فرهنگ چیست؟ (نظر متخصصین)

DORIS DIPPOLD: Hi Matthew. Thanks for talking to me today. Just for the participants in the MOOC, can you just introduce yourself briefly please?

MATTHEW MACLACHLAN: Of course, yes. I’m Matthew McLachlan. I’ve been working probably since about 2000 in the intercultural field where I started working for an organisation in the UK; working initially with just assignees, moving from one country to another, and over the past twenty-five years, that’s expanded out. So, I’ve been working with all kinds of different people in international business. Then about four or five months ago, I left the very specific intercultural field and I’ve started working at the University of Surrey.

DORIS: Thank you very much. I would like to ask you three questions about culture and intercultural communication, intercultural competence. The first one is, how do you define culture and what role do you think it plays in interpersonal communication?

MATTHEW: Well, I do think you could probably write a dissertation on the definition of culture. And I don’t think there’s an easy answer. I think it’s become such a broad term that it’s almost lost its meaning, whether it’s behaviours, attitudes, values, ways of communicating. Some people might say it’s just the unspoken rules that help people communicate or get on with each other. I think it’s a way of defining your in group from an out group. And that’s really the way I’d say it. It’s the way of defining your difference from other people around you.

DORIS: And so, you’ve used the word difference now. So, what role does culture play for you in interpersonal communication, face-to-face communication?

MATTHEW: I think there’s a negative role it plays and I think there’s a positive role it plays. I think sometimes culture is used as an excuse which hides the real reason that communication fails. I think it’s much easier for someone to say, ‘that person is German and therefore too direct’ rather than saying, ‘that person’s rude.’ So, I think quite often we look for a cultural explanation, but I think there is no doubt that there are different ways of communicating. There are different ways of communicating, there are different ways of interacting which are a product of your environment. And so, I would say that is the impact of culture, or whatever we call it, on our interpersonal relationships.

I think it gives you a frame of what is normal in that particular context. And obviously, your frame is going to be different from my frame because I have a different experience of the world.

DORIS: Brilliant, thank you. To follow up on something you said, you said culture is used as a simple explanation for people’s behaviours. What other explanations are there?

MATTHEW: Like I say, it could just be that someone’s rude.

Or it may be that I’ve misheard or there’s a power differential. I think we sometimes ignore the role that power and hierarchy has in defining interpersonal relationships. And by saying because someone is American and the other person is Mexican, you cannot explain the differences in communication styles and behaviour styles purely through that nationality. Or even any of the other culture onion layers, if you like. I think there’s more too it than that.

DORIS: Hi Trevor.

TREVOR GRIMSHAW: Hello there. How are you?

DORIS: Hello. Thanks for speaking to me today. First of all, for our audience, could you please introduce yourself?

TREVOR: Sure, yes. I’m Trevor Grimshaw. I’m an applied linguist. I work in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. I’m an associate professor there. And I work in the area of international language education and intercultural communication and learning. I’ve been doing that for longer than I care to think about. And I’ve been a director of studies of a couple of programmes, Masters programmes that involve intercultural communication and learning. I convene an Ed.D unit which is about language, culture and education.

So, that’s more or less my area.

DORIS: Brilliant. Thank you very much. I would like to ask you a few questions now about intercultural communication and intercultural competence. The first question I would like to ask you is, how would you define culture and what role does culture play in interpersonal communication?

TREVOR: Alright, how to define culture. That is one of the big questions of social science, and many people have sought to define it. I think there’s a classic study by Kroeber & Kluckhorn which was done over fifty years ago where I think they came up with something like a hundred-and-fifty-four different definitions throughout the book. It really depends on which school of sociology in particular that you tend to work within, whether you’re a functionalist or a symbolic interactionist or whatever. That tends to give you your definition. The great American sociologist C Wright Mills said that culture is one of the spongiest words in the English language. It’s a very spongy word because it involved everything.

And therefore, it’s quite difficult to work with. However, having said that, I myself tend to prefer what some people are calling a non-essentialist or a sort of constructionist view of culture, by which I mean culture is something which is a social force. It’s a discourse. It is constructed by people all the time in face-to-face interaction or written interaction.

Culture is a very diverse thing. As I say, it’s a social process. And culture has lots of different levels. It’s very multi-faceted. And it’s very linked to the way that we define culture. The way that we understand culture, I think, is very much linked to the context in which we are making culture. Now, I understand that as a definition, that’s really quite woolly, and I understand that that is one of the challenges of dealing with culture. But I much prefer that notion of culture as a process to what is a much more conventional, more traditional, and I think still very popular view of culture.

Which kind of suggests that a person has a culture; a person has an identity; a person has a language. And the default assumption within that view, within that paradigm, is that it’s normal for a person to have a culture, an identify, a language, and these tend to be very closely related. That has been called an essentialist view – I’m quoting here, Holliday, Kullman and Hyde, which is a very favourite reference of mine – where they very helpfully contrast the essentialist with the non-essentialist view of culture. I find this essentialist view of culture very, very problematic, particularly in this day and age when we’re recognising how diverse and how dynamic our societies are.

So, I realise that I’ve not given you a very solid definition of culture, but I wouldn’t really want to do that. Because I think it’s really very important that we understand how complex, how changing, how fluid culture is as a concept and as an experience.