That’s Not How We Do Things

Just as a visual image without texture can be somewhat flat and uninteresting, communication without friction can be difficult to see. What I mean by this is that often, the cultural and deeply coded aspects of people’s communicative behavior only become visible to the observer when there is a problem. For a scholar of communication doing an ethnographic study, it can be difficult at first to distinguish individual idiosyncrasies from cultural codes, especially when you have not yet met a very wide range of people from a given place or community. You can’t tell whether an observed behavior is a personal quirk – someone who just happens to enjoy verbal sparring or argument, for example – or a behavior that is expected and valued in a particular speech community.

When there is conflict, however, and speakers explicitly call upon the communicative norms of their own speech community (“American,” or “Congolese,” for example), to challenge or explain their own or others’ communicative conduct, an observer can be fairly certain that there is something cultural going on. This observation is not my own, of course, but comes from the literature on ethnography of communication and from many, many published case studies on the role of culture in communication. It is, however, always rather satisfying to see it proven yet again. It is also a bit of a relief, as it does provide a good place to start one’s data collection. When you hear someone say, “that’s not how we do things,” you can be fairly certain that you should listen more closely to the explanation. A lesson in “how we do things” can be valuable data.

There is another interesting phenomenon that occurs when you tell a new acquaintance that you are a communication researcher: people will either tell you what they think that means (“to me, that means ‘language’”), or they will roll their eyes, clutch their heads and bemoan the near-total absence of “communication” in their workplace or the world at large. Either way, these reactions also provide a good starting point for data collection.

Talking about intercultural communication also frequently reveals just how persistent are beliefs and premises about the “essential” characteristics of groups of people – “Americans” are this way, “Congolese” are like that – and how such an understanding of the role of “culture” shapes speakers’ behaviors and attitudes when they find themselves involved in communication that they recognize as “intercultural.” This phenomenon also presents the scholar of intercultural communication with a real challenge: how to write about and analyze culture in communication without duplicating your subjects’ own understanding of “culture” as something static and determinative.

These are just a few reflections on the task at hand, as I continue to grapple with the basic question, “what is going on here?” and as I try to begin to understand what is going on here from the participants’ own viewpoints.