Culture in Communication

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xALDO DI LUZIO, SUSANNE GÜNTHNER AND FRANCA ORLETTI

and interaction, influences our way of thinking and interacting with members

of different cultures. G

UMPERZ demonstrates that in modern society the

borders between different languages and cultures do not necessarily go hand-

in-hand with geographical borders. In interactions, forms and functions of

linguistic signs and communicative and interactive practices can only be

evaluated adequately within their own cultural context. As the adequate and

common evaluation of speaking practices and contextualization conventions

is necessary for the common negotiation of meaning, intercultural communi-

cation is prone to misinterpretation. G

UMPERZ argues that there are conven-

tional inferences and situated contextualization cues that participants take as

their basis for interpreting, at every point of an interaction, what the intention

of the speaker is and what is expected as an adequate reaction. These infer-

ences are not only based on common repertoires of communicative genres but

also on common socio-cultural knowledge in general and linguistic ideolo-

gies. These influence the process of interaction as well as speakers’ interpreta-

tions. This explanatory concept is illustrated by analysis of an intercultural

episode involving a criminal court case brought against a member of an Indian

minority culture in a North American town. Statements by the police, who had

misinterpreted the cultural speaking practices of the Indian defendent using

standards of White cultural speaking habits and ideologies, led to conviction

of the Indian. It was only after anthropologists’ ethnographic analyses of the

cultural context had been taken into account that the behavior of the defendant

was re-interpreted, and the judgment repealed.

Culture-specific differences in the distribution of social knowledge and

differences in cultural speaking practices are also the topic of Susanne

ÜNTHNER’s and Thomas LUCKMANN’s paper on “Asymmetries of Knowl-

edge in Intercultural Communication: The Relevance of Cultural Repertoires

of Communicative Genres”. Although the social knowledge of participants in

interaction is never identical, social interaction in general and communication

in particular still require a definable amount of shared knowledge among

participants. Even if non-native speakers have excellent grammatical and

lexical skills in a foreign language, they often face problems in negotiating

meanings in intercultural encounters. The reason for these problems is based

on various kinds of asymmetries of knowledge about culture-specific speak-

ing practices. One explicitly relevant element of knowledge involving speak-

ing practices in typical situations is, as G

ÜNTHNER and LUCKMANN argue, the

repertoire of communicative patterns and genres. Communicative genres are

NTRODUCTION

historically and culturally specific, fixed solutions to recurring communica-

tive problems. On the one hand, they guide the interactants’expectations about

what is to be said (and done) in pre-defined types of situation. On the other

hand, they are the sediments of socially relevant communicative processes.

Communicative genres are socially constructed and thus vary from culture to

culture. In intercultural situations, interactants often encounter different reper-

toires of communicative genres. Lack of knowledge of such differences may

lead to problems in some situations. A good deal more treacherous, however,

the authors claim, are situations in which interactants participate with reper-

toires of similar genres that are inadequately supported by knowledge about

differences in the mode of employment of the genre, stylistic variations and

subgenres, etc.

Section 2 of the volume deals with communication between people who

speak the same language but belong to different cultural groups within one

society and thus do not share the same ideologies and rhetorical or stylistic

conventions concerning the realization of particular communicative genres.

The section begins with Peter A

UER’s and Friederike KERN’s paper on

“Three Ways of Analysing Communication between East and West Germans

as Intercultural Communication”. In their analysis of job interviews in the

“neuen Bundesländern” (i.e. former East Germany) A

UER and KERN discuss

the question of the influence of West German discourse style on East German

discourse conventions. On the basis of their empirical investigation, they

argue that at an ideological level “West German discourse” tries to exercise

hegemonical control over East German discourse”. Job interviews represent a

new communicative genre for East Germans. Thus, in interview situations

they are confronted with communicative challenges — genre-specific expec-

tations which they have not encountered before. The “job interviews” genre is

thus a dynamic aspect in the changing speech ecology of former East Ger-

many. How do the East German interactants deal with the problem? A

UER and

ERN demonstrate that in this kind of interview situation participants from

former East Germany tend to re-activate a traditional, formal “East German”

discourse style, mixed with certain elements of what they guess or assume to

be a “West German style”.

Jenny C

OOK-GUMPERZ’ paper on “Cooperation, Collaboration and Plea-

sure in Work: Issues for Intercultural Communication at Work” focusses on

forms of cooperation and politeness in service encounters between members

of different subcultures. She analyzes interactions between staff and custom-

xii ALDO DI LUZIO, SUSANNE GÜNTHNER AND FRANCA ORLETTI

ers of an international restaurant chain with regard to the interactive ideology

of this particular firm. The staff is educated in the firm’s interactive ideology

by special training courses in which they learn to deal with customers in a

friendly and polite way. In intercultural service encounters in these restau-

rants, the acquired strategies of politeness, personal and friendly manners are

supposed to lead to positive feelings in the customers and reduce the vulner-

ability of personal exposure. The analysis of interactions between the trained

service people and their customers reveals that culture-specific ways of inter-

acting do not create misunderstandings but are dominated by the trained

politeness and personalization of communicative contacts. Thus, ways of

communicating with customers are re-contextualized in this particular “ser-

vice encounter” genre and are interpreted by the customers as signs of per-

sonal concern and friendly, emotionally involved cooperation.

Marco J

ACQUEMET’s paper (“The Making of a Witness: On the Behead-

ing of Rabbits”) analyzes asymmetrical relations in intercultural communica-

tion. He documents interactional power asymmetries related to the issue of

personhood and respect. In this kind of environment, respect was constructed

in interaction through a logic of challenge and riposte, in which participants

engaged in a ritual dance to determine a “one-up/one-down” asymmetry and

establish a ranking hierarchy. Among the communicative weapons utilized,

the social practice of addressing a person was found to carry a considerable

interactional weight, being interpreted as an indicator of an individual’s social

standing and position within the community. By focusing on the use of

address forms and participants’ metapragmatic awareness of this use, this

paper seeks to better understand the dynamics of interactional dominance,

local ideology, and minorization processes.

In his paper on “Intercultural Negotiation” Jochen R

EHBEIN analyzes

elements of verbal and non-verbal communication. His video analysis is based

on a buying-and-selling interaction between an American professor and a

German representative of a Swiss publishing house. Although the German

representative realizes fragments from linguistic schemata of buying-and-

selling activities in a brilliant British English performance, he does not

achieve a successful negotiation of his own position. By contrast, the insistent

and non-responsive negotiation of the American partner represents a typical

example of the successful achievement of business aims. R

EHBEIN tries to

show how especially those non-verbal means that are marked in culture-

specific ways convey and govern speech activities, and how their use influ-

xiii

NTRODUCTION

ences the result of intercultural negotiation. In addition, the author raises

various questions that are relevant for the analysis of intercultural business

negotiation: (i) to what extent can negotiating be conceptualized and recon-

structed as a schema of a particular communicative activity or, rather, as a

communicative “auxiliary device” and (ii) what role do non-verbal elements

play in the realization of these schemata or devices for successfully negotiat-

ing controversial topics.

Section 3 concentrates on forms of asymmetries and cooperation in native/

non-native interactions. Volker H

INNENKAMP’s paper on “Constructing Mis-

understanding as a Cultural Event” is based on video analyses of several kinds

of misunderstandings occurring in intercultural encounters. H

INNENKAMP

poses the question of how misunderstandings are manifested interactionally and

how interactants deal with such manifested misunderstandings. Furthermore,

he asks how cultural aspects are contextualized in these particular sequences (of

misunderstandings) and how culture as “habitus” and background knowledge

of a person can become relevant in interaction. The author argues that additional

data from the interactional episode and particular isolated constraints are not as

relevant for making an episode “intercultural”. Instead one has to look at the

common interactional history and the commonly constructed institutional

constraints which are relevant for the interpretation. Thus, Hinnenkamp

deconstructs the notion of culture and strives to aim at something close to

situative interculture.

Frank E. M

ÜLLER’s paper on “Inter- and Intracultural Aspects of Dia-

logue-Interpreting” introduces various types of lay interpretation in ‘face-to-

face’ interactions, where the interpreter translates the utterance immediately

for the other participant. The first part of the paper discusses aspects of

interpreting culture within the process of lay translations and shows how the

interpreter (re)constructs and creatively reconstitutes topics that otherwise

would be completely inaccessible to the co-participant. In the second part of

the paper M

ÜLLER shows, on the basis of an analysis of lay interpreting

between French and German metal workers and apprentices, how lay inter-

preters not only transfer aspects of one language and culture to another but

also create specific forms of contextualizing meaning from one subculture,

sublanguage and register to another.

Cooperation in institutional discourse among natives and non-natives is

also the topic of the other papers in Section 3. The papers analyze institutional

interactions between native and non-native immigrants and reveal that an

xiv ALDO DI LUZIO, SUSANNE GÜNTHNER AND FRANCA ORLETTI

orthodox conversation-analytic approach is not sufficient to explain what is

taking place in these settings. They demonstrate that besides sequential analy-

ses of the ongoing interaction, ethnographic information about linguistic and

sociocultural speaking norms of the participants is required for the investiga-

tion of intercultural communication.

Franca O

RLETTI’s paper “The Conversational Construction of Social

Identity in Native-Non-native Interaction” analyzes two informal conversa-

tions between Italian native speakers and immigrants from Eritrea. She raises

the question of whether symmetrical interaction is possible in this kind of

communicative context in which members of a dominant culture interact with

members of a non-dominant one. O

RLETTI’s analysis demonstrates that sym-

metrical forms of communication do appear in these interactions and argues

that only in specific moments are these conversations contextualized as “inter-

cultural encounters” by the participants themselves. Explicit references to

“membership categories” seldom appear. However, the contextualization of

“interculturality”, “heteroculturality” and “asymmetry” can also be marked in

non-verbal ways. The author also comments on the relationship between the

contextualization of asymmetry and other situational factors such as ideology,

friendly and cooperative attitudes towards the co-participants, discourse topic,

communicative genre and modality.

Gabriele P

ALLOTTI’s paper on “External Appropriations as a Strategy for

Participating in Intercultural Multi-Party Conversations” analyzes forms of

cooperation in the communicative behavior of a 5-year-old Moroccan girl

communicating with her Italian friends and an Italian teacher in an Italian

kindergarten. The paper studies cooperative strategies in producing interactive

meaning between the non-native Moroccan child and her Italian classmates and

shows how she internalizes and adapts the Italian language and Italian commu-

nicative strategies and cultural speaking conventions. Using video and audio

data P

ALLOTTI shows two different types of appropriation ,whose discourse

functions have never been previously analyzed: (1) forms of internal appropria-

tion (IA), which are repetitions of utterances directly addressed to the speaker

(i.e. the Moroccan girl) and (2) forms of external appropriation (EA), which are

repetitions of utterances addressed to other children. P

ALLOTTI demonstrates

that both types of appropriation may be relevant to intercultural communication.

Whereas IA seem to create cohesion and topical coherence, EA are used to

construct constitutive elements of a communicative genre. In their formal

structure, IA suggest equivalent reproduction of short sequences, whereas EA

NTRODUCTION

show vague reproductions and interpretations of longer stretches of talk. In

producing IA the speaker reconfirms known constructions, and in producing

EA she attempts new constructions. However, both strategies are used both as

a means of acquiring linguistic competence and as participation and cooperative

accommodation strategies. According to the specific contextual situation, the

speaker applies these strategies as a means of interpreting situatively the

communicative episode at hand.

The papers in this volume were presented and discussed at a workshop on

Intercultural Communication held in October 1994 at the Villa Vigoni in

Menaggio (Como, Italy).

We wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Deutsche Forschungs-

gemeinschaft as well as the Third University of Rome, whose financial support

made the workshop possible. We also extend our thanks to the Director of Villa

Vigoni, Prof. Dr. Lill, and to his staff for their helpfulness and hospitality. We

would also like to thank our publishing editor Isja Conen for her patience and

support.

Section I

Theoretical Issues in Intercultural

Communication

Communication, Contexts and Culture

A communicative constructivist approach

to intercultural communication

Hubert Knoblauch

University of Zurich

1. Culture and the ‘communicative paradigm’

The analysis of the problem of intercultural communication depends on the

clarification of the relationship between communication and culture. Is com-

munication only one subordinate element of culture, and, if so, is intercultural

communication only one of many paths between cultures? Is culture to be

considered as one sub-system of the communication system, and intercultural

communication as something similar to an interpenetration between systems?

Or is culture at the very bottom of society, so that real intercultural communi-

cation falls prey to cultural relativism and becomes virtually impossible?

The relationship between culture and communication may appear obvi-

ous, if not trivial, to those influenced by the ideas of postmodernism, post-

structuralism or cultural studies. However, even contemporary theoreticians

like Richard Rorty still refer to culture in terms of science, philosophy or the

arts. This traditional notion of culture has been defined by Scheler (1960: 31f;

60ff) as the “higher forms of knowledge”, i.e. the bourgeois notion of “repre-

sentative culture” (Tenbruck 1990) which pursued the bourgeois ideals of

‘Bildung’. This elitist notion of culture had previously been attacked by Vico

and ‘romantic’ thinkers such as Herder and the Grimms. In sociology, the

discovery of culture beyond the ‘higher forms of knowledge’ goes back to

authors such as Simmel who considered prostitution, fashion, or dining as

cultural phenomena. With the “discovery” of everyday life, sociology came to