The Global Intercultural Communication Reader

Molefi Kete Asante, Yoshitaka Miike, Jing Yin, Molefi Kete Asante, Yoshitaka Miike, Jing Yin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135048709
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

The Global Intercultural Communication Reader is the first anthology to take a distinctly non-Eurocentric approach to the study of culture and communication. In this expanded second edition, editors Molefi Kete Asante, Yoshitaka Miike, and Jing Yin bring together thirty-two essential readings for students of cross-cultural, intercultural, and international communication. This stand-out collection aims to broaden and deepen the scope of the field by placing an emphasis on diversity, including work from authors across the globe examining the processes and politics of intercultural communication from critical, historical, and indigenous perspectives.

The collection covers a wide range of topics: the emergence and evolution of the field; issues and challenges in cross-cultural and intercultural inquiry; cultural wisdom and communication practices in context; identity and intercultural competence in a multicultural society; the effects of globalization; and ethical considerations. Many readings first appeared outside the mainstream Western academy and offer diverse theoretical lenses on culture and communication practices in the world community. Organized into five themed sections for easy classroom use, The Global Intercultural Communication Reader includes a detailed bibliography that will be a crucial resource for today's students of intercultural communication.

I

The Emergence and Evolution of Intercultural Communication

1

Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication

The Foreign Service Institute and the Mandate for Intercultural Training

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz

In this opening chapter, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz documents the contribution of Edward T. Hall and the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the U.S. Department of State to the establishment of the intercultural communication field. She first explicates the significance of Hall’s work in defining and developing intercultural communication as a field of study and then examines the historical context of the FSI as it shaped the theoretical contours of contemporary intercultural communication research. According to Leeds-Hurwitz, it was the demands of U.S. diplomats and the practical mission of the FSI that led Hall and his distinguished colleagues (1) to shift macro-level cultural profiling to micro-level cultural analysis for the purpose of studying everyday interactions, (2) to investigate nonverbal messages such as proxemics, time, paralanguage, and kinesics, (3) to adopt the linguistic model in intercultural education and training, and (4) to prioritize patterns and practices of communication in the study of culture and society.

Many articles discussing some aspect of intercultural communication begin with a paragraph in which the author reviews the history of the field and the major early publications. Typically, Edward Hall’s book, The Silent Language, published in 1959, is listed as the first work in the field, and often specifically mentioned as the crucial starting point.¹ The lack of attention to his motives and sources for the work is not surprising, since the young field still has little history written about it.² But no book develops without a context, and no author invents a field without a reason. This study will look at the context in which Hall’s work was produced and will describe some of the events that led to the creation of the field of intercultural communication. Using this historical record, I argue that the parameters of the field were established in response to a particular set of problems. If we are to understand why we include some topics as appropriate and do not consider other types of work, we must understand the exigencies that generated the first study of intercultural communication.³

Briefly, I will argue that intercultural communication emerged from occurrences at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the U.S. Department of State (DOS) between 1946 and 1956.⁴ Because intercultural communication grew out of the need to apply abstract anthropological concepts to the practical world of foreign service diplomats, this early focus on training American diplomats led to the later, now standard use of intercultural communication training.⁵ Only recently (beginning with Gudykunst, 1983) has intercultural communication begun to discuss theoretical approaches; initially the concepts were accompanied only by examples, not by an elaboration of theory.⁶ In their first writings on the subject Hall (1959) and Hall and Whyte (1960) made no explicit attempt to create a new academic field with a novel research tradition (Winkin, 1984, p. 17). Establishing a new academic field was, rather, a secondary phase, based on Hall’s early attempt to translate anthropological insights into cultural differences to an audience that wanted immediate and practical applications, not research studies.

My discussion offers four major arguments: first, that Hall’s work was important to the development of the field of intercultural communication; second, that Hall’s work originated in and was shaped by the specific context of the FSI; third, that this context resulted in a number of crucial decisions, which were continued by later researchers; and fourth, that these decisions illuminate some features of the contemporary literature. Assuming that the readers of this article will be most familiar with the contemporary literature, my effort will focus upon illuminating the historical context which set the stage for the current practices in the field.

The following specific connections between the work of Hall (and others) at the FSI and current intercultural communication research will be demonstrated:

1. Instead of the traditional anthropological focus on a single culture at a time, or at best, a comparison of two, Hall responded to the critique of his foreign service students by stressing interaction between members of different cultures. Hall is most explicit about this in a publication written jointly with William Foote Whyte:
   In the past, anthropologists have been primarily concerned with the internal pattern of a given culture. In giving attention to intercultural problems, they have examined the impact of one culture upon another. Very little attention has been given to the actual communication process between representatives of different cultures.

   (Hall & Whyte, 1960, p. 12)
   This shift from viewing cultures one at a time to studying interactions between members of different cultures has been enormously influential on the study of intercultural communication and is what most completely defines the field today.⁷
2. Hall narrowed the focus of study from culture as a general concept (macroanalysis) to smaller units within culture (microanalysis). This occurred in response to a particular problem: the students in the FSI classes had no interest in generalizations or specific examples that applied to countries other than the ones to which they were assigned; they wanted concrete, immediately useful, details provided to them before they left the US, and they thought it appropriate that the anthropologists involved in their training should focus their energy on this level of culture.⁸ Hall, eventually agreeing that the complaints of his students were justified, began the move from a focus on the entire culture to specific small moments of interaction.
3. Hall enlarged the concept of culture to include the study of communication; he viewed much of his work as an extension of anthropological insight to a new topic, interaction between members of two or more different cultures. Those who study intercultural communication continue to use the concepts taken from anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s (culture, ethnocentrism, etc.), but this cross-fertilization moved primarily in one direction: now only a few anthropologists study proxemics, time, kinesics or paralanguage, or focus on interactions between members of different cultures.⁹ Although anthropology and intercultural communication were once closely allied, the two fields have grown apart as reflected in the shift from the qualitative methods of anthropology to the quantitative methods of communication generally used in intercultural communication today and in the recent surge of interest in applying traditional American communication theories to intercultural contexts.¹⁰ While intercultural communication sprang from anthropological insights, it has been on its own for some thirty years, and some shift in focus was predictable.¹¹
4. Implicit in Hall’s work is the view that communication is patterned, learned, and analyzable, just as culture had been previously described. (Others later stated these insights more explicitly, but he implies them and should be given some credit for the ideas.) Researchers today make the same assumptions about communication. Without these assumptions, we could not have the abstract theorizing about intercultural communication that now marks the field.
5. Hall decided that the majority of information potentially available about a culture was not really essential in situations of face-to-face interaction with members of that culture: only a small percentage of the total need be known. Thus he delineated several types of micro-cultural behavior as the focus of study: tone of voice, gestures, time, and spatial relationships. That intercultural research still pays extensive attention to these types of interaction over many other possibilities is a tribute to the influence of his work.
6. Several aspects of the training established by Hall are accepted as part of the repertoire of training procedures used today: (a) Hall created teaching materials out of experiences abroad which students in the training sessions were willing to provide; (b) Hall encouraged his students to meet with foreign nationals as part of the preparation for a trip abroad, as one way to increase their knowledge of other cultures; and (c) Hall presented his insights as a beginning for his students, but assumed they would continue the learning process once they arrived at their destination.
7. Hall and his colleagues at FSI are responsible for the use of descriptive linguistics as the basic model for intercultural communication, a model which still implicitly serves as the basis for much current research. Explicit discussion of linguistic terminology is currently enjoying a renaissance through attention to what are now termed the “etic” and “emic” approaches to intercultural communication.
8. Hall expanded his audience beyond foreign diplomats to include all those involved in international business, today one of the largest markets for intercultural training. Intercultural communication continues to serve the function of training Americans to go abroad, although it has grown substantially beyond this initial mission to include such areas as the training of foreign students, recent immigrants, and teachers who work with students of different cultural backgrounds; it has established a university base now, and many practitioners engage in research, as well as teaching large numbers of undergraduate students the basics of an intercultural communication approach.

The innovations listed here were picked up by the fledgling field of communication, and they were crucial in the establishment of the area known as intercultural communication. They are today hallmarks of intercultural communication.

Background: The Foreign Service Institute

The story of intercultural communication begins at the Foreign Service Institute.¹² In the 1940s many persons recognized that American diplomats were not fully effective abroad, since they often did not speak the language and usually knew little of the host culture. After World War II Americans began to reevaluate their knowledge and understanding of other countries, both in terms of their languages and in terms of their cultural assumptions.¹³ Along with general concern about the ability of Americans to interact with foreign nationals, the training and knowledge of American diplomats were issues, since deficiencies in those areas have substantial repercussions. In 1946 Congress passed the Foreign Service Act, which reorganized the Foreign Service, and established a Foreign Service Institute to provide both initial training and in-service training on a regular basis throughout the careers of Foreign Service Officers and other staff members.¹⁴

As one part of the preparation of the bill, in 1945 the American Foreign Service Journal sponsored a contest for ideas to improve the training program of the Foreign Service; Foreign Service personnel from around the world contributed essays. Those judged to be the best were published as a series of articles in the journal, and the comments are fascinating. Many themes recur, among them the recommendation for better language training. Because American representatives abroad were often not well trained in foreign languages, many contributors argued that they would be more successful if they had fluency in at least one language other than English.¹⁵ Many authors also urged fuller education about the history, political structure, economics, and international relations with the United States, not only of the country to which the diplomat would be sent, but of the entire geographic region.¹⁶

About the same time, a series of articles not submitted for the contest, but generally addressing the issue of change in the Foreign Service, was published. One of these specifically criticized the generally limited language fluency in the foreign service and highlighted the need for individuals who knew more than basic grammar and who could converse in a language other than English (Pappano, 1946). In an unpublished history of the beginnings of FSI, Boswell points out that “Prior to 1946 the American Foreign Service placed less emphasis on language qualifications for entry than any other nation’s foreign service” (1948, p. 38). He attributed the deficiency to the poor language training available in American schools.

One factor which changed attitudes towards language training in the Foreign Service was the extensive language training program begun by the Army during World War II, which demonstrated the feasibility of language training on a large scale. Little excuse remained for Foreign Service diplomats to have inadequate language skills (Boswell, 1948, p. 38).

In 1939 Mortimer Graves, then the Executive Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), reasoned that linguists who were capable of analyzing Native American Indian languages (often funded through ACLS grants) should be able to analyze other, perhaps more politically useful, languages. Convinced that world-wide conflict was inevitable, he obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to put a small group of linguists to work. Mary Haas, the first hired, was asked to analyze Thai from native speakers, to prepare basic teaching materials, and then to teach a group of students the language, combining the spoken words of native speakers with the written materials she had prepared (Cowan, 1975, 1987; see also Smith, 1946, and Murray, 1983, pp. 113–120).

When the United States formally entered World War II, Graves brought J. Milton Cowan to Washington; together they organized the linguists to serve the war effort through what became known as the Intensive Language Program (ILP). Those who had been inducted served on the military side of the project, and those who had not participated as civilians through the ACLS. Henry Lee Smith, Jr., who was trained as a linguist, was in the Army Reserves at the time; he was recalled to active duty and put in charge of the military side (Cowan, 1975; Maddox, 1949).

The method, developed as the “linguistic method” of language training, became “the Army method.” Instead of the traditional focus on learning to read and write a language and on grammar as the key to a language, the method emphasized appropriate use of the spoken language, an innovative approach. Because the classroom teacher was a native speaker, students heard the idiomatic usage and pronunciation. These native speakers were under the close supervision of professional linguists, who worked with them on consistent organization of the materials. Ideally the material was organized as a series of natural speech situations: asking directions, going shopping, finding housing, etc. Through this division of labor, a small number of linguists supervised a large number of native speakers, and dozens of languages could be taught simultaneously with a minimum of full-time staff members (Smith, 1946).

Initially the Army program, formally one part of the larger Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), was to serve 1,500 of the brightest and most qualified army recruits. However, believing that having a larger number of soldiers qualified to speak a variety of languages was desirable, officials increased the number of participants to 15,000. Not all of the techniques that had been established for 1,500 transferred easily to the larger group but, on the whole, the prog...