Towards intercultural Communication

As the world shrinks as a consequence of globalization, the power of international media and global travel, cultural understanding between different societies, states, regions become increasingly important. Hence it is hardly surprising that intercultural communication has emerged as a significant sub-field within communication studies. During the last three decades or so, intercultural communication has established itself as compellingly important field of inquiry. More and more universities are offering courses in intercultural communication and the number of books, monographs, journals devoted to the study of this subject has increased exponentially. However, as the field gains in greater visibility, it is important that we examine the postulates and axioms that drive this field of study.

There is indeed a close and mutually nurturing relationship between culture and communication. It is clear that we cannot understand culture without reference to communication, and analogously we cannot understand communication without reference to culture. Culture, according to some scholars, is a code we share, and learning and sharing, one need hardly add, require communication. And communication, in turn, presupposes codes and symbols and common semiotic fields which mist be learned and shared.

The eminent communication scholar Ray Birdwhistell, who was one of my teachers, maintained that culture and communication are terms that represent two different viewpoints or methods of representation of patterned and structured human inter-connectedness. As culture, the focus is largely upon structure; as communication, it is upon process. These distinctions are useful provided we do not press them too far. However, in exploring and charting the nature of intercultural communication, as a focus of study and research, we need to investigate more carefully the role of culture in shaping human behavior and the nature of human communication as a goal-oriented activity.

In seeking to understand the nature and function of intercultural communication, I wish to invoke the name of an old-fashioned rhetorician, Richard Weaver, who is hardly cited today. He examined the relationship that exists between human beings and nature at three levels of conscious reflection. They are: man's specific conception and ideas about things, man's general beliefs and convictions, man's metaphysical understanding of the world. Based on this typology, Weaver went on to make the point that in all cultures there is a dominant image towards which a cultural collectivity seeks to move. It organizes and inflects the actions, behavior of people living in that culture in a readily identifiable manner. It is true that Weaver's conceptualization is somewhat simplistic; however, it has the merit of calling attention to dominant images as centripetal forces. The idea of the image has assumed a position of centrality as a consequence of modern cultural theorists ranging from Guy Debord to Jean Baudrillard.

This idea of image can be profitably connected to some of the dominant theorizations favored by communication scholars. For example, rules theorists perceive communication as an activity that seeks to secure meaning and significance from consensually shared rules. They stress the following aspects. Communication is relevant to complex, conjoint actions and such action is characteristic of humans; the transfer of information facilitates complex conjoint human action; communication rules provide the basis for fruitful communication transactions. It is important to bear in mind that rules are creations of human beings inhabiting specific cultural spaces and are, of course, subject to change and reformulation.

It is indeed the considered opinion of rules theorists that as a discipline communication should recognize the explanation and clarification of such rules as its primary goal. Rules theorists believe that these consensually shared rules provide human communication with its defining characteristics. Against this theoretical background, we can usefully raise the following questions. What should be the mode of procedure of an intercultural communicationist who wishes to reflect on the nature of intercultural communication as a field of study? According to the rules perspective that I have sketched above, he or she should first speak to the question, how similarly or differently are the acts of symbolic communication defined by that various participants?

Secondly, if the act of symbolic communication is similarly defined, he or she should ponder the question of what rules of procedure followed by the interactants are. To come up with cogent answers to these questions, the communicators should be immersed very deeply in the cultures in question. Hence, the defining role of culture becomes apparent.

Here the notion of acculturation assumes a great importance. By acculturation we refer to the ability of a person born and bred in one culture to live and act with reasonable proficiency in the symbolic and behavioral system of another. This understanding of the symbolic and behavioral system of another culture is a task fraught with formidable difficulties.

As the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz stated culture can be understood as the webs of significance that human beings have spun around themselves. There is no magic key to unlock these webs of significance. The only way in which we could penetrate the webs of significance associated with a given collectivity is to observe and understand how he people living in that culture make sense of their lives and impose patterns of intelligibility upon them. This, if course, involves paying close attention to matters both profound and trivial. To make things worse, culture is almost always over-determined and does not always speak with a single voice. In addition, we have to deal with the fact that there is no privileged position or vantage point from which to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of a given culture.

As Clifford Geertz has argued so persuasively, our culture is public. Though ideational, it does not exist in the head of some individual; though unphysical, it should not be perceived as an occult entity. As he sees it, the interminable debates among cultural theorists as to whether culture is subjective r objective, materialist or mentalist, impressionist or positivist, is entirely misconceived. Once human behavior is seen as symbolic action, the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or frame of mind does not make much sense.

The important question here is not what cultural behavior looks like but what its perceived impact is. When we adhere to this line of reasoning, it becomes clear that although the idea of intercultural communication is central to the whole enterprise of acculturation, one has to be deeply alert to the ways in which one uncovers and understands the webs of significance characteristic of a given culture.

What, then, are some of the issues that we need to focus on if intercultural communication is to emerge as an influential field of study that guides our thought patterns in productive ways? First, we need to move away from the fairly widespread, but mistaken notion that intercultural communication signifies the attempt of one person from one culture interacting with another persona from another culture. Such a formulation does not bring out the full complexity and many-sidedness that are involved in this interaction. Instead, we need to think of it as a phenomenon in which one person from one culture indicates to another from another culture the cultural forces that shape their rule system and how they must be taken into account for effective communication to take place. In short, intercultural communication underlines the ways in which A indicates to B the rules that shape and govern A's understanding of the behavior of A's culture and b indicating to the rules that shape and govern them in B's culture. This reciprocal display of respect for the similarities and differences in understanding is central to intercultural communication.

If we are willing to conceptualize intercultural communication along these lines, we will succeed in giving it a sharper focus and allow for meaningful empirical inquiries to be mapped out. Having said this, it also needs to be pointed out that one should not regard this as a simple or mechanical task. What is at the heart of this conviction is the belief that culture consists of shared knowledge. However, it is important that we do not underplay some of the dangers associated with this line of thinking. First, not everything that we designate by the term culture are not shared, and harmony as well as conflict are part of the terrain of culture.

Second, culture should not be confined to knowledge; it consists of many other entities and dimensions. Third, we are never certain as to whether cultural systems are to be discovered inside or outside the minds of individuals belonging to that culture. Hence, when we say that intercultural communication presupposes the process whereby A indicates to B the rules which govern A's understanding of the behavior of A's culture, it is important that we pay close attention to those aspects which make it a more complex undertaking than one would be led to believe at a first glance.

In the modern, rapidly globalizing world, paradoxically enough, national cultures are attracting greater interest. Instead of cultural differences being flattened out, they are being highlighted. From international trade to diplomacy, the role of cultures has assumed a great importance. This makes the field of intercultural communication that much more relevant and significant.