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The intercultural frame
Pergamon
Int. J. Intercultural Rel., Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 221-237, 1994 Copyright 0 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0147-1767/94 $6.00 + .OO
0147-1767(94)EOOO6-I
THE INTERCULTU~L
MICHAEL University
FRAME
AGAR
ofMaryland
ABSTRACT. This article reports the experiences of an anthropologist who suddenly found himself in the role of intercultural communicator. Specifically, the author worked in Mexico City on a new Mexican-American joint venture and mediated between Mexican and American partners, customers, and government officials. Based on that experience, the article evaluates some models of intercultural communication currently in the literature and finds them somewhat distant from practice. Part of the problem, continues the urgument, lies in the unarticulated character~tics of the culture concept. Using examples from MexicanAmerican contact situations~ a working concept of culture is developed that accounts for the data and that might serve as a guide for intercultural work.
About 2 years ago, I conversed with an American businessman in Mexico about how difficult replacement parts were to come by in that country. Over the next several months, he formed an alliance with Mexican and American partners and investors and formed a company, one with a more specific business goal, namely, to provide rebuilt diesel engine parts from the U.S. to commercial transportation fleets in Mexico. During meetings over the following year, the American and Mexican partners saw me in action, doing what linguistic anthropologists naturally do-mediating worlds-sometimes in English, sometimes in rusty
An earlier version of this article was presented to the conference on Intercultural Communication at the LAUD Symposium in Duisburg, Germany, in March 1992. The conference, organized by Dr. Martin Putz, brought together numerous individuals from different disciplines and nationalities whose own multicultural identities led them to speak from the heart as well as from the mind. I owe them all for their comments and support, and wish I could list them by name. Support from the Center for International Business Research at the College of Business and Management at the University of Maryland is gratefully acknowledged. I also acknowledge the comments of Helmut Gruber and the editorial help of Dick Janney, as well as the anecdote provided by John Gumperz that I use in the article. Gumperz’s work (1982) lies behind this way of thinking about intercultural communication. Reprint requests should be sent to Michael Agar, Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, CoIlege Park, MD 20742.
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Spanish, sometimes in both. We mutually decided that I would spend the summer in Mexico City to help start up the company. I dealt with Mexican and American partners, government offices, lawyers, and customers. I worked in the cracks between two different “cultures,” cracks described in recent books on Mexican-American relations, books whose titles foreshadow the examples to come: Distant Neighbors (Riding, 1985) and Limits to Friendship (Pastor & Castaneda, 1988). Kismet had turned me into something I had never been before- an “intercultural communicator.” The rest of this article is dedicated to figuring out what, in light of that experience, the phrase might mean. INTERCULTURAL
COMMUNICATION
After my baptism by fire, I returned to the university in the autumn and approached the library with a naive question in mind: “What is the field of intercultural communication all about?” The question was naive because the literature is huge, diverse, without agreement on any particular unifying focus (see Hinnenkamp, 1990, for a related concern with the fundamentals of the field). There are a few styles of research that cluster together, though. In the first style of intercultural communication (IC), the standard model of quantitative social research provides the guidelines. Theory produces variables that are measured and then statistically analyzed. The variables derive from such sources as the classic works of Edward T. Hall (1959, 1983) or from subsequent frameworks like that of Hofstede (1980). One quick example, reported in Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1988), exemplifies this approach. In several different studies conducted in the IC field, a correlation holds between the variables individualistic/coltivistic and low/high context. The first variable measures whether a culture features the individual actor or the collective social group, the second, whether communication is explicit and direct -low context -or whether it relies more on presupposition and implicature to communicate less directly- high context. According to the studies, which rely by and large on survey data, individualistic cultures tend towards low-context communication, collectivistic cultures, towards high-context communication. The correlation certainly describes some of the differences between U.S. Anglos and Mexicans, as I encountered them. For example, when I moved to Mexico City in June, the process of forming the company had ground to a halt. The Anglo partners kept asking the Mexican partners “why” and reporting frustration that no reasonable answer was forthcoming. After I arrived, I heard plenty of answers, answers that did not “directly” say but were rather “patterned by inference” into a message that the Mexicans had grown distrustful of the main Anglo partner. The
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message was confirmed, about a month later, after a Mexican partner and I had established a friendship, a context within which “direct” communication could more comfortably occur, though, paradoxically enough, this “collective” relation predicts high-context messages. Say we could broadly characterize Anglo-American culture as “individualistic” and Mexican culture as “collectivistic.” The example I just reported already complicates that broad classification, and if I reported more the fit would turn more problematic. Still, the correlation-individualistic with low context and collectivistic with high context -more or less holds, and “more or less,” in this kind of research, is as good as it gets. Besides, variables such as these are useful because they sensitize perception and lead an Intercultural Practitioner (ICP) to look for things that might be important in a particular situation. And the effort to develop a cross-cultural metalanguage is a noble and difficult one that any anthropologist can appreciate. But the “cultures” are overgeneralized and then kept distinct in the analysis. The variables are isolated from the whirlwind of communication in which they come to life and often turn into their opposite. Variables are “measured” with surveys that have little to do with interaction. Intellectually, interesting as this approach to IC research might be, it is of little use to the practitioner. It just does not have much to do with IC when it actually happens, on the ground. Whatever ICP is, it is not about quantitatively measured characteristics of distinct cultures. A second style of IC research runs like this: Two cultures are viewed as distinct codes, and IC maps them onto each other in terms of some key differences between them. Often the codes label broad aspects of style- friendly, direct, or polite, for example-or speech acts writ large-assertive, demanding, deceitful, and the like. Notice that any of these could, in principle, be theoretically derived and quantitatively measured in the style of the first approach to IC. However, that is not what this second style is about. Instead, the claim is that, when two specific cultures, X and Y, are brought into contact, a difference comes up, all the time, across persons and situations, and the differences can be generalized in terms of communicative style or speech acts preference. One example of this research, featured in a widely used reader in intercultural communication by Samovar and Porter (1982), portrays some differences between “Americans” and “Middle Easterners.” Yousef (1982), the author, pointed out that Americans value friendliness, extend it to one and all, are informal most of the time, and desire to be popular and liked. Middle Easterners, on the other hand, often regard such behavior as flippant and undignified. They use friendly behavior with very few people, always with a consciousness of hierarchy. Such general mappings from one culture to another are obviously important, and they begin to approach IC practice in ways that the first
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style of IC research does not. Instead of variables we have codes; instead of correlations we have differences that pattern when the two codes come into contact. But it is not clear how to bridge the two cultures, except to say that one has to act like the other. Besides, the cultures are still kept distinct no blends appear. And “culture” is still overgeneralized. Contact is exclusively through the ICP, which could be a computer as well as a human. And, of course, the general code mappings will not always work. Sometimes they will not work a lot. A third alternative that gets a little closer to what I dealt with in Mexico would run like this: First, one deals with persons rather than cultures. The person from Culture X already has a mapping of Cultures X and Y in his or her head, as does everyone else. Further, the two people from Culture X and Culture Y are in contact all the time, with and without the friendly ICP. Finally, the persons are in some situation, one in which problems emerge in ways that were not expected from the initial conditions. This third model is closer to what I dealt with in Mexico, all the time. In fact, the major problem I faced did not have to do with correlating variables or mapping codes of two cultures that had never been in contact before, what I now think of as the “naive IC problem.” The major problem was that everyone involved already had a model of the “different” culture they were dealing with, and those models were at times the greatest problem I faced. When you start a business venture with people of “different” cultures who “know” that the other does things in a different and therefore less trustworthy way, the ICP’s job can turn from translation into therapy. But even with an IC model that sets up situated interaction of the sort that an ICP routinely deals with, problems still remain. And the main problem, characteristic of all three approaches outlined here, has to do with that slippery term culture. When an ICP untangles the differences in the name of culture, just what is it that is being untangled? CULTURE A few years ago, at the International Pragmatics Association meetings in Antwerp, I stood in the hall and talked with my old teacher, John Gumperz. A colleague came up and said, “You know, this is really an interesting meeting. But how do you tell who the anthropologists are?” Gumperz smiled and answered, “It’s easy. They’re the ones who never use the word culture”. Culture, as in intercultural communication, is the dirty little secret of the field. The term does massive work in organizing the IC literature and ICP activity, and yet no one knows quite what it means. Anthropol-
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ogists have tangled with it for decades. They know how slippery and massive it is, which, of course, is why John Gumperz made his joke about how they avoid it if at all possible. Some years ago, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1966), two founding fathers of American anthropology, offered a definition. They ranged across the different uses of the term culture and came up with this summary: Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action. The definition is a philosophical nightmare. Culture is on the surface and hidden, a result of observation and what produced it, learned and taught with symbols (avoiding practice), both constructs and things, traditional (avoiding modern and postmodern), and produced by and causing human action. Now, in some ways this is an unfair example. Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s definition is an old one. More recent discussions deal with opentextured multiple cultures (Roseberry, 1989), the dialectic between framework and action distributed across complex society (Hannerz, 1992), and the cultural blend of structure and agency (Rosaldo, 1989). But I think it is fair to say that the newer definitions are as problematic, though in more interesting ways, as the old ones. And-the critical point here-the older definition still serves as a prototype for the way the term is used in many academic and popular contexts. The confusion over the term culture derives in part from the traditional use of the concept. In the old days, anthropologists invented an idea of what they studied. The idea defined a bounded research object, one that was isolated in space, one that by and large provided a life from birth to death, the so-called “cradle to grave” society. People might venture out to a market town for a few things they did not provide for themselves, and marriage partners might arrive from other, nearby communities, but by and large the “natives” lived in isolation from the rest of the world. The “natives” were also bounded in time. They were traditional. They learned their culture from the elders, then passed it on to the children who, in turn, passed it on to their children. Culture was replicated from generation to generation without change. This is a bit of a parody, but not by much. Anthropologists entered into this closed world bounded in space and time, the traditional community, and set out to exhaustively explore it, from the supernatural world
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all the way down to the recipes for the evening meal. What they came up with, the results of their exploration, they called culture. In retrospect, anthropology realizes that this story about what it studied was a fiction even then. But now, in the modern, or postmodern, era, the idea is hopelessly dated. Migration and war and tourism, information and transpo~ation, global identities embedded in tr~snational institutions dealing with business, academics, politics-the former traditional community has lost whatever edges it had, and, therefore, the term culture that we used to label it has lost its referent as well. The power of the old notion of culture still shows up, though, in the way it is used in the present. In the late sixties, when I first worked with heroin addicts, I tried to think of them as sort of an urban tribe, so that I could maintain the old model. When I went on sabbatical to Austria, colleagues suggested I study gypsies or street people, an effort to find modern groups that somehow corresponded to traditional ones. Herbert Gans (1962) wrote a book whose title captures the strategy perfectlyThe Urban Villagers. The search for the old concept in modern society is a mistake, doomed to failure. My favorite personal story that brings the point home occurred in Houston, Texas, when I Iived there in the seventies. I was in a club listening to progressive country music. During the break, I turned to the man standing next to me and started up a conversation, I could not figure out his ancestry, and, after awhile, I asked him where he was from. He told me he was an Australian Aborigine. I was speechless. Australian Aborigines had been “the natives” in countless articles and books I had read as an anthropology graduate student. He turned to me and asked what I did. As it turned out, he was delighted that I was an anthropologist, because, in contrast to most of the people he had met, I at least knew who he was. His uncle had migrated, first to the U.K. and then to the U.S., and founded a business in Houston, When he died, he left the business to my new acquaintance, and so he had relocated to take it over. The old concept of culture does not work anymore. Its referent has turned problematic. If you look at how it was used, if you understand its historical roots, you can see why. Yet IC, and many other fields, often use the term culture in the old-fashioned way to mean “a closed, coherent system of meanings in which an individual always and only participates.” If this is what culture means, it applies to no one who would be involved in IC and probably to no one at all.
MEXICO If culture does not mean what it used to, what could it mean now? In particular, what could it mean that would make sense to an ICP? From
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his or her viewpoint, the culture in intercultural communication solves a problem. What is the problem? The problem is that a group of people engaged in a common task cannot perform or complete it. Then follows the critical ICP assumption: The discourse that embodies the task links to different frames of interpretation. The differences can range from a single lexical item all the way up to basic premises about how the world works. From the ICP assumption follows the ICP solution: Find the locations in discourse where the differences occur and make the frames that explain the differences explicit. Culture names the ICP solution. The representation where the ICP shows the differences and why they occur, where he/or she makes the frames explicit, is culture. Culture is something the ICP creates, a story he or she tells, one that highlights and explains the differences- to both sides-that created the problem in the first place. This quick sketch, to be elaborated more in the conclusion, can be brought to life with some examples from my work in Mexico City. The examples serve to show how this view of the ICP’s job, and this notion of culture work out in practice. Consider a lexical example first. The product the company offered was rebuilt diesel engine parts. Rebuilt means you take the old casing, the core, check it for cracks and machine it, and then clean it up and add brand new working parts. The rebuilt part is as good as new, with the same guarantee but less expensive than a new part would be. Rebuilt parts constitute 80% of the U.S. market, but they are virtually unknown in Mexico, because that country lacks the technology. The term rebuilt turned into a problem. We first translated it as reconstruido, but when people heard that, they assimilated it to usado (used), and expected lower quality and lower prices. We could not really call the parts nuevo, because they were not new, either. We still have not solved the problem. We were toying with the term marca libre, which means a new part in the style of some known brand, but not really the same. The point is that, even at the level of the basic lexical item to label the product, we stumbled across a problem. Or consider the level of speech acts. Something people do all over the world is “lie,” but the way they lie and what counts as a lie vary considerably. John Condon (1985) wrote a book called Good Neighbors: Communicating With the Mexicans. One of the problems he took on was the difference in what counts as truth or lie in the two countries. He quotes a Mexican businessman: You Americans, when you think of a banana, you think of only one kind of fruit. But when you come to Mexico and visit a market, you see there are so many kinds. Some are big and solid and used for cooking, like potatoes. You never heard of such a thing. Others are tiny as your thumb and sweeter than
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candy. You never imagined such a thing. And I’ll tell you, my friend, here in Mexico we have as many kinds of truth as there are kinds of bananas. You don’t know what you’ve been missing. (p. 43)
Condon then writes, with a pun in the introductory if he was aware of:
phrase that I wonder
Though his analogy is strained, the point is well taken: what we expect and how we define “the truth” or “a lie” is a cultural matter. When Americans and Mexicans work together, it can become a source of intercultural confusion and conflict. (p. 43)
Can it ever. The issue of whether someone was telling the truth was a recurrent problem. There are many examples, but I offer only one here. A phrase you hear all the time in Mexico is, “pasar un buen momento” (“have a pleasant moment”). When my Mexican colleagues dealt with each other face to face, they attended to the “pleasantness” of the moment more than the Anglo-Americans did. If the choice comes down to some literal, unpleasant “truth” and a maintaining of the pleasant moment, they tend towards the “maintain” choice. Americans have a myth involving the first U.S. President, George Washington. He supposedly chopped down a cherry tree and then decided he had better confess to his parents. This model of honesty is, from the “pasar un buen momento” point of view, pathological. George Washington was an inconsiderate fool. You can imagine how this one example of truth and lies created problems, over and over again. But lexical items and speech acts are not the only source of problems. So is conversational style. One evening, after I had had enough time to get established in Mexico City, I sat around a table in a restaurant with several Mexican friends and colleagues. They were telling a story about an American who had come down to visit Mexican customers. He had asked for four appointments in 2 days, walked in, handed over a price list, and said, “Just have your purchasing agent call our guy when you’ve decided what you want .” By the end of the story, we were all laughing, because the American’s direct, aggressive style was way out of line in Mexico. As the Mexican telling the story finished up, he held his hands out to his side, as if he were holding a cape, waved it back, and said “ole.” Everyone laughed all the more. I had read things about the bullfight, about oppositions between life and death and male and female, oppositions out of a structuralist’s dream. But it had never occurred to me that the bullfight could be a metaphor for conversational style. A few days later, I was driving with a lawyer to a meeting with a government official. I asked him how it would go, and he said, “We’ll
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just cap&ear a little.” What was that? He explained that “capotear” had to do with “cape,” the cape the toreadors and matador use to work the bull. The bullfight metaphor, it turned out, helped understand how my Mexican colleagues handled direct, aggressive behavior. You just let them charge, work them with the cape, and see how they act. And, of course, I thought about how the bullfight usually ends. Another problem that turned up in Mexico involved something as simple as setting prices for things. Prices that made sense in the U.S. turned out at times to be too high at times too low, for Mexico. To handle this problem, frames that tied into political economy came into play. The traditionally high Mexican tariffs moved around in different ways as the liberalization policies of President Salinas de Gortari came into effect. Some products were manufactured in Mexico and were therefore cheaper. Discount structures were different. Overhead and profit were both lower in Mexico. Competition in the Mexican market continued to heat up even as the business was established. These and other shifting political economic currents meant that a price set in the U.S. might work in Mexico, but then again, it might not. You could not tell without understanding and monitoring the Mexican political economy. Other differences centered on powerful historical frames. Within Mexico, for example, there is a longstanding opposition between Spaniard and Mestizo, an opposition that lies at the foundation of the Mexican war for independence in the early 19th century. Even further back, Mexicans talk about the so-called Malinche complex. Malinche was the Indian woman who allied with Cortes and helped him conquer the country in the 16th century. Octavia Paz (1962), for example, features it in his book, The Labyrinth of Solitude. The opposition is alive and well today; once you learn it, you hear it in conversations and see it in popular media all the time. So, with one business partner of Spanish descent and another who is Mestizo, the split came alive in my work in Mexico City. Just to give one quick example, my Mestizo partner would sometimes say things like, “You’ve got to watch out for these Spaniards. They have this mentality of conquer, conquer, conquer.” Then there is the difference between Mexicanos and Gringos, the term for North American Anglos. Gringo is not necessarily negative. I would hear such phrases as “una teoria gringa” or “musica gringa” as simple descriptions of a theory or music from the U.S., and sometimes the phrase was used in good-natured teasing, as in references to the U.S. as “Gringolandia.” And it is no accident that the two best selling books that I mentioned earlier, books about U.S.-Mexico relations, popular on both sides of the border, have English titles like Distant Neighbors and Limits to Friendship.
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Gringos, so goes the historical stereotype, are powerful people with an army at their back whose amiable ways cover an agenda of exploitative self-interest. They are to be watched carefully, guarded against, and handled with the classic strategy of the powerless, manipulation. This negative stereotype is an oversimplification, but if it is not real, people certainly acted at times as if it were. A similar story could be told in the other direction, from Anglo to Mexican. This deep historical canyon of distrust surfaced over and over again and made, as you can imagine, a joint business venture difficult at best. Finally, other differences sometimes tied into frames that contained basic premises about how the world works. Time is a classic and wellknown exampfe. A couple of times Mexicans told me a joke: “In Mexico the week has 7 days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and man ana.” Time is not the scarce commodity that it is in the U.S.; its passing is not felt with such a sense of urgency and loss. Then there is the attitude towards work. For the U.S. partners, work is what you are, the foundation of your identity. For the Mexican partners, work is something you do that is important, but it is balanced against other aspects of your life that have equal, if not greater, value. Besides, the infrastructure of daily life in Mexico City is not reliable in that things routinely go wrong and problems come up, and when they do, you obviously have to stop whatever else you are doing and fix them. Central premises about time and work are obviously more complicated than this. But even this sketch shows how the plan-oriented, timeconscious Gringo can be driven crazy by the flow of business life in Mexico and, of course, vice versa if you recall the bullfight metaphor discussed earlier. After 3 months of intensive work in Mexico City, that is the best I can do. As an experienced ethnographer, I know that I am only skating across the surface of substantial differences, differences whose distribution I still do not fully understand, and the frames I have built so far are still piecemeal But even these few examples show how problems appeared at several different levels of discourse, in different combinations at different times, and they show how the frames to understand the problems range all over the map. The examples also show how one ICP version of c~~~~re might work. In order to do business together, the Mexican and American partners had to name the product and set prices, discuss and plan and deal with each other, and develop a style of work that made sense to all concerned. In all these areas, and others as well, differences surfaced that made task accomplishment difficult. Worse yet, both the Mexicans and Americans attributed the problems to a deficiency in the other, deficiencies embedded in their model of the “other” culture that they believed to be true.
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What I did, along the lines of the ICP job sketched at the beginning of this section, was to locate where in discourse the differences surfaced, when they did occur, and then use those locations as places to start building frames to explain to participants why the differences were there. The locations were as specific as lexical items and as diffuse as extensive passages of discourse, and the frames were as narrow as the dictionary and as broad as the sweep of history. The frames did let me make the differences explicit, thus satisfying the primary goal of the ICP job. But, as I mentioned earlier, making them explicit did not always make a difference, because everyone already had their own model of the other. At this juncture, the ICP either washes his or her hands of the matter or else he or she takes on a more active, persuasive role, a possibility that is developed more in the conclusion. The point for now is that ICP is a complicated business. The differences that will appear, and the frames that will resolve them, are not as predictable as recipes out of a cookbook; they grow out of the emergent interactional ground of intercultural encounters. And the frames that are built, the new knowledge that shows each side in the encounter what is going on, now serve as the referent of the term culture but the usage is a peculiar one that needs some explanation. LANGUACULTURE
Underlying this sketch of ICP is a particular view of language and culture, one developed in more detail in a forthcoming book (Agar, 1994). Understanding a new culture, the argument goes, is about making sense out of human differences in terms of human similarities. The similarities are the ground against which the figure of differences are understood. And the differences, most of them anyway, surface in the language out in the spaces between people. When you encounter a new language, some things are easy to learn. You just patch on some new lexical items and grammatical forms and continue listening and talking. A “fork” is a “tenedor” in Spanish and that is about it. Other things are more difficult, but with a little effort the differences from one language to another can be bridged. “You” is both “tu” and “usted,” and “be” is both “se? and “es&r,” and it will take awhile to figure out when to use which. But some things that come up strike you with their difficulty, their complexity, their inability to fit into the resources you use to make sense out of the world. These things-from lexical items through speech act up to extensive stretches of discourse-are called rich points (Agar, 1991). Rich points are rich because of the intricate web of associations and connotations that they carry with them, webs that have no corresponding echoes in your own language. Rich points-such as the exam-
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ples from Mexico presented earlier-are the linguistic tip of the cultural iceberg, the locations in discourse where major cultural differences are signalled. To understand rich points, new frames of interpretation have to be built. I use “frames” in a way that is intentionally ambiguous as between artificial intelligence and Goffman (1974). Frames are bundles of new knowledge-they might be a formalism, a bit of prose, or even a poem that bridge the difference between the rich points in the new language and the original frames for interpretation in the language you brought with you. In the Mexican examples, frames ran from dictionary definitions through speech acts and conversational style up to history, political economy, and basic ideas about how things are. To build the new frames, you have to realize that your old frames, ones that you may not have known you had, are only one of a number of possibilities, an arbitrary rather than a “natural” way of seeing, thinking, and acting. You have to become aware of and distance yourself from an identity that shapes who it is that you always thought you were (see Ehlich, 1992, for a similar discussion). But once that is accomplished, understanding is possible; rich points can be handled. Formerly taken-for-granted frames come to consciousness and enable you to start building new ones to get you from where you started to where you want to be, capable of handling the rich points that created the problem in the first place. Given this constellation of rich points in discourse and the frames needed to understand them, the separation between language and culture makes no sense. Instead, borrowing and modifying Friedrich’s (1989) term, it makes more sense to think of languaculture. What an ICP does, then, as the Mexico examples showed, is to take rich points and frames and present them as a single entity, as a bit of languacukure, rather than just a bit of language or just a bit of culture. But languaculture is more than just a list of rich points and frames. Threads run through the frames, themes that tie them together and lead you to develop frames of a higher order, frames that touch on the key, fundamental differences between two different languacultures and constrain their use. The list of rich points is only the starting point in the quest for coherence, the quest for the ties that turn separate examples into a deep understanding of another way of talking, acting, and thinking. Unfortunately, I did not show coherence in the Mexican examples as well as I would have liked to, because I have not worked long enough to understand and articulate it. Coherence takes time and lots of experience. It is the kind of thing bilingual/bicultural types and translators and interpreters achieve. A final comment returns us to the partiality of culture, or languaculture, as I can say now. Once you have worked long enough with some
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people around a set of tasks, you wonder how widely your understanding applies. You wonder about the scope of what you have learned. Scope is a massive, neglected problem. Where are the edges of the two languacultures whose rich points you have come to understand? We naively generalize, usually to a language or a national/state identity. But who is to say if what we have learned is Spanish or Mexican? What if what we have learned is tied to other social identities, identities that have to do with class or gender or occupation or ethnicity or leisure time pursuit or something else? And who knows if the social identities represent variation within the languaculture or variation across it? And who knows if maybe the languaculture generalizes to entire regions, like Latin countries in the case of Mexico? I cannot solve the problem here, but I want to close this section by underlining it. The disappearance of the traditional community on which culture was based predicts the problem at any rate. Yet we all routinely talk in terms of Mexicans and Americans and Japanese and Germans. Some of what an ICP learns surely generalizes in such a grand manner, but certainly not all of it, and maybe not even most of it. Scope is the untamed monster that all of us in the languaculture trade ignore at our peril. LANGUACULTURE
AND ICP
This sketch of languaculture theory forms a more general picture of what went on when the examples from Mexico were presented. Rich points are where the action is, and frame building is the way to handle them. But the general formulation and the specific examples are still some distance away from the model of ICP at the beginning of this article. ICP is a little bit like ethnography, the intensive investigation of a different culture, but then again it is not. Among other differences, ICP relies more on participant observation and less on interviews, and it is more focused on specific tasks and the differences that emerge within them. Most difficult of all, it is dual. A traditional ethnography sends you off to another place, where you go through culture shock, work deeper and deeper into the new culture, return home and go through reverse culture shock, and then write up your results. With ICP, you never leave home as you plunge deeper into the new culture. You cannot, because the gaps between home and the new culture define the space where you work. The point of ethnography is to develop an identity within a new culture; the point of ICP is to develop one between home and the new culture. It is different and, in my experience, more difficult. ICP is a little like becoming bilingual/bicultural, too-1 should say
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bilanguacultural-but with a similar twist. The usual case for a bilingual/bicultural person is that he or she uses the two languages in separate settings, or uses them in a setting where others are also bilingual/bicultural so that everyone can comfortably switch. In ICP, there are times when co-present people are competent in one languaculture or the other, but not both, so that the ICP has to switch languacultural worlds in the same setting where no one else can. This suggests that ICP is a little like translation or interpreter work, and it is if we lay the translation ability over a solid ethnographic base. But even here there are differences. Compared to the usual stereotype of translation work, ICP is more active-The ICP is not just transforming a text but rather participating in an interaction where it is co-constructed. And it is more argumentative. Remember that participants already have a model of the other culture in their heads. I mentioned earlier that one of my main problems was not that participants had no understanding of the other culture; instead, the problem was that they did think they understood it. In my ICP work, I had to figure out a representation of one languaculture in terms of another, but then it was not enough to just present it. I had to argue it, sometimes even provoke a crisis in terms of it, to convince people that my take on the differences was right and the one they thought was the case was wrong. The Mexicans sometimes called me “abogado del diablo, ” “devil’s advocate,” and the Americans sometimes claimed I had been “taken in.” ICP, in my experience in Mexico City, is an active, even aggressive, role, not a passive one. It is tempting to tie all these fields together, to say that ethnography is a means to the end of bilanguaculturalism, which in turn is a prerequisite to translation/interpretation abilities, which in turn enables ICP. In practice, of course, ICP mixes them up in different ways as the work progresses and also draws on other skills. What the logical formulation does make clear, though, is that ICP is not a general skill that one can offer anyone at any time, whatever the two languacultures are that come into contact in the context of a particular task. ICP relies on deep experience and knowledge of the languacultures in question. One can claim ICP expertise, but on/y with reference to particular pairings of languacultures in which one is communicatively competent. ICP is less a formal skill and more a substantive one. CONCLUSION An ICP is turning into a rather mythic figure at this point, a myth that no one I know or have read about ever realized. He or she functions well in two languacultures, one of which is “home” and the other “foreign.” He or she knows the likely rich points that characterize the bound-
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aries when travelling between the two and always stands ready to recognize and figure out new ones. Not only can he or she traverse them, but he or she can also articulate the complicated frames that explain what they are and why they are there. Furthermore, he or she can do so in fastmoving situations as they emerge, while dealing with co-present members of both languacultures in question, members who have their own ideas about each other, ideas that he or she must selectively argue against as part of ICP work. That strikes me as a demanding job description. Further, the ICP must continually question the assumption that the problem is located in the frames that underlie the discourse. Problems in task performance and accomplishment cannot always be located in different frames. Sometimes they derive from conflict within the same ones. At one point in Mexico, an American supplier wanted half payment on an order as deposit, with the other half paid on delivery. The Mexican customer, on the other hand, wanted half payment on delivery with 30 days to pay the balance. They decided that they obviously had a “cultural” problem and that I should fix it. This was not a case of “cultural” differences; it was a case of conflict within the same frame. Two businessmen wanted to get the other guy’s money and hold their own as long as they could. Everyone knew exactly what was going on in the same way. Culture as we have already seen, is a slippery, dangerous term. Nothing illustrates this better than the conflict some years ago between Oscar Lewis and Charles Valentine over the “culture of poverty” (Valentine 1968). Lewis argued that poor people in capitalist societies developed a “culture” and that their behavior could be explained by it. Nonsense, said Valentine, poor people adapted to blocked opportunities and scarce resources. Cultural differences did not have anything to do with it. Not all problems are languacultural. Culture is supposed to be a solution, not a label that hides the real problems. Problems in task performance might be due to differences in personality or power or circumstances or goals, not to differences in culture. In Mexico, I dealt with situations where participants were more or less of equal status, though even here, as the previous example shows, one carefully has to sort out the differences between shared business frames and different languacultural frames. Then there are contemporary situations that make one wonder if ICP can do any good at all. When I read Konstantinov (1992) on attempts at intercultural communication among Islamic and Christian Bulgarians or the journalist Friedman’s (1989) accounts of efforts to foster IsraeliPalestinian communication, deep-seated historical distrust and power differences make me feel despair at what an ICP might do to help, though, even in such cases, the effort could not hurt.
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Finally, although culture is no longer a closed, coherent system of meanings in which an individual always and only participates, the term is still problematic for the ICP. Culture is created knowledge that shows why problems occurred when a group of “different” people tried to do something together, but this is a peculiar notion of what culture is all about. Culture is something that the ICP creates, a story he or she tells that highlights and explains the differences that cause breakdowns. Culture is not something people have; it is something that fills the spaces between them. And culture is not an exhaustive description of anything; it focuses on differences, rich points, differences that can vary from task to task and group to group. Culture, in this formulation, departs rather dramatically from the old notion of a closed research space. In fact, it is not clear what the cultural solution from a moment of ICP practice generalizes to, the problem of scope discussed earlier. Speakers of two languages? Residents of two nation/states? Members of particular ethnic groups? Or classes? Or genders? Or some other social identity? So what is it, finally, that this mythic figure does? An ICP identifies discourse rich points that prevent task performance. He or she then figures out the frames that explain the rich point differences and makes them explicit in a persuasive representation. But the emergent social situation and the multiple social identities of actors make it difficult to predict a priori what differences will matter, how to represent them, or how to move the group back on track. Several historically separate disciplines are relevant to ICP. But ICP gives each of them a peculiar twist and promises a future synthesis that will draw on them, add something new, and lead to a view of languaculture that will map in interesting ways onto the many differences that make up our contemporary, multicultural world. I hope this exploration of ICP, together with all its pitfalls and promises, conducted in terms of my brief experience with U.S.-Mexico intercultural communication, is useful to others who struggle with an elusive and difficult ability that is essential to our common global future. REFERENCES AGAR, M. (1991). The biculture in bilingual. Language in Society, 20, 167-181. AGAR, M. (1994). Language shock: The culture in everyday conversations. New York: Morrow. CONDON, J. C. (1985). Good neighbors: Communicating with the Mexicans. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. EHLICH, K. (1992, March). Kommunikationsbrueche: Vom Nachteil und NutZen des Sprachkontakts [Communication breakdowns: the disadvantage and use of language contact]. Presented to the LAUD Symposium on Intercultural Communication, Duisburg, Germany.
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FRIEDMAN, T. L. (1989). From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Anchor Books. FRIEDRICH, P. (1989). Language, ideology, and political economy. American Anthropologist, 91, 295-312. GANS, H. J. (1962). The urban villagers. New York: Free Press. GOFFMAN, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper & Row. GUDYKUNST, W. B., & TING-TOOMEY, S. (1988). Culture and interpersonal communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. GUMPERZ, J. J. (1982). Discoursestrategies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. HALL, E. T. (1959). The silent language. New York: Doubleday. HALL, E. T. (1983). The dance of life. New York: Doubleday. HANNERZ, U. (1992). Cultural complexity: Studies in the sociaI organization of meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. HINNENKAMP, V. (1990). Wieviel und was ist “Kulturell” in der interkulturellen Kommunikation? In B. Spillner (Ed.), Znterkulturelle Kommunikation (pp. 46-52). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. HOFSTEDE, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. KONSTANTINOV, Y. (1992, March). Nation-state and ‘minority’ types of discourse. Paper presented to the LAUD Symposium on Intercultural Communication, Duisburg, Germany. KROEBER, A. L., & KLUCKHOHN, C. (1966). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. New York: Vintage. PASTOR, R. A., & CASTANEDA, J. G. (1988). Limits to friendship: The United States and Mexico. New York: Vintage. PAZ, 0. (1962). The labyrinth of solitude: Life and thought in Mexico. New York: Grove Press. RIDING, A. (1985). Distant neighbors: A portrait of the Mexicans. New York: Vintage. ROSALDO, R. (1989). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon. ROSEBERRY, W. (1989). Anthropologies and histories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. SAMOVAR, L. A., & PORTER, R. E. (1982). Intercultural communication: A reader. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. VALENTINE, C. A. (1968). Culture and poverty: Critique and counterproposals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. YOUSEF, F. S. (1982). North Americans in the Middle East. In L. A. Samovar & R. E. Porter (Eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader (pp. 92-134). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Int. J. Intercultural Rel., Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 221-237, 1994 Copyright 0 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0147-1767/94 $6.00 + .OO
0147-1767(94)EOOO6-I
THE INTERCULTU~L
MICHAEL University
FRAME
AGAR
ofMaryland
ABSTRACT. This article reports the experiences of an anthropologist who suddenly found himself in the role of intercultural communicator. Specifically, the author worked in Mexico City on a new Mexican-American joint venture and mediated between Mexican and American partners, customers, and government officials. Based on that experience, the article evaluates some models of intercultural communication currently in the literature and finds them somewhat distant from practice. Part of the problem, continues the urgument, lies in the unarticulated character~tics of the culture concept. Using examples from MexicanAmerican contact situations~ a working concept of culture is developed that accounts for the data and that might serve as a guide for intercultural work.
About 2 years ago, I conversed with an American businessman in Mexico about how difficult replacement parts were to come by in that country. Over the next several months, he formed an alliance with Mexican and American partners and investors and formed a company, one with a more specific business goal, namely, to provide rebuilt diesel engine parts from the U.S. to commercial transportation fleets in Mexico. During meetings over the following year, the American and Mexican partners saw me in action, doing what linguistic anthropologists naturally do-mediating worlds-sometimes in English, sometimes in rusty
An earlier version of this article was presented to the conference on Intercultural Communication at the LAUD Symposium in Duisburg, Germany, in March 1992. The conference, organized by Dr. Martin Putz, brought together numerous individuals from different disciplines and nationalities whose own multicultural identities led them to speak from the heart as well as from the mind. I owe them all for their comments and support, and wish I could list them by name. Support from the Center for International Business Research at the College of Business and Management at the University of Maryland is gratefully acknowledged. I also acknowledge the comments of Helmut Gruber and the editorial help of Dick Janney, as well as the anecdote provided by John Gumperz that I use in the article. Gumperz’s work (1982) lies behind this way of thinking about intercultural communication. Reprint requests should be sent to Michael Agar, Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, CoIlege Park, MD 20742.
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Spanish, sometimes in both. We mutually decided that I would spend the summer in Mexico City to help start up the company. I dealt with Mexican and American partners, government offices, lawyers, and customers. I worked in the cracks between two different “cultures,” cracks described in recent books on Mexican-American relations, books whose titles foreshadow the examples to come: Distant Neighbors (Riding, 1985) and Limits to Friendship (Pastor & Castaneda, 1988). Kismet had turned me into something I had never been before- an “intercultural communicator.” The rest of this article is dedicated to figuring out what, in light of that experience, the phrase might mean. INTERCULTURAL
COMMUNICATION
After my baptism by fire, I returned to the university in the autumn and approached the library with a naive question in mind: “What is the field of intercultural communication all about?” The question was naive because the literature is huge, diverse, without agreement on any particular unifying focus (see Hinnenkamp, 1990, for a related concern with the fundamentals of the field). There are a few styles of research that cluster together, though. In the first style of intercultural communication (IC), the standard model of quantitative social research provides the guidelines. Theory produces variables that are measured and then statistically analyzed. The variables derive from such sources as the classic works of Edward T. Hall (1959, 1983) or from subsequent frameworks like that of Hofstede (1980). One quick example, reported in Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1988), exemplifies this approach. In several different studies conducted in the IC field, a correlation holds between the variables individualistic/coltivistic and low/high context. The first variable measures whether a culture features the individual actor or the collective social group, the second, whether communication is explicit and direct -low context -or whether it relies more on presupposition and implicature to communicate less directly- high context. According to the studies, which rely by and large on survey data, individualistic cultures tend towards low-context communication, collectivistic cultures, towards high-context communication. The correlation certainly describes some of the differences between U.S. Anglos and Mexicans, as I encountered them. For example, when I moved to Mexico City in June, the process of forming the company had ground to a halt. The Anglo partners kept asking the Mexican partners “why” and reporting frustration that no reasonable answer was forthcoming. After I arrived, I heard plenty of answers, answers that did not “directly” say but were rather “patterned by inference” into a message that the Mexicans had grown distrustful of the main Anglo partner. The
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message was confirmed, about a month later, after a Mexican partner and I had established a friendship, a context within which “direct” communication could more comfortably occur, though, paradoxically enough, this “collective” relation predicts high-context messages. Say we could broadly characterize Anglo-American culture as “individualistic” and Mexican culture as “collectivistic.” The example I just reported already complicates that broad classification, and if I reported more the fit would turn more problematic. Still, the correlation-individualistic with low context and collectivistic with high context -more or less holds, and “more or less,” in this kind of research, is as good as it gets. Besides, variables such as these are useful because they sensitize perception and lead an Intercultural Practitioner (ICP) to look for things that might be important in a particular situation. And the effort to develop a cross-cultural metalanguage is a noble and difficult one that any anthropologist can appreciate. But the “cultures” are overgeneralized and then kept distinct in the analysis. The variables are isolated from the whirlwind of communication in which they come to life and often turn into their opposite. Variables are “measured” with surveys that have little to do with interaction. Intellectually, interesting as this approach to IC research might be, it is of little use to the practitioner. It just does not have much to do with IC when it actually happens, on the ground. Whatever ICP is, it is not about quantitatively measured characteristics of distinct cultures. A second style of IC research runs like this: Two cultures are viewed as distinct codes, and IC maps them onto each other in terms of some key differences between them. Often the codes label broad aspects of style- friendly, direct, or polite, for example-or speech acts writ large-assertive, demanding, deceitful, and the like. Notice that any of these could, in principle, be theoretically derived and quantitatively measured in the style of the first approach to IC. However, that is not what this second style is about. Instead, the claim is that, when two specific cultures, X and Y, are brought into contact, a difference comes up, all the time, across persons and situations, and the differences can be generalized in terms of communicative style or speech acts preference. One example of this research, featured in a widely used reader in intercultural communication by Samovar and Porter (1982), portrays some differences between “Americans” and “Middle Easterners.” Yousef (1982), the author, pointed out that Americans value friendliness, extend it to one and all, are informal most of the time, and desire to be popular and liked. Middle Easterners, on the other hand, often regard such behavior as flippant and undignified. They use friendly behavior with very few people, always with a consciousness of hierarchy. Such general mappings from one culture to another are obviously important, and they begin to approach IC practice in ways that the first
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style of IC research does not. Instead of variables we have codes; instead of correlations we have differences that pattern when the two codes come into contact. But it is not clear how to bridge the two cultures, except to say that one has to act like the other. Besides, the cultures are still kept distinct no blends appear. And “culture” is still overgeneralized. Contact is exclusively through the ICP, which could be a computer as well as a human. And, of course, the general code mappings will not always work. Sometimes they will not work a lot. A third alternative that gets a little closer to what I dealt with in Mexico would run like this: First, one deals with persons rather than cultures. The person from Culture X already has a mapping of Cultures X and Y in his or her head, as does everyone else. Further, the two people from Culture X and Culture Y are in contact all the time, with and without the friendly ICP. Finally, the persons are in some situation, one in which problems emerge in ways that were not expected from the initial conditions. This third model is closer to what I dealt with in Mexico, all the time. In fact, the major problem I faced did not have to do with correlating variables or mapping codes of two cultures that had never been in contact before, what I now think of as the “naive IC problem.” The major problem was that everyone involved already had a model of the “different” culture they were dealing with, and those models were at times the greatest problem I faced. When you start a business venture with people of “different” cultures who “know” that the other does things in a different and therefore less trustworthy way, the ICP’s job can turn from translation into therapy. But even with an IC model that sets up situated interaction of the sort that an ICP routinely deals with, problems still remain. And the main problem, characteristic of all three approaches outlined here, has to do with that slippery term culture. When an ICP untangles the differences in the name of culture, just what is it that is being untangled? CULTURE A few years ago, at the International Pragmatics Association meetings in Antwerp, I stood in the hall and talked with my old teacher, John Gumperz. A colleague came up and said, “You know, this is really an interesting meeting. But how do you tell who the anthropologists are?” Gumperz smiled and answered, “It’s easy. They’re the ones who never use the word culture”. Culture, as in intercultural communication, is the dirty little secret of the field. The term does massive work in organizing the IC literature and ICP activity, and yet no one knows quite what it means. Anthropol-
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ogists have tangled with it for decades. They know how slippery and massive it is, which, of course, is why John Gumperz made his joke about how they avoid it if at all possible. Some years ago, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1966), two founding fathers of American anthropology, offered a definition. They ranged across the different uses of the term culture and came up with this summary: Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action. The definition is a philosophical nightmare. Culture is on the surface and hidden, a result of observation and what produced it, learned and taught with symbols (avoiding practice), both constructs and things, traditional (avoiding modern and postmodern), and produced by and causing human action. Now, in some ways this is an unfair example. Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s definition is an old one. More recent discussions deal with opentextured multiple cultures (Roseberry, 1989), the dialectic between framework and action distributed across complex society (Hannerz, 1992), and the cultural blend of structure and agency (Rosaldo, 1989). But I think it is fair to say that the newer definitions are as problematic, though in more interesting ways, as the old ones. And-the critical point here-the older definition still serves as a prototype for the way the term is used in many academic and popular contexts. The confusion over the term culture derives in part from the traditional use of the concept. In the old days, anthropologists invented an idea of what they studied. The idea defined a bounded research object, one that was isolated in space, one that by and large provided a life from birth to death, the so-called “cradle to grave” society. People might venture out to a market town for a few things they did not provide for themselves, and marriage partners might arrive from other, nearby communities, but by and large the “natives” lived in isolation from the rest of the world. The “natives” were also bounded in time. They were traditional. They learned their culture from the elders, then passed it on to the children who, in turn, passed it on to their children. Culture was replicated from generation to generation without change. This is a bit of a parody, but not by much. Anthropologists entered into this closed world bounded in space and time, the traditional community, and set out to exhaustively explore it, from the supernatural world
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all the way down to the recipes for the evening meal. What they came up with, the results of their exploration, they called culture. In retrospect, anthropology realizes that this story about what it studied was a fiction even then. But now, in the modern, or postmodern, era, the idea is hopelessly dated. Migration and war and tourism, information and transpo~ation, global identities embedded in tr~snational institutions dealing with business, academics, politics-the former traditional community has lost whatever edges it had, and, therefore, the term culture that we used to label it has lost its referent as well. The power of the old notion of culture still shows up, though, in the way it is used in the present. In the late sixties, when I first worked with heroin addicts, I tried to think of them as sort of an urban tribe, so that I could maintain the old model. When I went on sabbatical to Austria, colleagues suggested I study gypsies or street people, an effort to find modern groups that somehow corresponded to traditional ones. Herbert Gans (1962) wrote a book whose title captures the strategy perfectlyThe Urban Villagers. The search for the old concept in modern society is a mistake, doomed to failure. My favorite personal story that brings the point home occurred in Houston, Texas, when I Iived there in the seventies. I was in a club listening to progressive country music. During the break, I turned to the man standing next to me and started up a conversation, I could not figure out his ancestry, and, after awhile, I asked him where he was from. He told me he was an Australian Aborigine. I was speechless. Australian Aborigines had been “the natives” in countless articles and books I had read as an anthropology graduate student. He turned to me and asked what I did. As it turned out, he was delighted that I was an anthropologist, because, in contrast to most of the people he had met, I at least knew who he was. His uncle had migrated, first to the U.K. and then to the U.S., and founded a business in Houston, When he died, he left the business to my new acquaintance, and so he had relocated to take it over. The old concept of culture does not work anymore. Its referent has turned problematic. If you look at how it was used, if you understand its historical roots, you can see why. Yet IC, and many other fields, often use the term culture in the old-fashioned way to mean “a closed, coherent system of meanings in which an individual always and only participates.” If this is what culture means, it applies to no one who would be involved in IC and probably to no one at all.
MEXICO If culture does not mean what it used to, what could it mean now? In particular, what could it mean that would make sense to an ICP? From
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his or her viewpoint, the culture in intercultural communication solves a problem. What is the problem? The problem is that a group of people engaged in a common task cannot perform or complete it. Then follows the critical ICP assumption: The discourse that embodies the task links to different frames of interpretation. The differences can range from a single lexical item all the way up to basic premises about how the world works. From the ICP assumption follows the ICP solution: Find the locations in discourse where the differences occur and make the frames that explain the differences explicit. Culture names the ICP solution. The representation where the ICP shows the differences and why they occur, where he/or she makes the frames explicit, is culture. Culture is something the ICP creates, a story he or she tells, one that highlights and explains the differences- to both sides-that created the problem in the first place. This quick sketch, to be elaborated more in the conclusion, can be brought to life with some examples from my work in Mexico City. The examples serve to show how this view of the ICP’s job, and this notion of culture work out in practice. Consider a lexical example first. The product the company offered was rebuilt diesel engine parts. Rebuilt means you take the old casing, the core, check it for cracks and machine it, and then clean it up and add brand new working parts. The rebuilt part is as good as new, with the same guarantee but less expensive than a new part would be. Rebuilt parts constitute 80% of the U.S. market, but they are virtually unknown in Mexico, because that country lacks the technology. The term rebuilt turned into a problem. We first translated it as reconstruido, but when people heard that, they assimilated it to usado (used), and expected lower quality and lower prices. We could not really call the parts nuevo, because they were not new, either. We still have not solved the problem. We were toying with the term marca libre, which means a new part in the style of some known brand, but not really the same. The point is that, even at the level of the basic lexical item to label the product, we stumbled across a problem. Or consider the level of speech acts. Something people do all over the world is “lie,” but the way they lie and what counts as a lie vary considerably. John Condon (1985) wrote a book called Good Neighbors: Communicating With the Mexicans. One of the problems he took on was the difference in what counts as truth or lie in the two countries. He quotes a Mexican businessman: You Americans, when you think of a banana, you think of only one kind of fruit. But when you come to Mexico and visit a market, you see there are so many kinds. Some are big and solid and used for cooking, like potatoes. You never heard of such a thing. Others are tiny as your thumb and sweeter than
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candy. You never imagined such a thing. And I’ll tell you, my friend, here in Mexico we have as many kinds of truth as there are kinds of bananas. You don’t know what you’ve been missing. (p. 43)
Condon then writes, with a pun in the introductory if he was aware of:
phrase that I wonder
Though his analogy is strained, the point is well taken: what we expect and how we define “the truth” or “a lie” is a cultural matter. When Americans and Mexicans work together, it can become a source of intercultural confusion and conflict. (p. 43)
Can it ever. The issue of whether someone was telling the truth was a recurrent problem. There are many examples, but I offer only one here. A phrase you hear all the time in Mexico is, “pasar un buen momento” (“have a pleasant moment”). When my Mexican colleagues dealt with each other face to face, they attended to the “pleasantness” of the moment more than the Anglo-Americans did. If the choice comes down to some literal, unpleasant “truth” and a maintaining of the pleasant moment, they tend towards the “maintain” choice. Americans have a myth involving the first U.S. President, George Washington. He supposedly chopped down a cherry tree and then decided he had better confess to his parents. This model of honesty is, from the “pasar un buen momento” point of view, pathological. George Washington was an inconsiderate fool. You can imagine how this one example of truth and lies created problems, over and over again. But lexical items and speech acts are not the only source of problems. So is conversational style. One evening, after I had had enough time to get established in Mexico City, I sat around a table in a restaurant with several Mexican friends and colleagues. They were telling a story about an American who had come down to visit Mexican customers. He had asked for four appointments in 2 days, walked in, handed over a price list, and said, “Just have your purchasing agent call our guy when you’ve decided what you want .” By the end of the story, we were all laughing, because the American’s direct, aggressive style was way out of line in Mexico. As the Mexican telling the story finished up, he held his hands out to his side, as if he were holding a cape, waved it back, and said “ole.” Everyone laughed all the more. I had read things about the bullfight, about oppositions between life and death and male and female, oppositions out of a structuralist’s dream. But it had never occurred to me that the bullfight could be a metaphor for conversational style. A few days later, I was driving with a lawyer to a meeting with a government official. I asked him how it would go, and he said, “We’ll
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just cap&ear a little.” What was that? He explained that “capotear” had to do with “cape,” the cape the toreadors and matador use to work the bull. The bullfight metaphor, it turned out, helped understand how my Mexican colleagues handled direct, aggressive behavior. You just let them charge, work them with the cape, and see how they act. And, of course, I thought about how the bullfight usually ends. Another problem that turned up in Mexico involved something as simple as setting prices for things. Prices that made sense in the U.S. turned out at times to be too high at times too low, for Mexico. To handle this problem, frames that tied into political economy came into play. The traditionally high Mexican tariffs moved around in different ways as the liberalization policies of President Salinas de Gortari came into effect. Some products were manufactured in Mexico and were therefore cheaper. Discount structures were different. Overhead and profit were both lower in Mexico. Competition in the Mexican market continued to heat up even as the business was established. These and other shifting political economic currents meant that a price set in the U.S. might work in Mexico, but then again, it might not. You could not tell without understanding and monitoring the Mexican political economy. Other differences centered on powerful historical frames. Within Mexico, for example, there is a longstanding opposition between Spaniard and Mestizo, an opposition that lies at the foundation of the Mexican war for independence in the early 19th century. Even further back, Mexicans talk about the so-called Malinche complex. Malinche was the Indian woman who allied with Cortes and helped him conquer the country in the 16th century. Octavia Paz (1962), for example, features it in his book, The Labyrinth of Solitude. The opposition is alive and well today; once you learn it, you hear it in conversations and see it in popular media all the time. So, with one business partner of Spanish descent and another who is Mestizo, the split came alive in my work in Mexico City. Just to give one quick example, my Mestizo partner would sometimes say things like, “You’ve got to watch out for these Spaniards. They have this mentality of conquer, conquer, conquer.” Then there is the difference between Mexicanos and Gringos, the term for North American Anglos. Gringo is not necessarily negative. I would hear such phrases as “una teoria gringa” or “musica gringa” as simple descriptions of a theory or music from the U.S., and sometimes the phrase was used in good-natured teasing, as in references to the U.S. as “Gringolandia.” And it is no accident that the two best selling books that I mentioned earlier, books about U.S.-Mexico relations, popular on both sides of the border, have English titles like Distant Neighbors and Limits to Friendship.
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Gringos, so goes the historical stereotype, are powerful people with an army at their back whose amiable ways cover an agenda of exploitative self-interest. They are to be watched carefully, guarded against, and handled with the classic strategy of the powerless, manipulation. This negative stereotype is an oversimplification, but if it is not real, people certainly acted at times as if it were. A similar story could be told in the other direction, from Anglo to Mexican. This deep historical canyon of distrust surfaced over and over again and made, as you can imagine, a joint business venture difficult at best. Finally, other differences sometimes tied into frames that contained basic premises about how the world works. Time is a classic and wellknown exampfe. A couple of times Mexicans told me a joke: “In Mexico the week has 7 days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and man ana.” Time is not the scarce commodity that it is in the U.S.; its passing is not felt with such a sense of urgency and loss. Then there is the attitude towards work. For the U.S. partners, work is what you are, the foundation of your identity. For the Mexican partners, work is something you do that is important, but it is balanced against other aspects of your life that have equal, if not greater, value. Besides, the infrastructure of daily life in Mexico City is not reliable in that things routinely go wrong and problems come up, and when they do, you obviously have to stop whatever else you are doing and fix them. Central premises about time and work are obviously more complicated than this. But even this sketch shows how the plan-oriented, timeconscious Gringo can be driven crazy by the flow of business life in Mexico and, of course, vice versa if you recall the bullfight metaphor discussed earlier. After 3 months of intensive work in Mexico City, that is the best I can do. As an experienced ethnographer, I know that I am only skating across the surface of substantial differences, differences whose distribution I still do not fully understand, and the frames I have built so far are still piecemeal But even these few examples show how problems appeared at several different levels of discourse, in different combinations at different times, and they show how the frames to understand the problems range all over the map. The examples also show how one ICP version of c~~~~re might work. In order to do business together, the Mexican and American partners had to name the product and set prices, discuss and plan and deal with each other, and develop a style of work that made sense to all concerned. In all these areas, and others as well, differences surfaced that made task accomplishment difficult. Worse yet, both the Mexicans and Americans attributed the problems to a deficiency in the other, deficiencies embedded in their model of the “other” culture that they believed to be true.
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What I did, along the lines of the ICP job sketched at the beginning of this section, was to locate where in discourse the differences surfaced, when they did occur, and then use those locations as places to start building frames to explain to participants why the differences were there. The locations were as specific as lexical items and as diffuse as extensive passages of discourse, and the frames were as narrow as the dictionary and as broad as the sweep of history. The frames did let me make the differences explicit, thus satisfying the primary goal of the ICP job. But, as I mentioned earlier, making them explicit did not always make a difference, because everyone already had their own model of the other. At this juncture, the ICP either washes his or her hands of the matter or else he or she takes on a more active, persuasive role, a possibility that is developed more in the conclusion. The point for now is that ICP is a complicated business. The differences that will appear, and the frames that will resolve them, are not as predictable as recipes out of a cookbook; they grow out of the emergent interactional ground of intercultural encounters. And the frames that are built, the new knowledge that shows each side in the encounter what is going on, now serve as the referent of the term culture but the usage is a peculiar one that needs some explanation. LANGUACULTURE
Underlying this sketch of ICP is a particular view of language and culture, one developed in more detail in a forthcoming book (Agar, 1994). Understanding a new culture, the argument goes, is about making sense out of human differences in terms of human similarities. The similarities are the ground against which the figure of differences are understood. And the differences, most of them anyway, surface in the language out in the spaces between people. When you encounter a new language, some things are easy to learn. You just patch on some new lexical items and grammatical forms and continue listening and talking. A “fork” is a “tenedor” in Spanish and that is about it. Other things are more difficult, but with a little effort the differences from one language to another can be bridged. “You” is both “tu” and “usted,” and “be” is both “se? and “es&r,” and it will take awhile to figure out when to use which. But some things that come up strike you with their difficulty, their complexity, their inability to fit into the resources you use to make sense out of the world. These things-from lexical items through speech act up to extensive stretches of discourse-are called rich points (Agar, 1991). Rich points are rich because of the intricate web of associations and connotations that they carry with them, webs that have no corresponding echoes in your own language. Rich points-such as the exam-
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ples from Mexico presented earlier-are the linguistic tip of the cultural iceberg, the locations in discourse where major cultural differences are signalled. To understand rich points, new frames of interpretation have to be built. I use “frames” in a way that is intentionally ambiguous as between artificial intelligence and Goffman (1974). Frames are bundles of new knowledge-they might be a formalism, a bit of prose, or even a poem that bridge the difference between the rich points in the new language and the original frames for interpretation in the language you brought with you. In the Mexican examples, frames ran from dictionary definitions through speech acts and conversational style up to history, political economy, and basic ideas about how things are. To build the new frames, you have to realize that your old frames, ones that you may not have known you had, are only one of a number of possibilities, an arbitrary rather than a “natural” way of seeing, thinking, and acting. You have to become aware of and distance yourself from an identity that shapes who it is that you always thought you were (see Ehlich, 1992, for a similar discussion). But once that is accomplished, understanding is possible; rich points can be handled. Formerly taken-for-granted frames come to consciousness and enable you to start building new ones to get you from where you started to where you want to be, capable of handling the rich points that created the problem in the first place. Given this constellation of rich points in discourse and the frames needed to understand them, the separation between language and culture makes no sense. Instead, borrowing and modifying Friedrich’s (1989) term, it makes more sense to think of languaculture. What an ICP does, then, as the Mexico examples showed, is to take rich points and frames and present them as a single entity, as a bit of languacukure, rather than just a bit of language or just a bit of culture. But languaculture is more than just a list of rich points and frames. Threads run through the frames, themes that tie them together and lead you to develop frames of a higher order, frames that touch on the key, fundamental differences between two different languacultures and constrain their use. The list of rich points is only the starting point in the quest for coherence, the quest for the ties that turn separate examples into a deep understanding of another way of talking, acting, and thinking. Unfortunately, I did not show coherence in the Mexican examples as well as I would have liked to, because I have not worked long enough to understand and articulate it. Coherence takes time and lots of experience. It is the kind of thing bilingual/bicultural types and translators and interpreters achieve. A final comment returns us to the partiality of culture, or languaculture, as I can say now. Once you have worked long enough with some
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people around a set of tasks, you wonder how widely your understanding applies. You wonder about the scope of what you have learned. Scope is a massive, neglected problem. Where are the edges of the two languacultures whose rich points you have come to understand? We naively generalize, usually to a language or a national/state identity. But who is to say if what we have learned is Spanish or Mexican? What if what we have learned is tied to other social identities, identities that have to do with class or gender or occupation or ethnicity or leisure time pursuit or something else? And who knows if the social identities represent variation within the languaculture or variation across it? And who knows if maybe the languaculture generalizes to entire regions, like Latin countries in the case of Mexico? I cannot solve the problem here, but I want to close this section by underlining it. The disappearance of the traditional community on which culture was based predicts the problem at any rate. Yet we all routinely talk in terms of Mexicans and Americans and Japanese and Germans. Some of what an ICP learns surely generalizes in such a grand manner, but certainly not all of it, and maybe not even most of it. Scope is the untamed monster that all of us in the languaculture trade ignore at our peril. LANGUACULTURE
AND ICP
This sketch of languaculture theory forms a more general picture of what went on when the examples from Mexico were presented. Rich points are where the action is, and frame building is the way to handle them. But the general formulation and the specific examples are still some distance away from the model of ICP at the beginning of this article. ICP is a little bit like ethnography, the intensive investigation of a different culture, but then again it is not. Among other differences, ICP relies more on participant observation and less on interviews, and it is more focused on specific tasks and the differences that emerge within them. Most difficult of all, it is dual. A traditional ethnography sends you off to another place, where you go through culture shock, work deeper and deeper into the new culture, return home and go through reverse culture shock, and then write up your results. With ICP, you never leave home as you plunge deeper into the new culture. You cannot, because the gaps between home and the new culture define the space where you work. The point of ethnography is to develop an identity within a new culture; the point of ICP is to develop one between home and the new culture. It is different and, in my experience, more difficult. ICP is a little like becoming bilingual/bicultural, too-1 should say
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bilanguacultural-but with a similar twist. The usual case for a bilingual/bicultural person is that he or she uses the two languages in separate settings, or uses them in a setting where others are also bilingual/bicultural so that everyone can comfortably switch. In ICP, there are times when co-present people are competent in one languaculture or the other, but not both, so that the ICP has to switch languacultural worlds in the same setting where no one else can. This suggests that ICP is a little like translation or interpreter work, and it is if we lay the translation ability over a solid ethnographic base. But even here there are differences. Compared to the usual stereotype of translation work, ICP is more active-The ICP is not just transforming a text but rather participating in an interaction where it is co-constructed. And it is more argumentative. Remember that participants already have a model of the other culture in their heads. I mentioned earlier that one of my main problems was not that participants had no understanding of the other culture; instead, the problem was that they did think they understood it. In my ICP work, I had to figure out a representation of one languaculture in terms of another, but then it was not enough to just present it. I had to argue it, sometimes even provoke a crisis in terms of it, to convince people that my take on the differences was right and the one they thought was the case was wrong. The Mexicans sometimes called me “abogado del diablo, ” “devil’s advocate,” and the Americans sometimes claimed I had been “taken in.” ICP, in my experience in Mexico City, is an active, even aggressive, role, not a passive one. It is tempting to tie all these fields together, to say that ethnography is a means to the end of bilanguaculturalism, which in turn is a prerequisite to translation/interpretation abilities, which in turn enables ICP. In practice, of course, ICP mixes them up in different ways as the work progresses and also draws on other skills. What the logical formulation does make clear, though, is that ICP is not a general skill that one can offer anyone at any time, whatever the two languacultures are that come into contact in the context of a particular task. ICP relies on deep experience and knowledge of the languacultures in question. One can claim ICP expertise, but on/y with reference to particular pairings of languacultures in which one is communicatively competent. ICP is less a formal skill and more a substantive one. CONCLUSION An ICP is turning into a rather mythic figure at this point, a myth that no one I know or have read about ever realized. He or she functions well in two languacultures, one of which is “home” and the other “foreign.” He or she knows the likely rich points that characterize the bound-
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aries when travelling between the two and always stands ready to recognize and figure out new ones. Not only can he or she traverse them, but he or she can also articulate the complicated frames that explain what they are and why they are there. Furthermore, he or she can do so in fastmoving situations as they emerge, while dealing with co-present members of both languacultures in question, members who have their own ideas about each other, ideas that he or she must selectively argue against as part of ICP work. That strikes me as a demanding job description. Further, the ICP must continually question the assumption that the problem is located in the frames that underlie the discourse. Problems in task performance and accomplishment cannot always be located in different frames. Sometimes they derive from conflict within the same ones. At one point in Mexico, an American supplier wanted half payment on an order as deposit, with the other half paid on delivery. The Mexican customer, on the other hand, wanted half payment on delivery with 30 days to pay the balance. They decided that they obviously had a “cultural” problem and that I should fix it. This was not a case of “cultural” differences; it was a case of conflict within the same frame. Two businessmen wanted to get the other guy’s money and hold their own as long as they could. Everyone knew exactly what was going on in the same way. Culture as we have already seen, is a slippery, dangerous term. Nothing illustrates this better than the conflict some years ago between Oscar Lewis and Charles Valentine over the “culture of poverty” (Valentine 1968). Lewis argued that poor people in capitalist societies developed a “culture” and that their behavior could be explained by it. Nonsense, said Valentine, poor people adapted to blocked opportunities and scarce resources. Cultural differences did not have anything to do with it. Not all problems are languacultural. Culture is supposed to be a solution, not a label that hides the real problems. Problems in task performance might be due to differences in personality or power or circumstances or goals, not to differences in culture. In Mexico, I dealt with situations where participants were more or less of equal status, though even here, as the previous example shows, one carefully has to sort out the differences between shared business frames and different languacultural frames. Then there are contemporary situations that make one wonder if ICP can do any good at all. When I read Konstantinov (1992) on attempts at intercultural communication among Islamic and Christian Bulgarians or the journalist Friedman’s (1989) accounts of efforts to foster IsraeliPalestinian communication, deep-seated historical distrust and power differences make me feel despair at what an ICP might do to help, though, even in such cases, the effort could not hurt.
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Finally, although culture is no longer a closed, coherent system of meanings in which an individual always and only participates, the term is still problematic for the ICP. Culture is created knowledge that shows why problems occurred when a group of “different” people tried to do something together, but this is a peculiar notion of what culture is all about. Culture is something that the ICP creates, a story he or she tells that highlights and explains the differences that cause breakdowns. Culture is not something people have; it is something that fills the spaces between them. And culture is not an exhaustive description of anything; it focuses on differences, rich points, differences that can vary from task to task and group to group. Culture, in this formulation, departs rather dramatically from the old notion of a closed research space. In fact, it is not clear what the cultural solution from a moment of ICP practice generalizes to, the problem of scope discussed earlier. Speakers of two languages? Residents of two nation/states? Members of particular ethnic groups? Or classes? Or genders? Or some other social identity? So what is it, finally, that this mythic figure does? An ICP identifies discourse rich points that prevent task performance. He or she then figures out the frames that explain the rich point differences and makes them explicit in a persuasive representation. But the emergent social situation and the multiple social identities of actors make it difficult to predict a priori what differences will matter, how to represent them, or how to move the group back on track. Several historically separate disciplines are relevant to ICP. But ICP gives each of them a peculiar twist and promises a future synthesis that will draw on them, add something new, and lead to a view of languaculture that will map in interesting ways onto the many differences that make up our contemporary, multicultural world. I hope this exploration of ICP, together with all its pitfalls and promises, conducted in terms of my brief experience with U.S.-Mexico intercultural communication, is useful to others who struggle with an elusive and difficult ability that is essential to our common global future. REFERENCES AGAR, M. (1991). The biculture in bilingual. Language in Society, 20, 167-181. AGAR, M. (1994). Language shock: The culture in everyday conversations. New York: Morrow. CONDON, J. C. (1985). Good neighbors: Communicating with the Mexicans. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press. EHLICH, K. (1992, March). Kommunikationsbrueche: Vom Nachteil und NutZen des Sprachkontakts [Communication breakdowns: the disadvantage and use of language contact]. Presented to the LAUD Symposium on Intercultural Communication, Duisburg, Germany.
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FRIEDMAN, T. L. (1989). From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Anchor Books. FRIEDRICH, P. (1989). Language, ideology, and political economy. American Anthropologist, 91, 295-312. GANS, H. J. (1962). The urban villagers. New York: Free Press. GOFFMAN, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper & Row. GUDYKUNST, W. B., & TING-TOOMEY, S. (1988). Culture and interpersonal communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. GUMPERZ, J. J. (1982). Discoursestrategies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. HALL, E. T. (1959). The silent language. New York: Doubleday. HALL, E. T. (1983). The dance of life. New York: Doubleday. HANNERZ, U. (1992). Cultural complexity: Studies in the sociaI organization of meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. HINNENKAMP, V. (1990). Wieviel und was ist “Kulturell” in der interkulturellen Kommunikation? In B. Spillner (Ed.), Znterkulturelle Kommunikation (pp. 46-52). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. HOFSTEDE, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. KONSTANTINOV, Y. (1992, March). Nation-state and ‘minority’ types of discourse. Paper presented to the LAUD Symposium on Intercultural Communication, Duisburg, Germany. KROEBER, A. L., & KLUCKHOHN, C. (1966). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. New York: Vintage. PASTOR, R. A., & CASTANEDA, J. G. (1988). Limits to friendship: The United States and Mexico. New York: Vintage. PAZ, 0. (1962). The labyrinth of solitude: Life and thought in Mexico. New York: Grove Press. RIDING, A. (1985). Distant neighbors: A portrait of the Mexicans. New York: Vintage. ROSALDO, R. (1989). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon. ROSEBERRY, W. (1989). Anthropologies and histories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. SAMOVAR, L. A., & PORTER, R. E. (1982). Intercultural communication: A reader. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. VALENTINE, C. A. (1968). Culture and poverty: Critique and counterproposals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. YOUSEF, F. S. (1982). North Americans in the Middle East. In L. A. Samovar & R. E. Porter (Eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader (pp. 92-134). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.