16.3585, Review: Socioling: Holliday, Hyde & Kullman (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3585. Sun Dec 18 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3585, Review: Socioling: Holliday, Hyde & Kullman (2004)

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1)
Date: 14-Dec-2005
From: Leonhard Voltmer < LVoltmer at web.de >
Subject: Intercultural Communication: An Advanced Resource Book 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 04:55:24
From: Leonhard Voltmer < LVoltmer at web.de >
Subject: Intercultural Communication: An Advanced Resource Book 
 

AUTHOR: Holliday, Adrian; Hyde, Martin; Kullman, John
TITLE: Intercultural Communication
SUBTITLE: An advanced resource book
SERIES: Routledge Applied Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2701.html 

Leonhard A. G. Voltmer, School of Translators and Interpreters, 
University of Bologna at Forlì

SUMMARY

This ''advanced resource book'' targets upper undergraduates and 
postgraduates on communication studies programmes. It is ultimately 
about developing skilled communication strategies and principles in a 
globalizing world.

The book is structured, like the other books in the series, in three 
main sections, each made up of approximately ten units. Every section 
features the three themes ''Identity'', ''Otherization'' 
and ''Representation''. Section A defines concepts, i.e. it presents a 
variety of definitions for the core ideas and gives extensive examples 
in which the concepts shine through. Section B explores these 
concepts further with a series of extensive quotations of usually 
scholarly writings of the 1990s. As there are some negative or dubious 
examples, the authors comment on the texts and encourage the 
student to reflect upon them through numerous tasks. This section 
makes out about half of the book (page 51-146 out of 213 pages). 
Section C proposes a series of research tasks and establishes a 
methodology for addressing intercultural communication.

EVALUATION

As to form, the quotations in section B are in very small grey font and 
require therefore an excellent eye. The references are mainly from the 
90s and not abundant. Unfortunately the cited literature appears only 
summarily and never indicates the page number, so that it is nearly 
impossible to check the statements in the book. Even worse, the 
extensively quoted scholars in section B do not figure in the 
references, and neither do the titles quoted in the quotations 
(although name and year is given in the text). For a book that is 
intended to be read across the sections, this is actually a considerable 
advantage (e.g. p. 146 quotes Triandis. Not being in the bibliography, 
you have to go back to p. 142 to find the reference. There, the text is 
quoted in ''extracts'', without dots indicating the omitted text.)

The authors of this book subscribe to a non-essentialist view of 
culture, as opposed to an essentialist view. The largest part of the 
book is an apt criticism of a simple ''one nation-one language-one 
culture'' ideology. However, arguments are much less convincing 
when the new paradigm, the non-essentialist view, is defined. As the 
name points out, the concept was coined in opposition. ''People in one 
culture are'' not ''essentially different from people in another'' and 
there are ''a lot of cultural similarities'' (p.4). This suggests that the 
concept of 'culture' remains basically the same and only the 
perception of its intermingling is different: essentialists deny 
multiculturalism and are against it, while non-essentialists detect and 
welcome it. In this direction go the declarations in section C: ''[T]his is 
not to say that the issue of cultural difference can be hypothesized 
away. People ... belong to distinct cultural groups which 
promote 'distinctive capacities and characteristics'. If this were not a 
reality then there would be no such thing as culture and there would 
be no need to study 'intercultural communication''' (p.159).

What is then the point of non-essentialism, if culture actually is a hard 
fact of life with a distinctive content and a name? The criticism of the 
concept would boil down to a criticism of the (still?) predominant 
discourse. The same concept filled with other contents: The 
uncivilized becomes the noble primitive. 

In sections A and B the two authors of take a more radical stance: For 
them, the essentialists ''define the person before understanding the 
person'', whereas ''the non-essentialist strategy is a moral one to do 
with how we approach and learn about a person as a human being'' 
(p. 10). They rebuke even the weaker essentialist position, i.e. the 
forming of ideal types that act as a template and help us to make 
working assumptions about the 'default value' of the majority, being 
well aware that this will be wrong in some cases. They argue that ''we 
do not behave sufficiently rational in intercultural dealings to be able 
to work objectively with such templates''. (p. 23) People interpret new 
information in the light of the default values, and reduce the 
complexity of the new information up to the point that already on the 
level of perception confirming information is memorized and competing 
information blended out -- a well described process in cognitive 
sciences.

A general rule might very well ascribe correctly a certain trait to a 
number of strangers, and nevertheless we may not use that rule, 
because it is crying injustice for 20 % of them. Here we are in the 
presence of a new paradigm, because the goal is not anymore 
inductive information, but politically correct information. The social 
sciences are left for deontology. 

This is anti-discrimination in all respects and all its consequences, but 
are we in the field of justice? Intercultural communication is about 
social relations, and those should be as just as possible. If so, are we 
rather in the field of the legislator who works with rules, or before the 
court where every man comes as innocent before us? The theory of 
intercultural communication should guide us in the practice of the 
encounter with other individuals, so it is also about doing justice to the 
person before us. But there are difficulties: schemas are 
psychologically inevitable (p. 198) but must never harden. And 
ethology teaches that humans tend to expel or tease outsiders, 
because group homogeneity has under certain circumstances a 
selective advantage (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 2004, p. 533). Therefore, if we 
want to become non-essentialists, we have to fight actively the 
impulse to look down on outsiders. We have to deconstruct the 
situation, step in the shoes of the individual before us and gather 
a ''thick description'' (p. 8). This is the moral and idealistic 
commandment of the book. 

But is there still place for the concept of 'culture'? It is very well to 
substitute the stereotype of cultures clashing with a complex picture of 
cultures melting into each other on contact. But how can we then 
define the essence of a group and distinguish group capacities and 
characteristics, either conceptually or in examples? In the book, all 
generalizing equals 'otherization'. Otherization is defined 
as ''imagining someone as alien and different to 'us' in such a way 
that 'they' are excluded from 'our' 'normal', 'superior' and 'civilized' 
group'' (p.3). The authors quote extensively examples for otherization 
from literature, science and popular culture (cartoons, 
advertisements), and from colonialist times to our days. The reader is 
urged very intelligently to deconstruct the underlying ideology. But 
if ''culture is basically a group phenomenon which interacts with 
individual identity'' (p. 152), what group is not excluding and 
otherizing?

We all agree with the authors that we have to ''avoid the trap of over-
generalization'' (p. 3), but in the book any generalization and theory-
building is pictured as a trap. The authors succeed in making the 
reader very attentive to generalization in all forms, so that even the 
book itself could be criticized in some passages out of its own 
instruments (e.g. p. 181, Example C2.1.1 reports the situation in very 
essentialist terms; p. 28 ''out of character'' presupposes a 'true' 
character that can be in opposition to 'superficial' cultural influences; 
on p. 193 the authors otherize a critic of Irish in schools, insinuating 
that he cannot appreciate the Irish language as a consequence of his 
religion, and not out of his agent quality and autonomous reasoning 
based on personal experience.). 

Without doubt the book teaches the reader to be more attentive and 
critical towards essentialism, and this is the great achievement of this 
book. But in some cases the authors go also too far: They sustain on 
p.186 that it is 'Languacism' (i.e. stereotyping people according to 
their language use) when we take incorrect pronunciation (pronounce 
the ''th''-sound as ''f'' for example) as marker for less education. 
Sociolinguists find a correlation between language standardization 
and higher education, to name only one thing. Nothing is said about 
cause relation, and it may be society's fault that some get excluded 
both from education and language norms. And of course, there are 
special cases, e.g. when people have another mother-language and 
are highly educated in another social context. Still, as a rule (or 
stereotype?), linguistic competences are a meaningful indicator for the 
time passed in the English education system. To state that fact is not 
politically incorrect, it is social science. But for the authors, who are 
talking about morals, it is, because of the close connection between 
stereotyping, prejudice and otherization (p. 23). There is no reflection 
of the censorship their stance imposes. For further development of 
this argument refer to the criticism of political correctness.

The great virtue of the book is that it incites reflection about those 
almost philosophical questions. It is a bit confusing to find several 
views instead of one solution. But the real defect of the book is that 
the authors do not share the main concepts and their writing becomes 
incoherent and sometimes contradictory. Still, it is a recommendable 
book, because it leads to the core of the problems in intercultural 
communication and provides new insights.

One way out of the philosophical dilemma might come from the 
intriguing metaphor of ''culture cards'' (p.166). Everybody holds a set 
of culture cards standing for a group membership. ''Some of these 
cards you cannot change but others you can gain, get rid of, or 
change, and indeed play.'' (p.166). In this way, the world is not made 
out of solipsistic individuals in constant need of personal encounter, 
but of multi-group (multicultural) persons. Membership in a culture 
becomes something positive in this metaphor, and instead of reducing 
the other to an alien, it ascribes an asset. As those culture cards are 
so many, you can be almost sure that you are always able to hold 
some cards in common. When you play the common cards, you 
strengthen both yourself and the other, you have found the right 
channel for communication. Intercultural communication is then not the 
science of (cultural) difference, but of finding common (cultural) 
ground. 

REFERENCES

Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus (2004): Grundriß der vergleichenden 
Verhaltensforschung, 8th ed., BuchVertrieb Blandk, Vierkirchen-
Pasenbach. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Leonhard A. G. Voltmer is jurilinguist. He studied law in Munich and 
Paris, Legal Theory in Brussels and Lund, and Romance Languages 
in Salzburg and Munich. From 2001 to 2005 he was working for the 
European Academy of Bolzano (Italy) in terminology, translation and 
language normation. The experiences in computer-linguistic treatment 
of multilingual legal data have become a Ph.D. thesis at the University 
of Munich (http://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/archive/00003716/), which 
was awarded a magna cum laude. Dr. Voltmer is increasingly involved 
in lecturing and has given courses for all ages. In 2005/06 he is 
teaching German in Intercultural Mediation (University of Trento) and 
for the School of Translators and Interpreters (SSIT) at Forli. Dr. 
Voltmer's research agenda focuses on the combination of disciplines 
and discourses: The dialogue between cultures (Intercultural 
Communication or Mediation), between lawyers and laymen, between 
computer-linguists and language practitioners, and between the 
different scientific disciplines in Legal Theory. For more details, visit 
his website at: http://dev.eurac.edu:8080/autoren/mitarbeiter/lvoltmer/.





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