Culture in Communication: Analyses of Intercultural Situations (review)

These eleven essays deal with intercultural communication and were originally presented at a workshop on this theme in 1994 in Como, Italy. The editors tell us in their introduction (vii–xv) that the papers are within the framework of interpretive sociolinguistics, and they are right to view this tradition as heavily influenced by such fields as the sociology of knowledge, ethnography of communication, and ethnomethodological conversation analysis (vii). While I have chosen to focus on three papers in accordance with my background and interests, this decision in no way implies that those remaining are less satisfactory. They are listed with their authors at the conclusion.

John J. Gumperz’s ‘Conceptualization and ideology in intercultural communication’ explores language and culture relationships, especially of one Patrick Croy, a Northern California Native American of Karuk and Shasta ancestry who was convicted of murder and given the death penalty in 1979 (35–53). The conviction was later overturned, based in part on the misinterpretation of linguistic evidence presented at the trial. For instance, the testimony that Croy allegedly was heard to exclaim ‘let’s shoot the sheriff’ was proven erroneous. He actually said, ‘Let’s shoot some Poofitch’. The latter word is the Karuk word for ‘deer’, and this expression, commonly used by the Native Americans of the area, means ‘to go out in the green areas to relax’ (42). This essay recounts the details of just how easy it is for a minority group to be misunderstood (the author makes mention of the communication problems of South Asians in the United Kingdom and Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany [51]).

Jenny Cook-Gumperz’s ‘Cooperation, collaboration and pleasure in work’ (117–39) examines inter-cultural exchanges by looking at service encounters at a McDonald’s restaurant as reported in Robin Leidner’s Fast food, fast talk: Service work and the routinization of everyday life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). One insightful training practice, in my estimation, encourages service workers to vary their routine verbal exchanges to alleviate any feeling of depersonalization that could occur if a customer overheard the same thing previously uttered. The author rightly reasons, among other interesting thoughts offered, that ‘the politeness of the work atmosphere is thus partly attributed by participants to the semi-scripted exchanges’ (124).

Jochen Rehbin’s ‘Intercultural negotiation’ asserts that intercultural miscommunication cannot be referred to as ‘misunderstandings’ (175–207). The author analyzes a video of an interaction between an American professor and a German representative of a publisher in Switzerland, and one of the conclusions offered is that traditional conversation analysis fails to pick up the communicative function in the surface structure of the text (179). Also, Rehbin successfully demonstrates that the American ‘has from the start assumed a position of unquestioned dominance’ (194).

The remaining papers are: Hubert Knoblauc’s ‘Communication, contexts and culture: A communicative constructivist approach to intercultural communication’; Susanne Günthner and Thomas Luckmann’s ‘Asymmetries of knowledge in inter-cultural communication: The relevance of cultural repertoires of communicative genres’; Peter Auer and Friederike Kern’s ‘Three ways of analysing communication between East and West Germans in intercultural communication’; Marco Jacquemet’s ‘The making of a witness: On the beheading of rabbits’; Volker Hinnenkamp’s ‘Constructing misunderstanding as a cultural event’; Frank Ernst Müller’s ‘Inter- and intra-cultural aspects of dialogue-interpreting’; Franca Orletti’s ‘The conversational construction of social identity in native/non-native interaction’; and Gabriele Pallotti’s ‘External appropriations as a strategy for participating in intercultural multi-party conversations’.

These articles are carefully edited and well-researched contributions to the field. Anyone interested in doing further work in this area would be well-advised to consult this book.