Culture and Communication

To better understand intercultural communication, it is important that we know more about the nature of culture and communication and, equally important, how culture may relate to communication or vice versa. The ensuring discussion in this section is a conceptual orientation of these topics.


What is culture?

There are many perspectives on culture. But we will focus on two of the fundamental ones.

The more "traditional perspectives on culture" has been espoused by many thinkers throughout the centuries. In the West, for example, Matthew Arnold defined culture in his 1869 book, Culture and Anarchy, as "the best that has been thought and said in the world." Culture, according to this traditional view, is looked upon as a standard of excellence and usually refers to achievements in the arts, literature, architecture, and the like.

Similarly, many people also relate culture to standard in (formal) education--as in "the more you're educated, the more culture you have." Culture, from this angle, refers to the outcome of a formal and programmatic learning process (as in going through schooling). For example, in various parts on Mainland China, the expression "someone has culture" means someone has received an extent of formal education. So, according to this notion, a college graduate has more culture than a high school graduate, a high school graduate has more culture than an elementary graduate, and so on.

But the above perspective is currently thought of by many scholars as a "class-based" or elitist view of culture. After all, someone, a class of people, or an institution in society is defining or legitimizing what is culture (or what is good, significant, and valuable) and what is not. For instance, most of the artifacts, "traditions," or past events we see in the typical art, culture, or history museums represent the vision or interpretation of the curators who have their own sets of ideology and preference; their selection is determined by a privileged class of people. Artifacts, traditions, or past events that are not selected for display in museums have tended to be viewed as unimportant or insignificant, at least by implication of their omission. In other words, this elitist definition of culture has enormous social, economic, and political implications. It is because cultural artifacts, practices, or traditions that are not legitimized by museums, the media, or cultural elites tend not to have much exposure and can then be forgotten easily.

In addition, this traditional notion of culture has tended to be static, that is, it assumes that "culture" can be put into distinct categories or within set boundaries. A good illustration of this notion is the fact that there are still many people in society insisting on preserving certain traditional "cultures" passed down through the generations as if such "cultures" do not change over or "with" time.

Now we come to our second important conception of culture which is quite different from what has been discussed above.

The second and what can be regarded as the "sociological perspective on culture" came into being in such fields of study as sociology and cultural anthropology. For example, Raymond Williams defined culture in his 1965 book, The Long Revolution, as "a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behavior. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture."

According to this conception, culture refers to people's everyday sense-making or meaning-making experience. It means the experience whereby people come to agreements among themselves as to what is important, good, valuable, or otherwise significant and worthwhile for them. The construction of culture involves many things we do in our everyday life, for example: institutions (e.g., social structures we enact such as business corporations, family, schools); the rules used to gather social behavior in institutions and everyday human interaction; the symbols used for communication (e.g., words, pictures, music, etc.); the symbolism or meanings we create and assign to these symbols, the things we do and own, or the action we take.

From this sociological perspective, therefore, culture, or our meaning-making experience, is (1) an on-going phenomenon, (2) ever-changing, (3) not a static entity, (4) not easily put in distinct categories, and, equally important, (4) subjective. Culture is "subjective" because everyone of us has an individual way of looking at the world and, as a result, has a unique way of making sense of the world.

In other words, an important question to ask about culture is HOW people come up with their unique way(s) of making sense of the world. We will address this question more thoroughly later. For now, we will move on to two important ideas about what communication is.


What is communication?

This seems an easy question but in fact it is not. Like culture, communication has its share of multiple interpretations. For our purpose, however, we will look at two of them, namely, the technical perspective and the ritual perspective on communication.

The "technical perspective on communication" is one of the most basic and commonly-held notion of communication. It refers to the process whereby information or message is transmitted or exchanged between a sender and a receiver and vice versa. It is also called the transmission or transportation perspective on communication because it is concerned with the physical transference of information. But this conception of communication is very limited in explaining the complexity of human communication because human communication involves much more than the mere physical exchange of information, data, or message. This is why many scholars nowadays think that what has come to be known as the ritual perspective is more appropriate for our understanding of human communication.

One of the most vocal proponents of the "ritual perspective on communication" is James W. Carey, who defined communication in his 1988 book, Communication as Culture, as "a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed." To study communication from this perspective, Carey explained, "is to examine the actual social process wherein significant symbolic forms are created, apprehended, and used." The followings are several key points to remember in reference to the ritual perspective.

First, communication, like what people from the transmission perspective would agree, involves at least two persons. Of course, we may sometimes "talk to ourselves" silently; this is called intra-personal communication. But even in this situation, two "persons" are involved--you and a "fictional" character you create--and they "talk to each other" intra-personally.

Second, communication is a process, that is, it is ever-changing and it never stops. This point highlights an essential aspect of communication's nature: As people maintain their relationship through communication, the on-going, tentative nature of the communication process dictates that people's relationship is also ever-changing, ever-evolving, and tentative. A relationship may be good on one day, for example, but the relationship between the same two persons may turn bad or become even better the next morning because no two communication processes are alike.

Third, communication is a process sustained by the use of symbols people use to express themselves or to interact with others. Some of the key symbols we use include spoken or written words, graphic designs, hand signs, body gestures, audiotapes, movies, music, and so on. This is a KEY component is the communication process and in our understanding of culture as a sense-making experience. The meaning of symbols, all kinds of symbol (such as Chinese or English writings), is socially constructed. People assign meanings to the symbols they create (e.g., red is a lucky color during a wedding in Chinese tradition; red represents danger in traffic lights). That is to say, the meaning of symbols is also context-bound. Therefore, the meaning of any given symbol (or the symbolism we assign to any thing we use or thing we do) is often, if not always, "ambiguous" or tentative. Since we use symbols to communicate, then the outcome of any given communication can also be ambiguous, tentative, or simply unpredictable.

Fourth, communication is the process whereby people come to some sort of understanding of an experience. This means that a communication can result in a mutual understanding of something among the communicants; or the communication may end up with differing or even conflicting understandings. Now, this is a subtle and yet very important point to remember. Embedded in this point is an argument that there is no objective reality "out there." What we know as "reality," according to this argument, is in essence our interpretation or understanding of an experience. This is why Carey refers to communication as a symbolic process whereby "reality" is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed." For example, if we agree on "eating an apple a day is good for our health," then a reality is established and it is our "mutual agreement" that "eating an apple a day is good for our health." Otherwise, there will be two or more "realities" among us, including one "reality" in the mind of the beholders that "eating an apple a day is good for our health," another "reality" in the mind of the others that "eating an apple a day is not good for our health," and perhaps even more "realities" that are different from these two.

Of course, ideally, and more often than not, we hope to have more mutual understandings than we have conflicting understandings in our communication. Here, what John Dewey wrote in his 1916 book, Democracy and Education, on the intimate relationship between communication and community can help us understand this concept even better. He said: "There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. [People] live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common...are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a common understanding--likemindedness as sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to another like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces....Consensus demands communication." In short, a sense of community among people is created and maintained through and in communication.


How does culture relate to communication, or vice versa?

It should be clear to us now that there is an intimate and, indeed, symbiotic (or mutually defining) relationship between "the sociological perspective" on culture and "the ritual perspective on communication" in that "culture is realized through communication." Or, in the words of Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, a communication scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, "Whereas culture is the noun, communication is the verb." In other words, we create, maintain, share, and transform a sense of common purpose and meaning (that is, culture) with our fellow beings through the use of symbols over time (that is, communication).

Therefore, intercultural communication, from the above conception, refers to the process whereby people with different ways of constructing or interpreting reality co-create, negotiate, share, maintain, and transform a sense of common purpose and meaning among themselves. So some of the most fundamental questions in intercultural communication are: How do people generate meaning or construct their sense of what is real, what is valuable, what is significant and so on? More specifically, how do people come to understand the world and others communicatively? We assume that by knowing more about these two issues, we can better understanding how we can communicate with others interculturally more effective and productively.

As we suggested in the Introduction section, the followings are several sections on some key issues in intercultural communication. Our key objective is to address the above two major questions.