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Some Issues of Intercultural Communication and the Work of Ron and Suzanne Scollon
Cecilia CastilloAyometzi
Georgetown University
I remember, as a graduate student, hearing some of Prof. Scollon’s lectures where he consistently reminded us to question conceptually loaded terms such as “culture,” “context,” or even “identity,” as we encountered them in the readings covered in class, or while selecting our own methodology to understand human interaction and communication.It is not until now that I am involved in intercultural affairs in a city government, as well as teaching a graduate course in intercultural communication, that I feel the urgency of getting some clarity on at least two problems that Ron Scollon posed for us when I was a student in his intercultural communication course.The first of these questions is obvious:what exactly should we mean when we use the term “culture”?The Second question is this:how do we know when we are seeing an intercultural encounter?The second question naturally follows from the first.In other words, we cannot determine what an intercultural encounter is unless we first know what we mean by “culture.”
THE PROBLEMATIZATION OF “CULTURE” IN “INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION” Culture is a term that covers a contested and polysemic category, and one can just imagine how much more complicated the issue gets when incorporating into the mix related terms such as “crosscultural,” or “multicultural.”As Scollon and Scollon (2001: 128) stated, “the word culture brings up more problems than it solves.”Most importantly, they strongly assert that “[c]ultures do not talk to each other; individuals do” (Scollon and Scollon, 2001: 138). Ron and Suzanne Scollon, as evidenced in many of their writings, were constantly re tuning their ideas and continuously incorporating their previous work and expanding them. This was certainly the case withIntercultural Communicationcan see how they went. One from conceiving Intercultural Communication as Interdiscourse Communication (Scollon & Scollon, 1995, 2001) to providing a mediational view of intercultural communication (1996a), and in later writings describing it as Nexus Analysis (Scollon, 2002; Scollon & Scollon, 2004, 2005). The Scollons held thatculturewould be better conceived, as Piller (2007) convincingly argues, as animagined community(Anderson, 1991), and taking this into consideration in all of the reworkings of their theory, they advocated for a focus to be placed on an observable unit of analysis, social action.For them culture is understood as the intersection in which people appropriate the different meditational tools available to them at a particular time and place, thus inevitably also resulting in the constitution of their own social identity. Inone of his lectures Ron Scollon (1996b) discusses the consequences of mismatching social and discourse identities.In later work the Scollons felt the urgency of addressing how “discourse becomes action, and action becomes discourse,” a point elegantly developed in their (2002, 2005) work on nexus analysis, which takes social action instead of the reified concept of culture or discourse as the object of study.
eVox. February 2010. Vol. 4. Washington, DC: Georgetown University. © 2009 By Cecilia CastilloAyometzi.
Some Issues of Intercultural Communication and the Work of Ron and Suzanne Scollon
ISSUES OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION If nexus analysis is the framework with which we can examine culture without reification, then we are left with the question of how one identifies instances ofintercultural communication. Scollon(1996a, 1997) points to a problem of reification whereby when we attribute a national, linguistic or ethnic identity to people involved in an interaction, we tend to create these elements of “culture” as an analytical objects, and then assume that interactants arerepresentatives of those objects.The danger is that we ignore what is actually going on because we assume that these people are acting as tokens of their “cultures,” ignoring their personal histories and social placements.One solution would be to consider all communication as interpersonal as opposed to intercultural, but in doing so we would fall into the traps of cognitivism and false individualism.There are, in fact, patterns of preference that groups of people share, such as the favored manner of appropriating address forms and names in interaction.Nevertheless, assuming national, ethnic or linguistic memberships overshadow the importance of much smaller groupings to which all people have memberships, that is, communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), also removes the analytical focus from what is going on in an interaction, what people appropriate to carry forward an interaction, and what these appropriated tools allow or do not allow them to do. Scollon (1996a: 10) states that “culture is a very loose collection of meditational means” organized into much smaller discourses to which all persons have access.“[T]he language we use must always be borrowed fromsomediscourse which is located in time, history, and society, and our listeners hear not only meaning but also the time, history, and society from with we have borrowed our language.” In later work on nexus analysis, Ron Scollon (2002) makes the point that the temporal framing of an interaction can make a tremendous difference in the framing of a definition of what is going on.While some meditational means often have a certain time frame of availability for appropriation, they, and the persons who use them in an interaction, have a history and provenience.If one expands the time frame, or “circumference” of the interaction, it might appear to be something quite different.This highlights the importance of definition by both participants in the interaction, and by the analyst.Here we arrive at a very important metaanalytical question:who is framing or defining what is going on, and how? Scollon incorporates Burke’s pentad of motives (Burke, 1969[1945]) to show that there are in fact many ways in which one can interpret the origin and trajectory of an action.Scollon even argues that in most interactions, the intercultural quality is not even the most important one for understanding what is going on.So, that insight leads one to wonder about the possible motives of analysts in defining, or even obsessing with the intercultural dimension. If “intercultural” refers to politically central identity categories, as I see in the identity group politics of Washington, DC then perhaps this type of description might not be so much an ontological reading of an interaction, but a political one.This degree of arbitrariness in describing an interaction opens up the possibility of further analysis beyond simply identifying “intercultural miscommunication” in interactions.It also indicates that a lot is at stake in these interpretations. I remember when I was Ron Scollon’s student in his intercultural communication class how I longed for him to lay out for us a simple definition of “culture” and “intercultural,” and how, to his credit, he refused to do so, maintaining his intellectual integrity to the end, helping us to think these concepts through for ourselves, and to identify the problems surrounding their use in the literature.One piece of Ron Scollon’s legacy is seen in the fact that I now find myself in the same position in both my own intercultural communication classroom and in my intercultural work in government.
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Some Issues of Intercultural Communication and the Work of Ron and Suzanne Scollon
References Anderson, Benedict.(1991). ImaginedCommunities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of NationalismVerso., London: Burke, Kenneth.(1969 [1945]).A Grammar of Motives, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice Hall. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger.(1991).Situated Learning:Legitimate Peripheral ParticipationCambridge University Press., Cambridge: Piller, Ingrid. (2007). Linguistics and Intercultural Communication.Language and Linguistic Compass. 1/3:208226. Online version located at: http://www.ciillibrary.org:8000/ciil/Fulltext/Language_and_Linguistic_%20Compass/2007/Vol_1_3_2 th 007/Article_5.pdf[Last accessed on May 12, 2009.] Scollon Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon.(2005). Lighting the stove:Why habitus isn’t enough for Critical Discourse Analysis.In Wodak, Ruth and Paul Chilton (Eds.),A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology, and InterdisciplinarityJohn Benjamins.. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Scollon Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon.(2004).Discourse and the EmergingNexus Analysis: Internet, NewYork: Routledge. Scollon, Ron. (2002). Intercultural Communication as Nexus Analysis,Logos and Language: Journal of General Linguistics and Language Theory, III (2): 117. Scollon Ron and Suzanne Wong Scollon.(2001[1995]).Intercultural Communication: A Discourse ApproachMA: Blackwell Publishing., Malden, Scollon, Ron.(1997). Current Trends in Intercultural Communication Studies.Lecture Presented to the School of English Language CommunicationForeign. Beijing Studies University, revised April 3. Scollon, Ron.(1996a). A Mediational View of Intercultural Communication.Lecture first presented to the School of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 8 October, 1996, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Melbourne University, Melbourne Australia, 9 October 1996 and atthe English Department, Guangdong Foreign Studies University, Guangzhou, PRC, 18 October 1996. Scollon, Ron.(1996b). Discourse identity, Social Identity, and Confusion in Intercultural Communication.Intercultural Communication Studies VI: 1.
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