This art icle was downloaded by: [ Cit y Universit y of Hong Kong Library] On: 04 April 2013, At : 21: 15 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Language and Intercultural Communication Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rmli20 The paradox of culture in a globalized world Rodney H. Jones a a Depart ment of English, Cit y Universit y of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong Version of record first published: 04 Apr 2013. To cite this article: Rodney H. Jones (2013): The paradox of cult ure in a globalized world, Language and Int ercult ural Communicat ion, DOI:10.1080/ 14708477.2013.770869 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 14708477.2013.770869 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- andcondit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. The accuracy of any inst ruct ions, form ulae, and drug doses should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and, or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. Language and Intercultural Communication, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2013.770869 DISCUSSION The paradox of culture in a globalized world Rodney H. Jones* Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:15 04 April 2013 Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong The paradox of culture is that the subjective life, which we feel in its continual flowing and which pushes of its own volition towards its inner perfection, cannot, viewed from the idea of culture, achieve that perfection on its own, but only by way of those selfsufficient crystallized structures which have now become quite alien to its form. Culture comes into being
and this is what is absolutely essential for understanding it
by the coincidence of two elements, neither of which contains culture in itself: the subjective soul and the objective intellectual product. (Simmel, 1916/1997, p. 58) Culture is (alas) a noun Much of the work in intercultural communication studies in the past decade, especially in the field of applied linguistics, has been devoted to ‘disinventing’ the notion of culture. The problem with the word ‘culture’ as it has been used in anthropology, sociology, and in everyday life, it has been pointed out, is that it is used as a noun, conceived of as something ‘solid,’ an essential set of traits or characteristics of certain people or groups, something people ‘have’ rather than something they ‘do’ (Scollon, Scollon, & Jones, 2012). Among the most famous statements of this position is Brain Street’s classic paper ‘Culture is a Verb’ (1993), in which he argues that culture should be treated as ‘a signifying process
the active construction of meaning
rather than the static and reified or nominalizing’ sense in which the word is often used in anthropology, some linguistics circles, and in everyday conversation. This view of culture is part of the broader dominance in the social sciences, pointed out by David Block in his paper in this issue, of a poststructuralist perspective on identity, which regards it as ‘a social process as opposed to a determined and fixed product,’ and many of the papers in this special issue demonstrate allegiance to this perspective. Qu, for instance, in his contribution criticizes ‘static and ahistorical’ approaches to cultural identity that are blind to the ways the norms of behavior of groups change in response to social and material conditions, Canagarajah points out the limitations of models of culture that fail to account for the creative ways people negotiate social values and social identities in specific contexts, and Shohamy complains about standardized language tests that ignore the fluid processes of negotiating identity and creating meaning that people use to organize their social lives. This ‘verbing’ of culture is considered by some an antidote to reified notions of culture and language that are all too often used to *Email: enrodney@cityu.edu.hk # 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:15 04 April 2013 2 R.H. Jones reinforce systems of inequality and discrimination and support practices of ‘othering’ of the type so dramatically illustrated by Joseph in his paper. At the same time, however, there is also in the papers in this issue a strong acknowledgment that this processural view of culture is not enough to explain the ways people actually experience culture in their everyday lives and to address the issues of inequality and injustice associated with these experiences. To say that culture is ‘socially constructed’ does not make it any less real for those who find themselves living within the confines of its material manifestation of laws, borders, passports, language tests, prisons, clinics, and classrooms. As Hacking (1999, p. 31) points out, ‘classifications do not exist only in the empty space of language, but in institutions, practices [and] material interactions with other people.’ As much as culture is a verb, it is also, in a very real sense a noun, and for many people the solidity of its substance is hard to escape. This is particularly true for the less economically advantaged of the world’s population such as migrant laborers and refugees for whom the notion of social constructionism is a bit of a luxury. Even those whose range of choices is wider, like the doctors and university professors in Canagarajah’s study, cannot escape the material consequences of their choices. Some would argue, in fact, as Qu points out, that we cannot help falling into the trap of essentializing the categories we use to make sense of the world, precisely because without us doing so, the world would become much more difficult to make sense of. As Qu puts it, paraphrasing Hamilton and Trolier (1986), ‘to cognize and describe a category, one has to detect its distinguishable features, a process that inescapably will involve essentialization.’ The German sociologist George Simmel (1900/2004) refers to this tension between the processural aspects of culture (culture as a ‘verb’) and its substantive aspects (culture as a ‘noun’) as the ‘tragedy of culture.’ For Simmel, the essence of culture is agency, the capacity of humans to create themselves, yet the more people exercise this agency, the more they find themselves at the mercy of the products they create. One example of this is fashion (Simmel, 2003): the more preoccupied people become with using clothing to express their individuality, the more they become ‘slaves to fashion,’ their choices constrained by external forces. The fundamental form of human suffering, Simmel (1916/1997) argues, is that in our infinite creativity we end up creating culture as a noun, and then end up being weighed down by ‘our own past, our own dogma and our own fantasies’ (p. 59). Each of the papers in this issue illustrates a different way of making sense of this paradox against the backdrop of globalization and technological developments which, as the editors point out, have ‘blurred many cultural boundaries, and have forced researchers to reconsider concepts that were once understood as binary and divergent.’ Even this statement, however, is undermined by the paradox of culture, for, as the world contracts and economic pressures for standardization grow, ‘cultural differences’ seem to become more, rather than less, apparent. Rather than ‘blurring together,’ the world seems sometimes to be splintering into ever more and ever smaller local identities, niche markets, interest groups, and subcultures. Just because traditional socializing structures are on the decline (families, faiths, neighborhoods, and nations), does not mean that folks are now much freer to invent themselves. They may have more categories to choose from, but they must still choose, and the categories of Facebook profiles can in some way be just as totalizing as those of families. This tension between culture as a noun and culture as a verb is highlighted in David Block’s discussion of structure and agency in the opening paper of this issue, a Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:15 04 April 2013 Language and Intercultural Communication 3 discussion which perfectly sets the parameters for the debates that follow in the subsequent papers. How, Block asks, can structure, the substantive side of culture, be understood to exist in relation to human agency? How free are people in the realms of language and culture to shape their own destinies, and how much are they constrained by the objective cultural forms that surround and ‘envelope’ them? In trying to answer these questions, he draws upon the work of Beck, Giddens, and, most importantly, Bourdieu, finally advancing the ‘critical realist’ perspective developed by Archer (2007), in which what Simmel calls ‘subjective culture’ (an individual’s personal identity and life projects) and ‘objective culture’ (the objectivity of social circumstances) are mediated through the human capacity for reflexivity: human actions are neither free nor determined, but subject to the ‘reflexive deliberations of subjects who subjectively determine their practical projects in relation to their objective circumstance’ (Archer, 2007, p. 17). The papers that follow take up where Block’s theoretical argument leaves off, each providing a detailed description of a different kind of ‘practical project’ and a different set of ‘objective circumstances,’ and each coming to a different conclusion about the relationship between what Simmel calls ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ culture. What is important about each of these conclusions is not just that they each add a piece to the theoretical debate initiated by Block, but that they also present their own ‘practical projects’ for their authors for dealing with the increasingly complex problems that arise out of the paradox of culture in a globalized world, problems having to do with freedom, dignity, health and safety, education, equity, and economic opportunities. The way we answer theoretical questions about structure and agency will in part determine the kinds of ethical positions we open up for ourselves as scholars to address these problems. Differences that make a difference The most central operation of structure that concerns the authors in this issue is the way structures establish and maintain boundaries between people. While many of these boundaries are physical (such as national boundaries and the walls of schools, prisons, hospitals, and gated communities) or social (laws and regulations, labels, tests, and criteria), at the heart of them all are the boundaries created by the discursive construction of categories of people, often conceptualized in terms of binary oppositions (male/female, black/white, and native/non-native). Indeed, as Qu points out, one of the biggest problems with culture as a discursive construct is that it is predicated on the notion of difference, the assumption that different cultures have their own distinctive identities. Without the idea of difference, culture hardly makes sense. The discursive construction of difference and the differentiation between ingroups and out-groups has long been assumed by evolutionary biologists to play an important role in the survival of our species. Forming groups and knowing who is a member and who is not a member allows humans (and other species) the ability to secure and protect territory, food, and other important resources, to keep outsiders out, and to make sure insiders do not behave in ways that threaten the group or endanger its resources. Such assumptions have led to a naturalization of categories like ‘native’ and ‘alien’ to the degree that they are regarded as existing independent of our language. Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:15 04 April 2013 4 R.H. Jones In his paper, Joseph argues not only that such categories are not natural, but that they are not even particularly useful. In his exploration of different examples of ‘othering’ in a variety of social and ‘cultural’ contexts from the discourse of scientists about ‘alien’ species of squirrels to conversations among teachers about the language use of their students, he shows how people regularly engage in ‘othering’ even when there is no clear social (or, for that matter, evolutionary) advantage to be gained. The problem for Joseph is the linguistic construction of difference to begin with. As long as we believe that ‘difference has some absolute, objective character distinct from what is said about it,’ he argues, ‘othering’ is inevitable. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of Joseph’s point is his own ‘othering’ of one of the speakers in his data who, in the context of ‘othering’ some gay neighbors, speaks in a way that Joseph perceives as ‘effeminate.’ The basis of this ‘othering’ seems to be the assertion that since this speaker ‘sounds gay,’ he is somehow less qualified to criticize his neighbors for their sexual behavior or to question their masculinity. Here, however, the culprit is not so much the social construction of difference as the social construction of equivalence, the conflation of sexuality and gender (both on the part of the speaker and on the part of Joseph). This conflation goes beyond observations about phonology when Joseph attributes the speaker’s interest in ‘peeping throughout the neighbors’ windows’ to ‘gender confusion.’ Like the scientists, which Joseph criticizes for dressing up their ‘othering’ of gray squirrels as ‘science,’ Joseph dresses up his implication that men who speak like women are likely to be gay as ‘linguistics,’ using terms like ‘index’ and citing studies by respected scholars of language and sexuality like Cameron and Kulick (2003) and Gaudio (1994). In reality, however, these studies undermine rather than support his implication, Gaudio (1994, p. 31) explicitly ‘critiquing the use of the term feminine and especially effeminate in characterizing gay male speech,’ and Cameron and Kulick (2003, p. xiv) asserting that such attempts to delineate the features of gay speech are not just simplistic, but have ‘done more to obstruct than to advance our understanding of the relationship between language and sexuality.’ Part of the problem, of course, as Joseph himself admits, lies in regarding indexicality as a matter of communication rather than a matter of interpretation, asserting that ‘linguistic signs actually carry indexical meaning’ independent of people’s interpretation of them, as Joseph himself does when he writes of this speaker ‘He has the indices associated with gay male speech’ (emphasis mine). It’s a short jump from imputing ‘indices’ to imputing identity, and although Joseph never actually makes this leap, his implication is so strong that others make it for him: the ‘gay sounding’ homophobe of Joseph’s paper becoming in Block’s paper a ‘homophobic-sounding gay man.’ The problem of ‘othering,’ then, is not just a function of the discursive construction of difference, but also, to borrow a term from Bateson, a function of what differences are seen to ‘make a difference’ and what kind of difference they are seen to make. Ironically, it is often the least consequential differences (fur color, voice pitch, and intonation) that are most central in the operation of ‘othering.’ However, it is not these differences that are the problem. It is that these differences are seen to index more fundamental binary oppositions (alien/native, male/female, gay/straight). Almost any surface difference can be recruited to the service of binarism, and the problem with binarism is not the proliferation of difference, but that the reduction of difference to a single, simplified relation, a relation which, by its very nature is not just structural, but also hierarchal. All binary oppositions imply a value judgment. If Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:15 04 April 2013 Language and Intercultural Communication 5 not, there is no need to engage in binarism in the first place. Natives are higher than aliens. Men who ‘talk like men’ are higher than ‘those who talk like women.’ It is not enough, then, to deny difference, to assert that, after all, ‘we are all just squirrels.’ There is a need, as Carol Bacchi (1990, p. xvii) asserts, ‘to shift the focus of analysis from the ‘‘difference’’ to the structures which convert this ‘‘difference’’ into disadvantage.’ The paper by Shohamy provides a sharp contrast to Joseph’s take on difference. For her, what accomplishes ‘othering’ is not the construction of difference, but its erasure. In her analysis of three different kinds of language tests, Shohamy shows how these institutional artifacts operate to exclude and marginalize people not by highlighting their differences, but by constructing a world in which these differences do not exist. The homogenous national, global, and transnational identities perpetuated in these tests, stand in stark contrast to the populations who take them, populations which are characterized by ‘language diversity, multilingualism, trans-languaging, and multi-modalities.’ This different view of the relationship between difference and ‘othering’ leads Shohamy to a very different ethical stance, one which sees the solution to the problem in protecting and promoting difference rather than undermining it. It is a more poststructuralist view of difference which seeks to liberate it from the confines of the binary opposition, to allow it to proliferate in all of its multiplicity and irreducibility. The ethical stance it makes available is more in line with that of Levinas (2005), for whom alterity is not so much the basis for drawing boundaries as it is the site of authentic exchange or encounter with the other. Behaving ethically means learning how to recognize and honor the other’s ‘otherness’ without resorting to ‘othering,’ something Joseph argues is not possible. This approach, of course, is also not without its contradictions. Just as terms like indexicality can be used to disguise essentialism, terms like diversity can be used to disguise binarism. What is it, one must ask, that makes a group of people diverse? What differences, in this context, are deemed to ‘make a difference’? Often, especially in the USA, the term diversity is used as a code word to signal racial variation in a population. In fact, the whole rationale for the use of the term by Justice Powell in the famous ruling on affirmative action (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke) was to give public institutions a way to discriminate based on race by not referencing race per se, but by instead referencing ‘diversity’ (Wood, 2004). Culture as both wave and particle The papers by Jenks, Qu, and Canagarajah take a very different stand on the relationship between structure and agency than those discussed above, and consequently make available a different set of ethical responses to concepts like difference and equivalence, and to social constructs like ‘native speaker.’ For them the question is not whether or not we should resist or embrace difference, but rather under what circumstances difference can be used strategically to either open up or close down possibilities for human action. Ideas of difference and equivalence are not just tools for ‘othering’; they can also be used as strategies for liberation. ‘Strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1985/1996), in fact, is an important basis for the liberation projects of many groups including feminists and gays and lesbians. Culture can be used to assert power or to resist it. Diversity can be used to claim rights or withhold them. The important questions Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:15 04 April 2013 6 R.H. Jones from this particular perspective are: ‘When and how do notions like culture, diversity, and ‘‘native speaker’’ become weapons for the perpetuation of injustices, and when and how can they become useful objects for the enactment of social change?’ What is going on in these papers is not so much a downplaying of the importance of structure as a kind of critique of the structure/agency binary in which structure is almost always put in the role of constraining agency. In some situations, structure can instead be seen as the necessary condition for the exercise of agency. As Jackson (2004) suggests, although categories like ‘woman,’ ‘gay,’ and ‘native speaker’ are restrictive, they also form the basis for the invention of alternative identities. Sometimes, it is only from within categories that we can resist them. For Jenks, approaching the problem from the perspective of membership categorization analysis, categories are not so much stable structures as they are strategies which people use to make relevant identities in, and through, talk. Orienting towards one or another category might have broader social consequences for interactants, but these consequences cannot really be measured without first and foremost taking into account what is locally accomplished by and through these categories. To interpret Jenks’ data simply as evidence of the oppressive power of the native speaker paradigm would be to miss the point of how his participants strategically make use of the categories of ‘native-speaker’ and ‘foreigner’ to manage their face relationships, for example, enacting modesty or mitigating the face threats involved in judging another person’s language. The main function of these categories on the local level of these interactions seems not so much to undermine the language use of interactants, as to give them non-threatening ways to make positive comments about their own and one another’s English. Similarly, for Qu, language behavior cannot be reduced to static norms, but must be assessed as the strategic response of individuals and groups to changing material and social circumstances. Even if you accept the objective, external existence of cultures as expressed in sets of norms developed by a group to respond to their situation, you can never consider a culture to be finished. All cultures are works in progress, moving targets, and it this understanding itself that liberates us from essentialized conceptualizations of culture. Culture becomes a dynamic series of responses to history, and history becomes the ground for the exercise of agency. Finally, Canagarajah, adopting the scalar metaphor of Blommaert (2005), also shows how structure can play a role in making certain exercises of agency possible. Based on interviews and observations with migrant professionals in the USA, he shows how in certain situations they are able to renegotiate the values assigned to different language behavior. For Blommaert, communication occurs on multiple scales, each scale associated with different orders of indexicality. While this model helps to partly explain the complex language behavior of migrants, and the complex layers of structure that constrain that behavior, it does not explain the ways the migrants that Canagarajah interviewed were consistently able to renegotiate scales and to alter orders of indexicality, even to the point of persuading ‘native speakers’ to adopt orders of indexicality in which plural linguistic norms were valued over more traditional language ideologies. The only way to really understand how scales work to structure language behavior, Canagarajah asserts, is to complement them with an understanding of strategies and tactics (de Certeau, 1984). Scales become comprehensible only in the context of the strategies people develop to manage them, and strategies only become possible in the context of the affordances and constraints imposed on different scales. Downloaded by [City University of Hong Kong Library] at 21:15 04 April 2013 Language and Intercultural Communication 7 These approaches, however, also have their limitations: focusing on the strategic uses of culture in particular situated encounters can sometimes conceal from us the workings of larger systems of power and dominance. One’s ability to take strategic action in the context of social structures depends on all sorts of mediating factors such as social class differences, institutional role differences, and national identities. This is especially clear in Canagarajah’s data where the ability of participants to negotiate norms of linguistic behavior is inseparable from their socio-economic class. Migrants of a different sort such as factory workers, call center operators, or domestic helpers have a whole different (and clearly more narrow) range of choices when it comes to negotiating linguistic norms. One thing, however, is clear from these three examples: that structures and categories do not just impose actions and identities onto people. Rather, what they do is ‘change the space of possibilities for personhood’ (Hacking, 1986, p. 223), introducing new affordances along with new constraints. All of the papers in this issue present unique and useful perspectives on the paradox of culture in the era of globalization. They remind us of the complex theoretical and ethical issues that are involved in the study of intercultural communication, and remind us as well of the inadequacy of traditional notions of culture and communication for dealing with these issues. Finally, they remind us of the practical implications of the choices we make in how we study culture and the different ethical stances these choices open up for us. Notes on contributor Rodney Jones is an Associate Professor in the Department of English of City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include discourse analysis, health communication, and language and sexuality. He is co-author with Ron and Suzanne Scollon of Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, 3rd ed. (Wiley, 2012), and author of Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for Students (Routledge, 2012) and Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective (Routledge, 2013). References Archer, M. (2007). Making our way through the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bacchi, C. L. (1990). Same difference: Feminism and sexual difference. London: Allen and Unwin. Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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