Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Ostman & Jan Blommaert (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics 1995 Q © 1995. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publ. Co ISBN 90 272 5881 2 (Eur.) / 1-55619-503-6 (US) INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION Volker Hinnenkamp 1. Background: language and culture ‘The world is small!’, Columbus is said to have exclaimed when he finally reached the New World. Columbus’ ‘discovery’ is also said to have finally combined the two hemispheres, thus having created the one world we live in today — the beginning of that global village, so often cited, where we all can or have to communicate with each other. Of course, between Columbus and satellite communication there was a long way to go. At least the event was an important milestone for the westerners of the world. Intercultural (or crosscultural) communication did not start with Columbus’ experience. It is rooted in the evolutionary differentiation of languages and cultures, however uni- or polycentral cultural evolution took place, and it started with contact between whoever regarded other individuals and groups as different: ‘They’re different from us, they don’t do things the way we do them. They do them in a strange way’. Culture contact is as old as trade, wars, migrations, conquests and the like, actually as old as mankind. It is only since the emergence of the art of record keeping that we are provided with a kind of literature on the subject. Marco Polo’s and Columbus’ notes and diaries are just two popular samples in a long history of recording culture contact. The study of intercultural communication as a special field, not only within pragmatics, is quite new. But the relationship between culture and language is a long-standing topic of inquiry. One such trend may be traced back to the Humboldtian tradition where the language-and-culture link found itself expressed2. Volker Hinnenkamp in terms of grammar, worldview, and national character. Wilhelm von Humboldt thought that “each language draws a circle around the nation to which it belongs" ["jede Sprache zieht um die Nation, welcher sie angehdrt, einen Kreis"] (1830-35, Vol. VII: 60), a circle hard to escape. Different versions emerge in the anthropological work of Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ‘principle of linguistic relativity’, and (though not from a strictly relativistic viewpoint) in Bronislaw Malinowski’s concept of ‘context-of-situation’. Versions vary from a once-popular deterministic re-interpretation of Whorf to Sherzer’s (1987) discourse-centered approach, or Silverstein’s (1979) reading of Whorf’s theory of grammatical categories in terms of language ideologies. But the topic itself has had an enduring presence for more than a century. It was not until the 1960s, with Dell Hymes’ seminal works on the ethnography of speaking (see e.g. Hymes 1974), that linguistics was provided with asystematic methodology that could account for the interdependence of language, speech, communication and culture. Intercultural communication is about the confrontation of one language- culture link with another. More specifically, it is human beings bearing the whole ~ burden of culture-in-communicating as individuals, who meet, converse, talk, have conflicts, struggle, ie. communicate in face-to-face interaction, Michael Agar has recently coined the term ‘languaculture’, intended as "a reminder [...] of the necessary connection between its two parts, whether it’s theirs, or yours, or, as it always is when it becomes personal, something that belongs to you both" (Agar 1993: 60). A term such as languaculture seems useful as long as the juxtaposition of language and culture (likewise language and society) indicates that language runs the risk of being stripped of all these links. But at least in pragmatics, the cultural and social are part and parcel of the term ‘language’, to the point where ‘intercudtural communication’ should become nearly tautologous. 2. Intercultural communication: the emergence of a field of inquiry Intercultural communication has become quite a popular field recently. In addition to linguistic pragmatics, contributing disciplines include communication science, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Language teaching and language learning are two areas of application to which intercultural communication is of Intercultural communication 3 particular interest. ‘The study of intercultural communication as a multidisciplinary venture has its roots mainly in the 1960s in North America. Besides the academic research, there was a very strong orientation towards practice right from the beginning. After the emergence of contrastive linguistics, due to the new demands of foreign language learning in the wake of World War II, language learning alone was not sufficient for the new role of the United States of America in the the world. Robert Lado (1957) made a first attempt at expanding contrastive linguistics to contrastive culture analysis. Around this time, Edward Hall, one of the pioneers in this field, is said to have been the first who gave the term intercultural communication an audience (Trager & Hall 1954; Hall 1959; Hall & Whyte 1960). Meeting the challenge in the global race with communism meant exerting influence internationally. In the 1960s thousands of American volunteers went to the ‘developing countries’ to give technical, social and medical support through the Peace Corps programs. They were not only trained in the local languages, but they were also given culture training to prepare them for the encounter with the natives. Many of the still popular games in intercultural awareness training stem from these times. Another motivation for the emergence of the field was to be found in the American immigrant society itself, in the Civil Rights Movement, in the New Ethnicity of African Americans and other mainly non-white ethnic groups. "Even when we overcome natural barriers of language", stated Porter & Samovar (1974: 4), "we could still fail to understand and be understood. These failures both in the international arena and the domestic scene gave rise to the marriage of culture and communication and to the recognition of intercultural communication as a field of study". Unlike with other trends in academia, Europe did not latch on before the 1970s and 1980s. Although colonial and postcolonial immigration, as well as labor migration from Southern European countries to Western Europe presented a languacultural challenge as early as the 1950s, urban multiculturalism was conceptually non-existent. Germany, e.g., responded with German language programs. Only when institutions became aware of the multicultural reality of immigrants having become established sections of the population, and when refugees widened the flow of immigrants, ethnic minorities were beginning to be ‘noticed’. Studies on Gastarbeiterdeutsch (Immigrant German, literally ‘Guestworker German’; Heidelberger Forschungsprojekt 1975; Keim 1978) were4 Volker Hinnenkamp followed by research on intercultural communication between Germans and Turks, Greeks, Italians etc. (Rehbein 1985; Knapp, Enninger & Knapp-Potthoff 1987; Hinnenkamp 1990). Meanwhile continuous international and intercultural mobility has come to be seen as one of the characteristics of our fin de siécle. This permanent mobility can be structurally differentiated in terms of voluntary and involuntary, the latter implying little or no choice as to place and length of stay. Rights and obligations are quite unbalanced for the different types of foreigners. Refugees of war, famine, disease, political oppression and ethnic cleansing will find themselves at the mercy of the host country, and so will most labor migrants, although many of them will have more options to choose from. International tourism, exchange programs and business negotiations are clearly to be situated at the beneficial or even mutually profitable end of the scale. Such structural differences do have an impact on intercultural encounters. Offen there are even specific institutions provided for the different kinds of migrants, where special kinds of encounters between local and foreign people take place (Jupp, Roberts & Cook-Gumperz 1982; Roberts, Davies & Jupp 1993; Koole & ten Thije 1994). Many intercultural encounters can be reformulated in terms of minority-majority relations. This is also where the term ‘interethnic’ comes in, alluding to ethnic minorities and focusing on their differences from mainstream society (cf. Scollon & Scollon 1981; Erickson & Shultz 1982; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Streeck 1985; Kim 1986; Meeuwis 1994b). Here we also find the rationale for dealing with intercultural communication in theory and practice. Intercultural encounters are typically believed to demand extra effort of conversants in making themselves understood, or even to be bound to failure. In the literature there is a heavy emphasis on communication breakdown, communicative disruption, failure, trouble and misunderstanding. A term covering all these is miscommunication. Miscommunication and cultural or languacultural differences are thought to go hand in hand. Studying and preventing miscommunication has therefore become the main raison d'étre of the field. Trouble and misunderstanding lurk in all kinds of intercultural communications, in international business as much as in international political relations; the former may lead to the loss of a good business deal, the latter to diplomatic crises or even to war (“the fate of the earth depends on cross-cultural communication” — Intercultural communication 5 Tannen 1986: 30). In interethnic minority-majority encounters, misunderstanding may lead to (additional) discrimination and disadvantages in matters of employment, housing, health, and civil rights. The precise interplay between factors such as cultural or languacultural difference, power, social constraints, prejudice and ideological a priori’s, and their (causal) relationship to miscommunication phenomena, are prime topics for pragmatically oriented intercultural communication analyses (see Sarangi 1994). 3. The concept of culture But intercultural communication itself may give rise to misunderstandings as well. It forms the breeding ground for a multitude of myths and illusions (Verschueren 1984). For one thing, culture in intercultural communication is far from being clearly and explicitly defined within the scientific community of intercultural communication researchers (see e.g. Blommaert 1991). Moreover, whatever definition of culture we adopt, we still have the difficulty of showing how communication at any given moment is bound by culture or how culture continuously finds expression in communication. Even this phrasing of the problem is misleading, because it suggests two separate entities — communication and culture — whereas it has to be shown that the one is an integral part of the other, that culture is to be found within the use of language, just as every Sprachspiel (language game), to use Wittgenstein’s phrase, is embedded in the Lebenswelt (way of life) of the speaker and his/her group. Separating ‘communication’ and ‘culture’ would imply that certain forms of communication could be a-cultural or culture-free, totally untouched by the communicator’s sociocultural background. The juxtaposition of language and culture can therefore only be a provisional, yet necessary, analytic form of meta-discourse. Culture in intercultural communication, as Agar (1993) keeps emphasizing, is nothing to be objectified in individuals and groups. Culture is at first a very personal experience when it comes to communication outside our taken-for- granted ways of acting and framing the world. Culture as a scientific term "is supposed to explain differences, to take rich points and make them understandable", that is, it "is supposed to be an answer to the problem of understanding differences" (Agar 1993: 124-125).6 Volker Hinnenkamp There are some classical definitions of culture, which even fit nicely into the concept of talking, acting and interpretation. One often quoted definition is by Ward H. Goodenough, who holds that a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves. Culture, being what people have to learn as distinct from biological heritage, must consist of the end product of learning: knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term. {...] culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interperting them. As such, the things people say and do, their social arrangements and events, are products or by-products of their culture as they apply it to the task of perceiving and dealing with their circumstances. (1964: 36) Towards the end of this quotation, culture becomes slightly reified, though it is less the product than the producer and product at the same time. But otherwise such a cognitively oriented definition comprises many of the relevant aspects, particularly for a pragmatic Perspective on communicative competence and mutual knowledge. But that is certainly not all we need for an understanding of culture in intercultural communication. Culture has become an issue in itself, a discourse to look at critically. The complexity of our urban cultures necessitates differentiation: "the term ‘culture’, with its cosy invocation of consensus, may serve to distract attention from social and cultural contradictions, from the fractures and oppositions within the whole" says E.P. Thompson (1993: 6). Questions arise as to whether there can be a sense of multiple cultural belonging in a person, just as we find multiple identities. If so, how do these find their expression in communication? If there are overarching national or ethnic cultures, how are they communicated? How does the relevance of culture to communication manifest itself? Are there ‘rich points’, as Agar (1993) calls them, such as culture-bound signals, offering a glimpse of the tip of the cultural iceberg? Or is culture-in-communication just a marginal phenomenon so that errors can be as routinely corrected as grammatical mistakes? Moreover, can Intercultural communication 7 culture-in-communication not easily be overridden by common membership? Are we, as a group of culturally mixed researchers and writers communicating on Pragmatics, not a good example to show that professional identity is stronger than any cultural difference? Different definitions and approaches imply different discourses. None holds the truth. But they do have a common task: to show, to analyze and ultimately to construct a good theory of how culture translates into human communicative interchanges, how communication is part of the phenomenon or condition we call culture, and how both affect interchanges between members of culturally defined entities. 4. Loci of culture-in-communication There are different loci of culture-in-communication. Whatever layer of the interactional structure we analyze, it may be of cultural relevance to the communicating parties. Resources of interaction are based on features and properties. These can be ‘localized’. Most of the studies in intercultural communication show how one or more locus is made relevant for participants in an encounter. Thus, culture may be located in the style of a speaker, in his or her ways of speaking, of structuring arguments or of sequencing information units. It may be located in aspects of behavioral competence such as politeness, deference, or proper conduct. It may be located in ‘language’ competence, in native vs. non-native proficiency. It may be located in nonverbal signals, such as gaze direction or territoriality. It may be located in switching between language varieties. It may be located in stereotyped behavior, in opinions, attitudes and worldviews, It may be located in the available power resources, Generally, it may be located in the use of any ‘brought along’ property of a person or his/her group in terms of ‘visible’ categories such as skin color, gender, language, dialect, or less visible ones such as nationality, ethnicity, religion and the like. But whatever the loci, in order to work as a resource, what is needed is the interactional ‘counterpart’ of deriving meaning from them, of inferring frames, of guiding contingent action as participants go along. One locus commonly focused on in intercultural communication research is related to language selection. At one end of the scale, intercultural encounters8 Volker Hinnenkamp may take place within the same language, as described in Gumperz (1982a, 1982b), Scollon & Scollon (1981) and Erickson & Shultz (1982), where native speakers of (a majority variety of) English encounter people speaking English as a second language or a minority dialect of English (speakers from India or the Carribean; London Jamaicans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, to name just a few). Differences may be perfunctory at first sight, but when it comes to mutual perceptions of difference and attributions, minor stylistic variants may turn out to have a major effect on the process of communication. In particular, the function of nonverbal signs in a cross- and intercultural perspective have been investigated intensively. As early as 1941 and without any reference to interculturality, David Efron compared some gestural sign language use amongst New Yorkers with South Italian and East Jewish backgrounds and described their ‘hybridization’ under the impact of the urban ‘melting pot’ (Efron 1972). The main pioneer in this context is Edward Hall, who compared many elements of nonverbal ‘silent language’ crossculturally (Hall 1959). As another example, Erickson & Shultz (1982) have investigated, by way of micro-ethnography, how minor nonverbal differences in the synchronization and rhythm of head-nodding in conversations between black and white participants may influence the outcome of a counselling situation. At the other end of the scale, interlocutors may not have a language in common, Sometimes a provisional language has to be created, as in initial culture contact situations (Hewes 1974), resulting in pidginization processes or in ‘foreigner talk’ (Hinnenkamp 1982; Roche 1989; Jakovidou 1994). Further, we find languages used as lingua francas with no native speakers on either side (Jordan & Fuller 1974; Meeuwis 1994a), as well as native-nonnative interaction, which is one of the most typical intercultural contexts. An example is Kotthoff (1989), who contrasts the discourse of argumentation between Germans and Americans in a German university context in terms of deficits in competence versus pragmatic differences. Native-nonnative speakership is an important issue in interlanguage pragmatics (e.g. Varonis & Gass 1985), but so far it has not been sufficiently connected to intercultural aspects. It seems that culture is more easily referred to when discussing encounters with little ‘linguistic’ problems. On the other hand, the more language and communication have to function as a medium of pure content transmission, the Jess culture is emphasized. Perhaps this corresponds to a culturally defined need Intercultural communication 9 of focusing on the ‘content’, without the luxury of pragmatic and cultural ‘frills’. However, more research on native-nonnative communication is expected to show that this habitual perspective is untenable. Using cultural features for struggles over resources of prestige, power and dominance is part and parcel of intercultural interactions. How this works has been shown in the literature (Tsuda 1986; Hinnenkamp 1989; Meeuwis 1994b). Struggles over resources are most often institutionally conditioned. Personal or institutional power, involving the possibility to exert force, overrides any cultural feature as candidate resource for further action. This is why so many contact situations, e.g. in the history of European expansionism and later in North-South relations, can hardly be called ‘intercultural’ communication in the strict sense of the term (see e.g. Blommaert 1990; Eelen 1993). Even the understanding of the others, that holy concept of so many optimistic intercultural practitioners, has been all too often instrumentatized as a strategic weapon to dominate or eliminate other cultures, as Todorov (1982) has convincingly shown with reference to the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The exertion of power was also involved in pidginization and creolization processes. Pidgins and creoles have so far been seen as just the linguistic outcome of frequent contact situations, Of course contact is an important factor. Culture, however, also played an important role, although of course, adjustment to the new situation was permanently forced upon natives or slaves, so that they had no choice on how to exploit resources to their own advantage (Stoller 1979; Siegel 1987). Colonizers and slaveholders were affected much less by the change. Natives or slaves had to give up their languages and their cultures, and had to adapt. So intercultural communication is not necessarily to the better of human kind. It can also be to the disadvantage of those groups who were the disadvantaged all along. A particularly interesting topic in this respect is the way in which the institutionalized master-servant relations in a colonial context gave tise to the construction of particular varieties of local languages (mostly labeled as lingua franca, sabir, patois and so on), and how the colonial power relations were inscribed in the structure and the patterns of usage of these language varieties (see, e.g., Fabian 1986 and 1991 on Swahili in the Belgian Congo).10 Volker Hinnenkamp 5. Methodological (sub)discourses of the field The intercultural discourse within linguistic pragmatics comprises various types of methodological subdiscourses. Within intercultural communication research several trends have been established in peaceful competition and sometimes peaceful ignorance of each other. Many of them share a number of shortcomings. For one thing, definitions of the topic are often skipped altogether, or only found implicitly. Second, culture remains an object of interpretation, and is not shown to be a resource. Third, there is a strong inclination towards ideology, anecdotes, stereotypic knowledge and assumptions over empirical evidence. The different approaches we come across are not mutually exclusive, but for analytical reasons they can be nicely contrasted with each other.! Two approaches in particular have been of special relevance in pragmatics. The first one is the contrastive approach, represented in contrastive pragmatics in general, or more specifically in contrastive discourse analysis, contrastive rhetoric, contrastive sociolinguistics, or contrastive textology. Underlying this approach is the classical Jeitmotif of contrastive analysis that difference means a potential source of errors, learning difficulties, and interference. “Cross-cultural communicative interference, then, is the result of the negative transfer into the L2 context of L1 sociolinguistic and interactional rules due to a contrasting interdependence between speech behaviour and cultural world-view and value system", as Loveday puts it (1982: 2). For Riley (1989: 234) "[p]ragmatic errors are the result of an interactant’s imposing the social rules of one culture on his communicative behavior in a situation where the social rules of another culture would be more appropriate". So the rationale of contrastive pragmatics lies in language learning issues. Central to contrastive pragmatics is speech act analysis. The Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), to date the largest research project to systematically inquire into the cultural specificity of speech act behavior, was set up to investigate cross-cultural variation of the two speech act types of ‘requesting’ and ‘apologizing’ across such various speech communities (and cultures?) as the German, British, American, Australian, Danish, Israeli and French. Both speech acts are regarded as particularly pertinent in terms of politeness and ‘face work’ (as defined by Goffman 1955 and Brown & Levinson 1987) and in terms of culture-specific versus universal phenomena. Data were Intercultural communication 11 mainly gathered by a Discourse Completion Test, where subjects had to fill in dialogical replies in 16 different types of situations, selected according to the parameters of power, distance and rank. Some authentic data support the experimental findings. The goals of the project can be taken as paradigmatic for many other investigations into culture-specific speech act use, i.e., (1) to investigate the similarities and differences in the realization patterns of given speech acts across different languages, relative to the same social constraints (cross-cultural variation), (2) to investigate the effect of social variables on the realization patterns of given speech acts within specific speech communities (sociopragmatic variation), (3) to investigate the similarities and differences in the realization patterns of given speech acts between native and nonnative speakers of a given language, relative to the same social constraints (interlanguage variation). (Blum-Kuika, House & Kasper 1989: 12f.) Another major project, the PIXI project (Aston 1988; Gavioli & Mansfield 1990; Anderson 1994), involves contrastive discourse or contrastive conversation analysis. Its main objective was to “identify regularities of socially ‘unmarked’ collaborative talk in two cultures", i.e. English and Italian bookshop encounters, “analysing eventual occurrences of conflict in terms of deviation from these regularities” (Gavioli & Mansfield 1990: xviii). The analyses of the project focused on: contrastive aspects of negotiation, of joint and progressive text production by participants; contrasting underlying scripts; examining contrasts in the lexicogrammatical and intonational forms as well as recurrent features such as laughter and interruptions, the sequential organization of requests and responses; patterns of openings and closings and accounting practices; participants’ strategies of dominance and control, stressing the ways in which identities and statuses were established and maintained through such strategies. Both the CCSARP-project and the PIXI-project stand for advanced research within contrastive pragmatics. Both are empirically oriented, though CCSARP uses ethnographic data only as control data in addition to their experimental design. The PIXI data are authentic: 379 naturally occurring conversations recorded in bookshops in England in Italy, processed mainly by means of12 Volker Hinnenkamp ethnomethodological conversation analysis. Yet both projects, advanced as they are in methodology, sampling and analysis, are not intercultural in the strict sense of the term, but rather crosscultural (and would not claim otherwise). The latter denomination emphasizes the comparative aspect of two cultures, rather than the interactional perspective. We may assume that different phenomena will have to be accounted for when an Italian customer negotiates with an English bookseller, or if a German requests something ftom a speaker of Hebrew. In such cases, the respective conventions will not simply be carried over to the encounter, but changes or adaptations will take place; and in case of conflict, repairs, accounting practices and the like will be used. Acting in an intercultural situation may be very different from what a researcher may imagine. Michael Roberts, as a historian, has shown how an entire history can be contextualized in the culminating ‘ethnic’ speech act "I am a Sinhalese" in a casual verbal exchange during a cricket match in Sri Lanka. Roberts’ analysis "underlines the manner in which the imponderabilia of everyday transactions can utilise and portray deeply rooted historical perceptions, and in so doing, may contribute to the reformulation, reproduction, and transmission of these imprints from the past" (Roberts 1985: 407). A contrastive approach is not able to reveal such intercultural problems, which only show up in real, authentic face-to-face intercultural interactions. It is logical, therefore, that the second major approach is interactional, focusing on authentic data, not only within one’s group or society, but derived from groups in contact, in confrontation, with the ‘cultural other’. Interactional or interpretive sociolinguistic is one tradition that provides us with analyses of face-to-face intercultural, interethnic and interracial encounters. The first scholar to mention here, is John Gumperz (1982a, 1982b). Gumperz dived straight into multicultural society, analyzing encounters between white British and American majority members and ethnic minority members in situations of counselling, job interviews, committee negotiations and the like, i.e. in institutional settings relevant to urban multicultural societies. What he found was that simple interpretations based on ‘low’ linguistic levels such as pausing, rhythm, tempo, volume, pitch and accent, intonation and prosody in general, could produce major misunderstandings. One of Gumperz’s well-known examples goes as follows: Intercultural communication 13 In the staff cafeteria at a major British airport, newly hired Indian and Pakistani women were perceived as surly and uncooperative [...] Observation revealed that while relatively few words were exchanged, the intonation and manner in which these words were pronounced were interpreted negatively". Instead of using ‘correct’ British intonation in so simple a question as "Gravy?", intended to ask the customer if s/he wanted some gravy added to the meal, the Indian assistant would pronounce the word with falling intonation. However, this intonation was “not interpreted as an offer but rather a statement, which in the context seems redundant and consequently rude. (Gumperz 1982a: 173) Gumperz calls these signals in situated communication ‘contextualization cues’, because they support interpretive frames of how to understand an utterance or an act. In Gumperz’s words: "a contextualization cue is any feature of linguistic form that contributes to the signalling of contextual presuppositions" (1982a: 133). Part of a speaker’s tacit sociocultural competence is the knowledge of how to employ and how to understand the cues; they will be conventionalized and taken for granted. When all participants understand and notice the relevant [contextualization] cues, interpretive processes are then taken for granted and tend to go unnoticed. However, when a listener does not react to a cue or is unaware of its function, interpretations may differ and misunderstanding occur. It is important to note that when this happens and when a difference in interpretation is brought to a participant’s attention, it tends to be seen in attitudinal terms. A speaker is said to be unfriendly, impertinent, rude, uncooperative, or to fail to understand. Interactants do not ordinarily notice that the listener may have failed to perceive a shift in rhythm or a change in pronunciation. Miscommunication of this type, in other words, is regarded as a social faux pas and leads to misjudgements of the speaker’s intent; it is not likely to be identified as a mere linguistic error. (Gumperz 1982a: 132) Gumperz’s approach is relevant to pragmatics far beyond the field of intercultural communication, because contextualization cues are general signalling devices for creating and sustaining any kind of conversational and communicative14 Volker Hinnenkamp involvement as such. Quite a large body of research has grown out of it (cf. Auer & di Luzio 1992). One of the advantages of the contextualization approach is the detectability of many of the signalling cues through microethnographic methods. The approach is able to link language and culture on a level of "shared typifications that enter into the signalling and use of activity types in interaction, as well as systems of contextualization conventions", thus arriving at “interactively defined notions of culture [that] can be studied by empirical means” (Gumperz 1992: 51f). Susanne Giinthner is another empirical intercultural communication researcher who works within the paradigm of interactional or interpretive sociolinguistics. Her work deals with conversations between Germans and Chinese learners of German in institutionalized settings, such as counselling situations, and in informal settings, such as social gatherings (Ginthner 1993a). Giinthner concentrates among other things on (contextualization) differences in discourse organization and in structuring arguments; she shows that conventions of recipient behavior of the Chinese differ sharply from German usage; she inquires into the function of proverbial uses in discourse. Her data show that "even Chinese with a good command of the German language rely on their own contextualization conventions, which are partly different from the German ones" (Giinthner 1993b: 302). Hinnenkamp’s works in interactional sociolinguistics (1987, 1989, 1991) widens the perspective of intercultural communication by his attempt to fully integrate society into the language-and-culture link. Hinnenkamp investigates ‘pretexts’ in relation to created contexts, and asks: "How and why is it possible that the said is sayable, that it can be said that way, that it is permissible to be said that way, and that it can be understood that way?" (Hinnenkamp 1991: 93). He resorts inter alia to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his credo “What speaks is not the utterance, the language, but the whole social person" (Bourdieu 1977). Similar to what happens in Michael Roberts’ approach, single speech acts can take the function of ‘rich points’ in terms of transforming knowledge of societal pretexts into discourse. According to Bourdieu, language, culture and ethnicity are negotiable goods on the market of symbolic capital. There is linguistic, cultural and social capital ‘convertible’ into discursive practice, Hinnenkamp applies this to a casual Turkish-German conversation, where he shows how a sudden switch into an emblematic, stereotypic kind of foreigner Intercultural communication 15 talk (Tuirkischmann Du? — ‘Turkish man, you [= TU]?’) transforms an ongoing exchange completely: culture, ethnicity, language and social position become an issue and are structurally reflected in the new allocation of discoursal space and in unequal rights and obligations, resulting in a disharmonious end of the encounter. The process shown in the example is one of active ethnic categorization, it is an example in which the minority member’s position in society can be turned into a resource for social distinction on a hierarchical ladder. The German interlocutor was a beggar, down at the bottom of society; the Turkish interlocutor was an immigrant worker, not quite that low in the hierarchy. For the beggar, the strongest symbolic profit to be gained was ethnic capital, since ethnic difference is the only irretrievable category able to draw a sharp distinction. Hinnenkamp (1987, 1989) provides more examples where it is shown that time and again an immigrant worker’s German competence is functionalized as the main resource in culturalization, ethnification and discrimination. There are of course other approaches in addition to the ones discussed so far. One of them is the ‘anecdotal’ or ‘case study approach’. It focuses on perceived or alleged cultural differences, mostly with reference to so-called ‘critical incidents’ which are given an illustrative or at least introductory role to reflect on intercultural communication. There are some theoretical insights which have been gained by this method, especially as to patterns of interpretation. Such critical incidents can certainly help to reflect on ‘rich points’ of an intercultural encounter, or, at least of another culture (Agar 1993). Actually, the majority of the publications in the field are of this kind; studies based on hard empirical data of authentic face-to-face encounters, crossculturally as much as interculturally are a minority. Another — less prominent but very critical — approach does not so much focus on the interpersonal communicative exchange level between ‘cultural others’, but views intercultural communication as being constructed by way of individual, interpersonal and institutional discourses, i.e. by way of the textual presentation of communicative events as intercultural communication. That is, the more lay people (in everyday talk, jokes, interviews), or specialists (in institutional settings like the media, administration, politics), or scientific observers (in research, publications, academic discussions) talk about culture, ethnicity and intercultural communication, the more they help construing it as a discursive reality. This approach could be regarded as part of the sociology of16 Volker Hinnenkamp knowledge or as a constructivist approach. Here we may situate Blommaert (1994), who criticizes the ideological impact of an allegedly neutral concept of culture within academic and social-pedagogical discourse (cf. also Blommaert & Verschueren 1993), and the work of Tom Koole & Jan ten Thije (1994), who investigate team sessions of educational advisers in view of the way in which Dutch institutions react toward the entry of immigrant employees. The latter approach is more or less in line with an emerging critical tradition of intercultural communication tesearch, inspired by critical theory and critical linguistics (see e.g. Fairclough 1989). Despite the fact that most authors within this critical tradition acknowledge the pioneering nature and quality of Gumperz’s work, they emphasize societal and institutional conditions of disadvantage and discrimination against immigrants or ethnic minorities, criticizing a linguistic and culturalist bias in Gumperz’ approach (see ¢.g. Kandiah 1991, and most of the contributions to Meeuwis 1994b). Their aim is also to open the analysis of intercultural encounters to insights from present-day social and cultural theory, in particular those related to ideology and hegemony (Meeuwis & Sarangi 1994). 6. Conclusion What is certainly needed in the pragmatics of intercultural communication is more investigations into face-to-face encounters between members of different cultural or ethnic minority groups. These investigations should cover the relevant groups of societies, such as immigrants and refugees in most Western European countries. Moreover, these investigations should take into account the real localities of interaction. There are many places in society — institutions such as hospitals, or market places, or schools — where different settings will probably lead to quite different forms of intercultural contact. The commercial sphere, one which is most strongly characterized by a structural integration of ethnic minority people (as opposed to education or health care) has not been tackled yet and is very likely to yield new and perhaps surprising results. Another very interesting type of question is that of the emergence of local “foreigner-variants’ of languages in heavy immigration areas. In Germany, for instance, the question would be as to how young Germans of Turkish descent or Intercultural communication 17 young Turks in Germany use German in communication with Germans of German descent. There could be patterns of usage emerging, similar to the ones found in the London Jamaican English variety of young black Britons (Sebba 1986). What we also need is an investigation of how children acquire cultural awareness. How do concepts of strangeness, ethnicity, cultural outsiderdom develop in interaction among members of a single group, in culturally mixed groups, and between grown-ups and children (see Rampton 1995). Roger Hewitt tackled similar questions when he studied the mutual influence of ethnic styles in black and white friendship groups among children (Hewitt 1986). Finally, and on a more theoretical level, the methodological development of the field should not be neglected. In particular, the conceptual apparatus used in the analysis of intercultural communication is far from unproblematic (as has already been mentioned above), and should be under constant scrutiny. Questions of methodology and epistemology are hardly ever touched upon, despite the fact that recognizing intercultural communication as an object of investigation would also imply that analyzing intercultural communication (or, in general, data from another languaculture) is an instance of intercultural communication in its own right (Fabian 1990; Blommaert 1991). Intercultural communication is a new and booming field. I have mentioned a few — subjectively chosen — studies, mostly empirical ones. Some very interesting insights have been gained. Many questions remain unanswered; many more have yet to be formulated. Note 1 Only some major works will be introduced in the sections to follow. For an overview of the literature, the reader is referred to a comprehensive bibliography of the field (Hinnenkamp 1994) which provides more than 800 references, two thirds of its entries covering the years from 1983 to 1994. The bibliography is organized in six main sections: (1) Introductions; (2) Theory and methodology; (3) Interactional studies; (4) Contrastive studies; (5) Special areas; and (6) Applications. There are also two other selective bibliographies: Loos (1991) and Dirven & Pokuta (1994).18 Volker Hinnenkamp References M. AGAR (1993) Language shock. William Morrow. L. ANDERSON (1994) Accounting practices in service encounters in English and Italian. In H. Pitrschel (ed.) Intercultural communication: 99-120. G. ASTON (ed.) (1988) Negotiating service. Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna. P. AUER & A. DI LUZIO (eds.) (1992) The contextualization of language. Benjamins. J. 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