INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

We cannot learn another language by simply memorizing its vocabulary and grammatical structures. A language is a complex system, intricately related to culture, and it cannot be mastered by simple substitutions. Nor can we master a culture by memorizing a list of symbols, norms, and values, even if it were possible to memorize all of them. The meaning of "red" and "gold," the proper amount of time to devote to a business transaction, the appropriate way to behave toward a person in authority—these are not isolated factors; they are all part of the intricate pattern of a culture (Hall, 1959, pp. 99-105). Learning aspects of a given culture, therefore, will not allow you to understand that culture in the same way you understand your own.

The book Blue Collar Worker, by John Coleman (1974), illustrates some of the difficulties of understanding another culture. Coleman, a university president, spent some months working at a number of menial jobs, including collecting garbage, digging ditches, and working in a restaurant kitchen. Although the jobs and his contact with the people he worked with (none of whom knew he was a university president) taught him a great deal about the way of life of an unskilled worker, his understanding was ultimately very limited. He lived on his wages from his blue-collar jobs, but his salaries from the university and from the companies on whose boards he served supported his family, paid his children's tuitions, and met his insurance payments; as a result, he had no j&rsthancLexperience of living on an unskilled workers pay. He learned how a garbage collector -is supposed to ~ act and how his supervisors, coworkers, and the people whose garbage he collected behaved toward him, but the roles he played ultimately had little effect on his self-concept because when his leave from the university ran out, he would go back to his job as university president. In many ways, Coleman was never "really" a blue-collar worker.

If you have spent summers in an unskilled job in a restaurant or factory, you may have noticed that the summer-employed college students and the more regular, full-time employees tend to form separate groups at lunchtime and after work. Although both groups of people hold similar jobs at the same place, they generally feel they have little in common. If you are returning to school after some years of working in or outside your home, you may feel quite isolated from the younger students around you, at least at first. You probably feel that you have very different ways of life outside of class, different roles in your families, different ways of spending your leisure time, and different expectations of your education. Not all these differences are necessarily cultural, but in both cases, the groups of people are divided by more than a collection of differences; their entire ways of life are different.

The more diverse two cultures are, the wider the division between their people, and the less they can come to really understand one another. Coleman's blue-collar coworkers shared, in most cases, Coleman's language, many of his social and political values, and the same national heritage, yet Coleman could never understand what it was to be a blue-collar worker. The division between cultural groups who have less contact with one another is likely to be greater and even more difficult to reconcile. As much as a native U.S. citizen of non-Asian heritage may study Japanese culture, for example, he or she can never really understand what it is to be brought up in that culture (Hall, 1976, p. 2).

The differences between the Americans and the Japanese are particularly striking in the way their businesses are organized. In comparing Japan with the United States, we see that Japan favors lifetime versus short-term employment; slow versus rapid evaluation and promotion; nonspecialized versus specialized career paths; collective versus individual responsibility; and holistic versus segmented concern (Ouchi, 1981) (see table in Chapter 11).

The following advice to Americans doing business with the Japanese is re­vealing not only of the values of Japan but of those of our own country:

1. Saving face and achieving harmony are more important to the Japanese than higher profits and sales.

2. Go-betweens and third-party introductions are important.

3. Contact people at the highest levels in the organization, because whoever is contacted first is involved in negotiations until the end.

4. Avoid talking about money: leave this to the go-between.

5. Never put a Japanese in a position where he must admit failure or impo-tency.

6. Don't praise your own products or services; let the go-between do that. (Cushman and Cahn, 1985, p. 144)

Ethnocentrism

We are not aware of the many aspects of our culture that distinguish it from others; in fact, many of the aspects of communication and culture discussed in this book came to be recognized not through the direct study of communication but through the study of other cultures. Culture, as Hall (1976) describes it, "can be understood only by painstaking or detailed analysis." As a result, a person tends to regard his or her own culture "as though it were innate. He is forced into the position of thinking and feeling that anyone whose behavior is not predictable or is peculiar in any way is slightly out of his mind, improperly brought up, irresponsible, psychopathic, politically motivated to a point beyond all reason, or just -plain inferior" (p. 38).

The tendency to judge the values, customs, behaviors, or other aspects of another culture "using our own group and our own customs as the standards for all judgments" is ethnocentrism.Because culture is unconscious, however, it may be inevitable that we regard "our own groups, our own country, our own culture as the best, as the most moral" (Samovar and Porter, 1972, p. 6; italics added). Psychologist Roger Brown (1986) puts it another way: "It is not just the seeming universality of ethnocentrism that makes us think it ineradicable but rather that it has been traced to its source in individual psychology, and the source is the individual effort to achieve and maintain positive self-esteem. That is an urge so deeply human that we can hardly imagine its absence" (p. 534).

Hall (1976) believes that ethnocentrism complicates interculturai communication even when both parties in the interaction attempt to keep open minds.

Theoretically, there should be no problem when people of different cultures meet. Things begin, most frequently, not only with friendship and good will on both sides, but there is an intellectual understanding that each party has a different set of beliefs, customs, mores, values, or what-have-you. The trou­ble begins when people start working together, even on a superficial basis. Frequently, even after years of close association, neither can make the other's system work!... Without knowing it, they experience the other person as an uncontrollable and unpredictable part of themselves, (p. 210)

Mass Effect

Lord Byron, the nineteenth-century British poet, was one of the first writers in history to sell books far beyond his own social group. Before his time, writers knew most of the people who read their work. When he received a letter from a reader in Oregon, Byron said, it was "like receiving a letter from the country of the dead" (Escarpit, 1977, p. 44).

In Byron's time, people half a world away probably seemed even less real than the people you read about in books on ancient history or those you see in futuristic movies. Although Byron and his contemporaries knew, of course, that there were people in Oregon, they could not envision them as individual human beings.

Today a postage stamp or a telephone allows you to contact almost any of the individuals who make up the world's population, yet your personal contacts with people beyond your own family and the community where you live (or where you have lived recently) are probably very limited. Aside from the difficulties of communicating with people outside your own community and culture, there are limitations on the number of people with whom you can communicate.

As Cherry points out, we cannot know or empathize with millions of people. We may be momentarily horrified by news accounts of famine or war or massive human tragedy, but then we put down the newspaper or turn off the television and turn to our own affairs. "This is no comment on human callousness," Cherry says. "As individuals we are helpless to feel personal involvement in all the world's tragedies; there are too many people to know" (1971, p. 175).

Under certain circumstances, our inability to know "millions of people" or comprehend them as individuals may become more pronounced. Escarpit (1977) describes a phenomenon he calls mass effect,which "seems to arise when an observer's channels of communication are inadequate to the number of people with whom he has to deal." Overwhelmed by numbers, with little to give the sense of the individuals who make up those numbers and with a feeling that the usual modes of communication simply will not operate, the individual perceives "recognized groups like an audience or a military unit turning into a crowd or a rabble, i.e., incipient masses. In fact, these are still groups with well-defined communication and interaction patterns, but these patterns are unidentifiable or unacceptable to the disconcerted observer" (p. 44).

Troops confronted with unarmed mobs in many historical events have fired into the crowd, possibly because of the feeling that they had no control over the communication. The mass effect phenomenon is apparent when we talk about "the French," "the Arabs," or "the Russians," as if all the people in these groups were alike.

Stereotyping

As we discussed in Chapter 2, we tend to impose stereotypes on groups of people, which limits our communication with those groups. It is almost impossible for us not to stereotype a group of people with whom we have no personal contact; furthermore, without personal contact, it is almost impossible for us to dispel the stereotypes we acquire about the group. We saw in Chapter 2 that stereotypes are inadequate because they are generalities but that there may be some truth in them. That truth, though, is likely to be dated, and it therefore may add to the inadequacy of the stereotype. Our impression of Ireland, for instance, as a mystical fairyland populated by people who believe in leprechauns is inaccurate, because it is based on a pagan-influenced culture that was virtually obliterated during the famines of the 1840s. That picture of Ireland was brought to us by the millions of Irish people who emigrated to the United States at that time.

Gumpert and Cathcart (1984) identify our main source of information about foreigners as television. According to their finding, the stereotyped images from the media even influence our face-to-face interaction with people of other cultures. Along with -French and Japanese teams the two researchers are, currently conducting a cross-cultural study of television stereotyping of American,- French, and Japanese people.

Writing on ethnic conflict, Brown (1986) explores the connection beween ethnocentrism and stereotypes:

Stereotypes go beyond ethnocentrism in that they are not simply expressions of in-group preference but qualitatively distinct character profiles attributed to in-groups and out-groups. Because of ethnocentrism, in-group profiles are generally going to be more favorable than out-group profiles. Like ethnocentrism, stereotypes are the cause of group hostilities. They serve primarily to justify and explain, with cartoonlike simplicity, hostilities that derive from conflicts of interest leading to unjust outcomes, (p. 534)

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 463