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If Culture is Practice ⊠? A Practice-Theoretical Perspective on Intercultural Communication and Mediation
Iben Jensen, Roskilde University
Introduction
The purpose of this chapter1 is to discuss how to take culture into account in intercultural encounters in everyday lifeâas in, for example, a job interview or in conflict mediationâwithout culturalizing or ethnifying.2 To culturalize or to ethnify is to magnify the meaning of culture or ethnicity in a personâs actions, beliefs, and values. Historically this has been done by constructing âthe otherâ as determined by their culture in opposition to âourselvesâ who are constructed as just acting (naturally) in relation to cultural values.3 In all Nordic countries the media, public schools and public and private institutions have become part of an ongoing maintenance and reconstructing flow of this âculturalisationâ and âethnifying.â4
My discussion starts with an example of an intercultural communication process, which is actually also an intercultural mediation, as I am giving an applicant from Pakistan feedback on his body language.
I:I think you would have shown more energy if you had been using your arms more? You look a bit too calm.⊠Do you think it is because you were nervous?
A:No no, but a friend told me that I should never use my arms. Danes donât use hands and arms to explain what they meanâso I just kept my hands on my legsâŠ
I:But it is ok to take your arms like this (shows).
T:I thought it was better not toâŠ
The applicant explains how his friend had told him to change his body language in order to perform in a more appropriately Danish manner. On the one hand his friend is right that very expressive body language can be overwhelming for an interviewer in a Danish context, on the other hand it might be difficult to act ânaturally,â when you imitate a Dane.5
However, the example shows how national stereotypes are part of knowledge sharing when the applicant is a member of an ethnic minority. Contrary to this, applicants not from an ethnic minority background made absolute no references to national ethnic gestures, but referred to the specific situation in the job interview and to their reactions from the interviewers. This illustrates how ethnicity used as an explanation of difference is privileged in everyday life. Similarly, in research into job interviews,6 cultural differences are very often seen as the main reason why the applicant answers the way he/she does. In order to minimize the unintended impact on for example professional relations as well as in the research field it is necessary to rethink the concept of intercultural communication and intercultural mediation.
The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I argue that we need to rethink the concept of culture and intercultural communication in order not to privilege culture. I suggest seeing culture from a practice theoretical perspective, which means that practice is foregrounded, and focus is on body, on agency, and on appropriate performance. Furthermore I suggest that studies of culture are seen from the perspective of intersectionalityâforcing us to study culture in relation to other categories like age, gender, ethnicity, class, and education.
In the second sectionâin line with a perspective foregrounding practiceâI provide an example of how a job interview can be analysed from a practice theoretical perspective. In the last section I argue that a reconceptualized concept of intercultural communication should be named post-cultural communication. This is meant to be a first step to avoid âculturalizingâ or âethnifyingâ cultural encounters.
Culture as Practice
In 1973 Zygmunt Bauman wrote a book called Culture as Praxis.7 Bauman tried to clarify the three main discourses on culture at that time. Bauman saw culture as âconcept,â âstructureâ and âpraxis.â His main argument was that culture had to be understood from all three perspectives in order to grasp its complexity. The book was republished in 1999. In the new introduction Bauman still finds the approach with three perspectives fruitful as an attempt to clarify the subject of disagreementâbut he no longer believes that this operation removes the ambivalence, or that it should be removed.
In 1973 Bauman praised the work of Clifford Geertz, who at the time had just contributed a new hermeneutic/semiotic approach to anthropology: âThe interpretations of Culture.â Geertz argued that anthropology was not to be seen as an objective science but as a subjective oneâas the anthropologist not just registered but interpreted their data.8 Bauman was not the only admirer of Geertzâs new approach. The story goes that the American Anthropological Association were divided into two groups, one finding Geertzâ emphasis on interpretation as part of science highly interesting, the other deeply shocking. However, the result of Geertzâs work was an enormous hermeneutic/semiotic turn in the field of anthropology, which lasted for many years.9
In 1972 Pierre Bourdieu published his famous book Outline of a Theory of Practice (in French) in which he analyzed the practice of an agrarian society in Algeria as a system. The book appeared in English translation in 1977. Its influence on anthropology in the Nordic countries did not become apparent until the middle of the 1980s, but it has had an enormous impact ever since. James Clifford and George Marcus offered, based upon Bourdieuâs key term practice, a fundamental critique of culture seen as systems and symbols and meanings. In their book Writing Culture they convincingly argued that anthropologists were selecting coherent patterns of information, when they constructed the cultures they wrote about.10 The last discussion I will mention is that of William Sewell who offers a very interesting analytical approach, in which he argues that, although it is never done, it is possible to think of culture as a system and culture as a practice as complementary concepts hence practice implies system and hence system implies practice.11
The key discussions in the last four decades have been whether we could talk about culture as a concept, a structure, or as practice, and whether we should talk about culture as one coherent cultural system or as many practices in everyday life. My aim is also to work with culture as practice, related to structures, but from a new analytical approach which I find is able to use insight from both anthropological approaches, working with text and discourse without privileging it and working with practice without missing the ambivalence that Bourdieusâ system of practice is suggesting.
Practice Theory: A New Analytical Approach to Micro-Processes in Social Life
In the last decade practice theory has been discussed increasingly in everyday life research.12 Practice theory is distinguished from other cultural theories by foregrounding practice. The main argument is that our practice maintains our social order. It is by certain doings and sayings that we maintain practice when we communicate, for example.13 In a practice-theoretical perspective, practice is defined as:
âŠa routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, âthingsâ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. A practiceâa way of cooking, of consuming, of working, of investigating, of taking care of oneself or of other etcâŠ14
Practice theory is a particular reading of certain theoretical elements from certain researchers in order to create a new analytical approach to micro-processes in social life. The theoretical elements used originate from Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Harold Garfinkel, Judith Butler, and Bruno Latour. A practice theoretical reading foregrounds the common assumptions among these researchers about the performance of social practices. This perspective has no ambition of creating a grand theory, the purpose is rather to make a new reading on performance and social practices. Taking this perspective it is possible to focus upon practices in everyday life focusing on body, like Bourdieuâbut not on habitus. The focus is on appropriate performance and normativity, but from an empirical sociological perspective, rather than a philosophical one like Butler.
Practice Theory as a Cultural Theory
The most ambitious attempt to think practice theory as a synthesis is offered by Andreas Reckwitz.15 Reckwitzâs main interest is to position practice theory in relation to other cultural theories. He argues that practice theory is a subtype of cultural theories, but that it differs from other cultural theories by the way the social is located. Reckwitz uses the location of the social as a dividing line to construct four ideal types of cultural theories, which I shall now briefly list.
The first ideal type is Mentalism: The social is in our mind. The social is placed in the structures, which form our minds (structuralism) or the social is seen as subjective ideas following the intentions of the subject (phenomenology).
The second ideal type is Textualism: The social is outside the mind. The social is in chains of signs, in symbols, in discourse in text (semiotic-, discourse-, system theory).
The third ideal type is Intersubjectivism: The social is in the interaction, most obviously in the language, which is formed by rules. This means that sociality is within a constellation of symbolic interaction between agents (Habermas is the dominant example in this ideal type).
The last ideal type, according to Reckwitz is, not surprisingly, Practice Theory: The social is in practice. The social is reproduced every time we act as we are used to, since âPractice theory does not place the social in mental qualities, nor in discourse, nor in interaction.â16
Although I disagree with Reckwitzâs third ideal type on intersubjectivism and interaction as I do not see how practices would not be interactive, I find it highly relevant to discuss the difference between cultural theories from a meta-theoretical perspective. Reckwitzâs ideal types offer a way to distinguish between different constructivist grounded cultural theories. Reckwitz clarifies how practice theory differs fundamentally by moving the focus from the individual to practice and by seeing discourse as just another practiceâwithout privileging it.
What do We Gain from Practice Theory?
Ann Swidler argues that seeing culture as practice gives a solution to one of the biggest problems in sociology, which is to move abstract ideas into specific activities. She writes that âPractice theory moves the level of sociological attention âdownâ from conscious ideas and values to the physical and the habitual. But this move is complemented by a move âupâ from ideas located in individual consciousness to the impersonal arena of discourse.17
In other words practice theory provides a new vocabulary for âideasâ and âvaluesâ because we can focus upon what people actually do, not on individual values or ideas, and on discourses (sayings). Swidler argues furthermore that the fruitfulness of practice theory is that it has renewed the focus on a definable empirical object.
Both discourses and practices are concretely observable in a way that meaning, idealism and values never really wereâŠ. If culture is only practices, the problematic relationship of culture to action disappears. Culture cannot be treated as some abstract stuff in peopleâs heads which might or might not cause their action. Rather cultural practices are action, action organized according to some more or less visible logic, which the analyst needs only to describe.18
However, Swidler adds that it might not be simple to describe âa more or less visible logicâ and admits that this has become a primary challenge for cultural analysis.
A Practice Theoretical Perspective in Relation to Intercultural Communication and Mediation
I find three aspects in practice theory especially relevant for culture, intercultural communication, and intercultural mediation: body, agency, and appropriate performance. In a practice theoretical perspective, first, the body is seen as part of all activities because practices always include bodily activity. In this way a social practice is the product of training the body in a certain way. âWhen we learn a practice, we learn to be bodies in a cer...
