Cultural Encounters: A Final Word

2012

In his systemic theory, Niklas Luhmann identifies culture with a society’s memory.In particular, memory is the difference between a recollection and memory.Memory, that is, culture, is not anymore a kind of archive collecting and storing ideas, knowledge or events, but more than that, a symptomatic access to information.This leads to the generation of a culture in abundance and polymorphism in cultural presence.Luhmann speaks of a dynamic memory, a potential culture and a complex variety, subject to the will for communication. This means that culture is communication, and in particular, specific forms of communication.Culture is no longer an object, but a point in which several prospects meet, the prospects of an observer.The observer’s aim is not to interpret, but to compare the object with the prospects of other observers.In this way we are led to the phenomenon of the culture’s cross-section and doubling, characterizing the semantics of the modern era.Each cultural occurrence is doubled and exposed to comparison.Via the process of difference, we observe a transition from culture’s ceremonial consideration, based on the procedures of repetition and imitation, to a culture of communication, based on observation and comparison.Acts, events, myths and documents are no longer monuments, but structures of communication, standards of meaning, describing society.

How may culture be defined? Numerous works and important contributions have been answering this crucial question for the past thirty years; yet the problem remains unsolved. When taking a close look at ‘intercultural communication’, we may see that some utterances might not be that cultural at all. If we have a clear definition of ‘intercultural communication’, then what is ‘intra-cultural communication’ (Winch 1997, Ma 2004)? Is there really a sharp difference between these two concepts and is miscommunication necessarily ‘cultural’ when implying individuals or groups from alleged different cultural backgrounds? We will study various examples and try to separate the cultural from the non-cultural by taking a close look at intercultural and intra-cultural miscommunication, insofar as their definitions seem to ultimately cover the same conceptual maps. After this first step, we will deconstruct the concept of culture, as it has been defined by scholars in various research fields over the last decades; we will thus see that culture might not be a set of shared values or behaviours (Knapp & Knapp-Pothoff 1990; Scollon & Wong Scollon 2001): culture may only be a very personal variable of a complex, strangely organized and experimental toolbox (Kay 1999) which would constitute a product of our education, psychology, social encounters and language and would only remain activated through particular contexts. This exploration will eventually be followed by a proposal for a redefinition of ‘culture’ as a concept, based on interactional pragmatics, contextics (Castella 2005) and a triadic declension of this very concept with three notions: bathyculture, dramaculture and osmoculture.

American Journal of Sociology, 2003

How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as "collective representations"-vocabularies, symbols, or codes-that structure people's abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of "group style," showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter collective representations. The result is "culture in interaction," which complements research in the sociology of emotion, neoinstitutionalism, the reproduction of inequality, and other work, by showing how groups put culture to use in everyday life.

American Anthropologist, 2001

Muchos trabajos en comunicación intercultural en el campo de la lingüística comparten el supuesto de que la influencia de la cultura sobre la interacción social se manifestará en los intercambios comunicativos, e igualmente que una mirada académica a esos intercambios será base suficiente para una adecuada descripción de cómo se supone que sea la comunicación intercultural. La teoría lingüística misma, careciendo de lugares para integrar a la cultura como un factor en sus conceptos, urge a los académicos a pedir prestadas operacionalizaciones de la cultura desde disciplinas vecinas, como diferentes corrientes de la psicología, sociología o antropología. Como una consecuencia, los enfoques que resultan de esta orientación transdisciplinar, comparten supuestos muy divergentes sobre cómo, en qué momento en un proceso comunicativo, y con qué efectos, la cultura afecta la interacción social. Mientras que muchas investigaciones desde tendencias similares distinguen entre los enfoques prim...

In the past decade, the idea that speaking of a culture inevitably suggests an inordinate degree of boundedness, homogeneity, coherence, and stability has gained considerable support, and some cultural/social anthropologists have even called for abandoning the concept. It is argued here, however, that the unwelcome connotations are not inherent in the concept but associated with certain usages that have been less standardized than these critics assume. The root of the confusion is the distribution of learned routines across individuals: while these routines are never perfectly shared, they are not randomly distributed. Therefore, “culture” should be retained as a convenient term for designating the clusters of common concepts, emotions, and practices that arise when people interact regularly. Furthermore, outside anthropology and academia the word is gaining popularity and increasingly understood in a roughly anthropological way. Retaining the concept while clarifying that culture is not reproduced unproblematically, has its limits in the individual and the universal, and is not synonymous with ethnicity and identity will preserve the common ground the concept has created within the discipline. Moreover, it will simplify communicating anthropological ideas to the general public and thus challenging mistaken assumptions.

This paper rst elaborates on the notions of conceptualisation and cultural conceptualisations. Cultural conceptualisations enable the members of a cultural group to think, so to speak, in one mind. These conceptualisations are not equally imprinted in the minds of people but are rather represented in a distributed fashion across the minds in a cultural group. Two major kinds of cultural conceptualisations are cultural schemas and cultural categories. These group-level conceptualisations emerge from and act as the locus for the interactions between people from the same cultural background. The members negotiate and renegotiate these conceptualisations across generations. The paper employs the notion of 'distributed representation' in presenting a model of cultural conceptualisations. It then provides examples of such conceptualisations and discusses how they may be instantiated in various artefacts, such as discourse. The paper also proposes a general framework for the identi cation of cultural conceptualisations, based on the adoption of an ethnographic approach towards the analysis of discourse. Examples from Australian Aboriginal cultural conceptualisations are provided throughout the paper.

International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016

The notion of culture is a very problematic issue. There is no consensus among the scholars, researchers and even the normal people concerning the definition and the scope of culture, because the significance of cultural observance is associated with the value that is given to it by its members. Therefore, all these diversities should be observed while conducting any studies that show the impact of culture on language use. This study aims at reconsidering the notion of culture, determining its elements, identifying its scope, clarifying how it works in association with language studies, and recommending the most appropriate methodology for examining the impact of culture on interactions .