7.1 Culture as distributed knowledge

The notion of culture as shared knowledge has been informed by the works of many researchers, among them Alfred Schütz (concept of typification and interpretative schemata), Claude Lévi-Strauss (concept of binary systems of difference and symbolic order), Pierre Bourdieu (concept of habitus schemata), Michel Foucault (theory of codes of knowledge), Erving Goffman (concept of frames), Charles Taylor (concept of background knowledge), and Clifford Geertz (notion of cultural models). Although different in their details, these approaches broadly share some fundamental assumptions, for example, the rejection of the Cartesian dualism of a self-enclosed human unit (res cogitans) and of an independent outer world (res extensa); instead, they aim at restoring a proper balance between external and internal human realities.

In order to achieve this goal, these approaches take into account the dynamic roles of social context, individuality, intentionality, and the sociocultural, historical, and institutional situation of the socially active individual, conducting his or her everyday life. These approaches are not primarily interested in direct and one-dimensional causal explanations for visible human behavior; rather, they try to reconstruct human behavior from within the complex social, societal, and cultural network of action. For this reason, they tend to promote the category of subjective meaning as central for understanding human behavior. This implies that the daily Lebenswelt (Schütz), or life-world, of the (inter-)actants, with its complex and multi-faceted interconnections and underlying cultural patterns, moves into the focus of analysis, as it provides the generative framework for continuously ongoing subjective processes of meaning-making. The term Lebenswelt implies that “we enact our lives socially, episodically, in relation to other people” (Hall, Grindstaff, and Lo 2010: 5). The world of daily life is not only the scene, but also the object of our actions and interactions. Society is composed of many different life-worlds, that is, networked relationships that have developed through intersubjective interactions.

Cultural knowledge, then, can be defined as the conventionally constructed and broadly shared cognitive, behavioral, and affective resources of a cultural community.⁶⁸ It is formed, maintained, and transformed as a consequence of continuously ongoing processes of negotiation and renegotiation in interactions that occur as the members of a particular community go about their everyday lives. Culture in this sense consists of a system of rules, beliefs, values, behaviors, and orientations that is tacit, anonymous, and not usually consciously available to the (inter-)acting members of a cultural community. Only in situations where, in a certain instance, the intersubjective constitution of meaning was unsuccessful may the reasons for this mishap be consciously analyzed. This may lead to a process of raising the level of awareness of some (typically implicit and automated) cultural patterns of forming attitudes, values, thoughts, beliefs, and (communicative) behavior. However, this is the exception for both subjective and social behavior and action because the vast bulk of cultural knowledge is taken for granted and remains on a subconscious level, unquestioned and unreflected upon.

Yet, tacit cultural knowledge effectively guides acts of meaning, interpreting, and understanding and also informs performative (inter-)acting of individuals and groups in particular social contexts. Thus, it contributes tacitly, yet decisively, to subjective and collective construals of identity, reality, and the world at large. It also provides the blueprint for actively coping with all kinds of immediate situations which all members of a cultural collective deploy as the basis for their (inter-)actions. On a social level of ordinary everyday interactions, it provides the patterns that guide participants in their judgments of the kind of genre and Discourse the immediate interaction is situated in, what to expect next from the other interlocutors, how to get clues about the identity of the other(s), and how to react and act meaningfully in response to the action and interaction of others. In addition, it also defines, on a subconscious level, the parameters of what to say explicitly, what to leave unsaid, what to imply (or infer), and what to assume and expect in certain situation-types of interaction.

Cultural knowledge and patterns of cognitive and emotional construction are basically re-inscribed in the minds of every generation of members in a cultural community through the complex processes of socialization, lingualization, and enculturation, and through ongoing active participation in social life (cf. Chapters 2 & 3). Although this re-inscription process has the potential to introduce changes in cultural knowledge, these are always very short-reaching and of such negligible effect for an extremely specialized part of a specific body of knowledge that they can never affect in an instant the main body of cultural knowledge at large.

Right from the moment of birth, each subject enters a world of meaning that has been constructed by generations of people before him or her in a historical dimension. This prefabricated network of knowledge fundamentally helps the subject to make sense of his or her direct and indirect social and material environment so that it is not necessary for each child to start from a blank slate in his or her efforts to construe the world anew. The process of developing and acquiring cultural knowledge is structured by socially organized processes of selection and production of meaning. By inscribing cultural patterns during socialization, culture does the following to the developing subjective mind:

Thus, culture is not only “out there” in a sphere of its own, but it actually does something to our minds. It ties us in, by means of semiotics (e.g. language), with the prevailing norms, values, and attitudes of our cultural community and therefore provides guidance for our appropriate behavior, interaction, and thought processes. All three elements, mind, culture, and language, are intrinsically linked together and intimately interwoven, as Elinor Ochs explains:

In this way, the collectively created, maintained, and distributed cultural knowledge becomes (mainly via the medium of language)⁶⁹ a subjective cognitive resource for the individual’s mind that assumes a pivotal guiding and orientating influence on individual and social action. Thus, we are socialized into plausibility structures, that is, conceptual understandings of the world which are supported by rational networks. As we come to rely on these plausibility structures, so do we develop a sense of a “natural,” taken-for-granted reality (cf. Chapter 3).

Human beings, in contrast to animals, therefore live in a self-generated universe of symbols or, as Geertz (1973: 5) characterizes this configuration, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” The symbolic modes of construing, (inter-)acting, and feeling maintain a culture’s particular web of significance. The symbols have been created by humans over many generations through a myriad of experiences and interactions, and they are adopted by every member of a cultural community before being passed on to the next generation. Every human existence relies on a familiar understanding of the figurations of the symbolic worlds of culture and language through meaningful contexts of referral which facilitate immediate routinized understanding (cf. Reckwitz 2000: 88). Its individual expression adheres to the construction of meaning, i.e., assigning meaning to symbols, things, thoughts, actions, attitudes, affects, or experiences in different settings on particular occasions, according to their appropriate cultural contexts, in order to know what they are about. Although meanings are constructed, with or without conscious effort, in the subjective mind spontaneously in specific situated contexts, they have their origins and their significance in the culture in which they have been produced. Hence, they do not refer to private inner states of people but are discursively produced, maintained, and distributed. LeVine (1984) explains this dialectical process:

The differences in implicitness can refer to the state of subjective cultural knowledge; for example, a child might require more explicit guidance in understanding irony or sarcasm than adults. Meaning is always situated in a given culture which ensures its smooth negotiability and communicability among those who share the cultural knowledge. Bruner (1996: 3) emphasizes, “Whether ‘private meaning’ exists is not the point; what is important is that meanings provide a basis for cultural exchange.” These culturally generated meanings do not only refer to conceptualizations of words and utterances which are generally linguistically mediated. They also refer to culturally established concepts, frames, and schemata (cf. Chapter 3) derived from the daily Lebenswelt of people; from this dynamic basis, they have been (and continue to be) culturally categorized and historically sedimented. These schematic structures, relating to certain objects or configurations, provide presupposed patterns of cultural understanding, action, and interaction that members of a culture apply tacitly and subconsciously, for instance with regard to juju in parts of West Africa. As Ciompi (1997: 47) has convincingly shown, schemata also include emotional elements which are, to a large extent, also culture-specific, for example, mourning over the loss of a pet (widely accepted in North America and Europe but unknown in other parts of the world).

The process of implicit and incidental acquisition of cultural knowledge implies that it exists largely independently of subjective experiences. Since it informs and coordinates thought and (inter-)action, it can be defined as an “operative fiction” (Schmidt 2003: 24, my translation, A.W.) with structuring qualities for both the individual mind and the cultural collective. It is a fiction because culture in its psychologically distributed form only materializes in singular instances but never reveals itself in its totality. Distributed cultural knowledge facilitates a range of thoughts and (inter-)actions from which the constructs considered to be the most appropriate are chosen and performed by the subject. Therefore, cultural knowledge is also characterized by potential reflexivity because the subject can reflect upon the best available option of thought or action.

Cultural knowledge is not restrained to cognitive knowledge alone but also includes normative, behavioral, and emotional dimensions, as well as socially mediated values, attitudes, predispositions, and motivations, which are normally not consciously available. These tacit aspects can be raised to consciousness only in exceptional circumstances for brief instants, for example, when expected consequences of habitual action do not transpire, or when miscommunication occurs (cf. Ciompi 1997). Taken together, all elements of distributed cultural knowledge provide the framework for constituting a subjectively viable and valid “objective” social world that is negotiated between the members of a cultural collective. This means that social “reality” is not something that exists outside of, and independent from, the symbolic world humans are living in, but that it is being continuously constructed in communicative acts and collaborative activities among members of a cultural group. Since notions of “reality” are always symbolically (pre-)structured by cultural knowledge, any attempt by the social sciences, including second language acquisition research, to analyze or understand this subjectively or socially maintained “reality” must aim to decipher the relevant aspects of the distributed cultural knowledge and the social quality of the data – rather than ignoring these symbolically meaningful categories, as, for example, the methods of empirically-analytical approaches tend to do.

Interpretive approaches to analyzing culture try to reconstruct the underlying cultural reasons why people act in a particular way from the basis of their actual life-world – rather than from the cultural and social systems, as the latter ultimately depend on the former. Whereas the cognitive tradition advocates the search for generalizations, based on the assumed power of statistical procedures, it is necessary to take into consideration the messy, ambiguous, and context-sensitive processes of constructing meaning in the hurly-burly of everyday life, the heteroglossia of language, and the polyphonic self. In order to get access to an insider’s view of the other culture, one has to try to empathetically identify with the subjects living in the other language community (in terms of motivations, attitudes, values, beliefs, etc.); only in this manner is the observer in a position to make sense of what the other person is doing, particularly by reconstructing his or her subjective perspective from within the social, cultural, and situational context in which he or she (inter-)acts. Such an approach to the understanding of behavior and action can be sensitive to the subtleties of a situation in a way that statistical procedures can never be. Hence, the subjective common-sense world as a daily enacted social reality, or the Lebenswelt, comes into focus of such an approach. Schütz and Luckmann (1974) define the common-sense Lebenswelt as the area of reality which the attentive adult takes unquestioningly for granted: “The world of daily life is given to us in a taken-for-granted way. (...) The province of meaning of this world retains the accent of reality as long as our practical experiences confirm its unity and harmony” (Schütz and Luckmann 1974: 35). The term life-world expresses the horizon of all relevant experiences of the subject against which things, actions, and activities appear meaningful. The life-world is lived (German erlebt) by the subject, and it lives with the subject. However, the life-world cannot be constructed by the subject in isolation, as it relies on pre-constructed sociocultural elements in a historical dimension and, more importantly, on permanently ongoing co-construction with other people. This refers to both material and social realities, which means that the life-world is inherently intersubjectively constructed and accessible to the subject by cognitive efforts: “The everyday life-world is (...) fundamentally intersubjective; it is a social world. All acts whatever refer to meaning that is explicable by me and must be explicated by me if I wish to find my way about in the life-world. Interpretation of meaning, ‘understanding’, is a fundamental principle of the natural attitude with regard to my fellow men” (Schütz and Luckmann 1974: 16).

The Lebenswelt is not a static given, although it may appear so to the subject, but the dynamic result of constitutive acts of interpreting experiences and worlds on the part of individuals (in the plural). This process is facilitated by socially mediated and subjectively internalized stocks of cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge includes categorizations of experiences, time, space, interactions, memories, emotions, and, on a profane level, frames of objects, such as hills and rocks, trees, and animals, including sub-typifications as granite, oak-tree, bird, fish, etc. All acts of subjective construction are related to this internalized stock of knowledge (which in the process of interaction can be changed at the margins). The subject’s “relative-natural world view (...) is a system of communicable typifications of the life-world as such, socially objecvtivated, and established in sign systems, above all the mother tongue” (Schütz and Luckmann 1974: 94).

Culture can, therefore, be understood as a coordinated composition of many different subjective Lebenswelten, which in turn depend on historically evolved and agreed (or sedimented) knowledge in the different communities of discourse. Thus, the coordinated cultural knowledge, as construed and accumulated by a particular community, cannot be pinned down to the individual member, but is distributed throughout the community: it is shared and organized. This organization of cultural knowledge and social habitus implies that,

It is important to remember that these institutions and exchange systems are fundamentally dependent on human interaction. As Kronenfeld (2002) suggests, “culture has no existence outside of our individual representations of it, and since these representations are variable, there exists no single place where the whole of any culture is stored or represented. Thus, culture is necessarily and intrinsically a distributed system” (Kronenfeld 2002: 430). The central proposition is that culture exists only “in” human beings and, more importantly, in the intersubjective spaces between people where cultural elements are constantly constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and co-constructed in interactive processes. These culture-producing and -maintaining interactive processes construct, among other configurations, notions of “reality” and “truth” that are intersubjectively negotiated and, as long as they remain fundamentally agreed upon by the members of a cultural community, serve as the underlying cultural concepts of these and related notions, not only for the individual members, but also for the cultural and speech community at large. Therefore, cultures cannot simply be reduced to a collective of people sharing a common language and historically evolved traditions. Rather, cultures, through their intersubjective negotiation of shared knowledge, specify what roles people play and what status these roles are accorded (cf. Chapter 6). Cultures in this sense consist of many life-worlds and communities of Discourse (cf. Section 4.5), that is, people who share assumptions about what is appropriate for discussion and about how the validity of a particular claim might be demonstrated. Since the members of a linguistic and cultural community act in socio-historically pre-interpreted relationships of seemingly “objective” social and subjective worlds, they cannot transcend these boundaries and step onto completely unmapped territory. However, based on their accumulated knowledge and their potential for construction, they are able to understand and empathize through the use of other cultural constructs and social forms of life which are, to an extent, similar to their own. Meaningful interaction with aliens from another planet, therefore, would be impossible if they use sign systems and values incompatible to human systems; however, meaningful interaction with people from other cultures is basically always possible, considering common human experiences, such as embodiment, which we all share, that form the basis for all of our symbolic systems.

The implications of these reflections for second language learning and teaching are obvious, in that mental and affective bridges have to be built between specific underlying patterns of interpretation of both (or more) cultures (and their life-worlds) involved. Relevant aspects of shared cultural knowledge of the L2 language community, including tacit assumptions for successful communication, have to be symbolically mediated through evolving third spaces which are located between the cultures, thus providing access to the Other (cf. Chapter 8). No society exists without a culture, which is a reflection of human needs to fulfill certain biological, social, and psychological aspirations; therefore one can assume fundamental similarities in cultural constructs that could provide for a basic understanding of the cultural other, albeit not for all aspects of his or her life.

7.2 Reading culture as text

Culture, as we have seen, is a very dynamic, multi-layered, and elusive concept which is very difficult to define. However, for the purpose of L2 teaching and learning, culture has to be considered because of its intimate relation to language. An interesting way of understanding culture is provided by semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism which consider cultural patterns and products to be a kind of text that can be read or interpreted just like the text of a novel, poem, or drama. The person analyzing culture, for example, the ethnographer, is at the same time the author and the reader of texts; he or she tries to decipher the original cultural patterns, or the text, of a cultural community, and writes down his or her observations and analyses, thus composing a new text. This text then constitutes a written meta-text on the original cultural text.

Cultural products and patterns in a textual sense are not just written documents, but contain all kinds of manifestations, whether visual, auditory, kinesic, or even olfactory (e.g., the smell of food), or tactile (for example, an artifact that is tangible). A contextual “reading” of these cultural “texts” can lead to a process of uncovering deeper levels of cultural meaning or other patterns of symbolic networks of a given culture which are usually hidden to the members of a cultural community. Sigmund Freud, for example, read culture as a means of managing and deploying to useful ends the aggression inherent in human sexuality.

One of the most famous examples of constructing a cultural meta-text is Clifford Geertz’s (1973) “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.” Here, Geertz tries to “read,” and then produce, a “thick description” of the deeply ingrained cultural patterns of Balinese society by describing and interpreting cockfights in their social context and with regard to their complex and multi-faceted relevance to Balinese culture. Geertz understands culture as a web of significance which has been spun by humans in a historical dimension and in which they are now suspended (cf. Section 7.1). Therefore, analysis of culture cannot be provided by “an experimental science in search of law but [by] an interpretative one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973: 5). Thus, culture is not conceptualized as an abstractly ordered and cognitively decipherable system of hidden patterns; instead, “its logic(...) derives rather from the logic of the organization of action, from people operating within certain institutional orders, interpreting their situations in order to act coherently with them” (Ortner 1984: 130). From this perspective, the sociocultural “reality” does not refer to underlying cultural patterns or systems in the sense of the structural approach, but refers to a symbolic system of meaning which undergirds human action in one’s life-world and cultural community.

This approach is particularly relevant to the analysis of other cultures where an empathetic understanding of the subject and his or her actions is not easily achievable, as the hermeneutic access to the other’s subjective Lebenswelt (and all its multi-faceted contexts of social action) can only be gained with great difficulty, due to its complexity which is rooted in the other societal structures and cultural patterns. One of the guiding questions that Geertz (1983: 56) asks, with reference to German hermeneutics, is “What happens to verstehen when einfühlen disappears?” Verstehen refers here to rationally comprehending the other cultural system, and einfühlen refers to empathizing with its subjective behavior, based on sociocultural norms. The answer to this question for him is that a different, more objectifiable approach to accessing cultural meanings must be developed, one that uses all the signs and symbols which have been created and maintained by a particular culture. This approach is exactly that of viewing culture as text.⁷⁰

According to this approach, social actions are constantly being translated into cultural signs to which meaning can be ascribed. If this process of ascribing meaning reaches a degree of stability beyond subjectivity, and when the meaning of an action can be separated from the action as an event, then cultural meanings can be seen as a supra-individual and decipherable text. Thus, the social activities of a society, once they have reached a certain degree of agreement and stability within the cultural community, constitute a text which has been created, or written, and is continuously being written, by the members of that particular society or community. This, in turn, facilitates a reading of the cultural text.

The task of the anthropologist as the reader of a cultural text is twofold: firstly, he or she reads the cultural text because, “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Geertz 1973: 452). The activity of reading “over the shoulders” of the cultural subjects refers to the notion of einfühlen, or empathizing, with the subjects in terms of their motivations, intentions, and objectives for action. Secondly, the anthropologist as ethnographer inscribes these readings upon his or her own texts, producing a textualization of previously read activities and interactions. The result is another text, a meta-text, created by the anthropologist herself or himself; this text operates at a different level from the first level of social activities within sociocultural structures and patterns, as it tries to translate these for an audience (in the anthropologist’s first culture) to which the activities of the observed society may be unfamiliar. Thus, the ethnographer becomes a translator (and commentator) of institutionalized activities from one socioculture to another. Like every good translator, the anthropologist must have a comprehensive knowledge of the customs, conceptualizations, schemata, and the language of the other people (and, of course, of his or her own socioculture) in order to arrive at a true and valid translation in the resultant meta-text (which he or she typically presents as a monograph) (cf. Section 8.3).

However, in acting as a cultural translator, the anthropologist runs the risk of misunderstanding and misrepresenting the ascribed texts. This risk is even greater if the translator either does not know the language of the other cultural community to a very high degree of competence (so that he or she can understand sarcasm, irony, insinuations, and other subtexts), or has not lived with the observed people for a sufficient time so that he or she is intimately familiar with even finer strands of meaning in social action and cultural patterns. There is the very real danger that, as Crapanzano (1986: 74) points out: “There is only the constructed understanding of the constructed native’s constructed point of view.” This is even more so the case, as the anthropologist ascribes utterances, opinions, attitudes, and sentiments not necessarily to the person who actually has expressed them; rather, there is the tendency to ascribe them wholesale to the community in question. Thus, the voice of the Other is usually disembodied and reconstructed in a scenario created by the author for the purpose of meeting the demands of the meta-text and its assumed audience; at best only short quotations are presented, where the individual in his or her role of the authentic voice of a particular part of the original cultural text is recognized, mainly for reasons of creating an aura of authenticity in the meta-text. This scenario of constructing patterns, structures, and meanings, which are rarely ascribed to authentic voices from within the cultural community, can raise serious questions as to the validity of the anthropologically authored cultural meta-text.

The lack of familiarity with the other’s Lebenswelt from an insider’s perspective and a lack of really competent knowledge of the foreign language would render an anthropological project of meta-text composition on the basis of a cultural text almost meaningless. However, in recent times there have been an increasing number of authors who have personal roots in the original cultural text and have been educated in a metropolitan context. Therefore, the translator is himself or herself a cultural hybrid, operating in a third space between cultures. Pratt uses the term “autoethnography” to characterize this situation, referring to “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, authoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (Pratt 1992: 7). These hybrid authors have profound linguistic and cultural competence in both cultural communities, marginal and metropolitan, and therefore are in a prime position to act as intercultural translators and mediators who can offer deep readings of the analyzed cultural text in a version of a meta-text which is adequately translated into the metropolitan language and which can also present critical perspectives on the metropolitan culture.

In an attempt to stabilize the meaning of culturally established signs, structuralism takes the basic notion of semiotics, that is, the constitution of meaning via the binary opposition of signs, and transfers it to the constitution of meaning in “reading” cultural patterns of a given society. This assumption is based on Saussure’s linguistic theory, namely that a certain kind of conventional knowledge, which functions as tacit knowledge for constructing meaning for a text, can be determined through the pattern of relationships of signs which, in turn, can be discovered by analytical procedures carried out by structuralists. Saussure assumes that there is no given definite meaning of any sign; the meaning of a sign is established by its contradiction to other signs: “In a language, as in every other semiological system, what distinguishes a sign is what constitutes it” (Saussure 1974: 121). Cultural structuralism takes this Saussurian notion and transfers it from the sphere of linguistics to cultural analysis.

One of the most prominent proponents of this approach to analyzing cultures is the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who assumes that all cultures can be read as sign systems that reflect cognitive predispositions to categorize the social world in terms of binary oppositions (for example, male/female, public/private, cooked/raw) (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1963; 1964; 1974). By analyzing cultures as sign systems, structuralists try to reveal the unconscious logic, or the “grammar,” of a cultural system. According to Lévi-Strauss, human minds are universally the same, but cultures are different expressions of basic abstract logical properties of thinking; these are common to all humans, but adapted to specific environmental conditions. Consequently, he tries to find universal categories of human thought in historically unrelated cultures by analyzing them as sign systems and applying structuralist principles. Lévi-Strauss considers the anthropologist’s reading of (frequently deficient) cultural texts to be that of a bricoleur who creates improvised structures by appropriating pre-existing materials which he or she comes across in the culture under investigation (Lévi-Strauss 1974: 16-33; 35-6). On this basis, Lévi-Strauss interprets myth and custom, not so much as the distinct product of a particular culture, but as different expressions of mental structures and images universally innate to human beings.

Like semiotics, structuralism (and post-structuralism) proposes that neither the individual nor the social community assume a central role in the analysis of culture. Rather, it is the “text,” the “grammar,” or “language” of a culture, that has to come into focus because it provides the really meaningful basis of and context for all action and interaction. Therefore, according to structuralism, the cultural form of social phenomena has to be analyzed in order to uncover the structures behind individual action, for instance, in the context of myths, death rituals, or rules of marriage. Structures are seen as transforming, since they are structuring as well as structured. They are also seen as self-regulating, as they maintain themselves autonomously against external disturbances. Cultural structuralism is interested neither in the diachronic development of the composition of parts of the cultural text nor in the socio-performative aspects of culture. Rather, it tends to be synchronic in its analyses, focusing on how the different parts of a given text fit together at a specific point in time. This approach involves identifying the relationships among the different components of the cultural text and discovering, through this parsing, an abstract system, which is then referred to as the structure. Cultural signs, just like linguistic signs in Saussure’s structuralist theory of language as a system, are understood to be arbitrary, and only become carriers of meaning by their opposition to, or distinction from, other signs. These symbolic worlds develop a logic of their own which is typically neither rationally nor consciously known by the subject of a culture. Hence, the subject is understood to be de-centered, torn apart by a myriad of conceptualizations and constructs which he or she has internalized. Whereas the interpretive approach assumes that the (individual and collective) author and reader of texts is at the center of the construction of meaning, structuralism assumes that readers and authors of text are determined by the meanings (in terms of form and content) of the cultural text. In this view, people are taken not to be creative, accountable subjects of their actions, but as the “tools,” or pawns, in language games and cultural texts. Rather than being autonomous subjects, they are understood to be objects of language and culture since they have been shaped to the core by linguistic conceptualizations and cultural patterns.

Post-structuralism takes a slightly different approach to the analysis of culture. The term refers to a broad school of critique which emerged in response to French structuralism in the 1960s.⁷¹ Like the structuralists before them, poststructuralists treat all cultural phenomena as systems of signification, the meaning of which is derived from the interrelations of their parts, rather than from a relation to an independent “reality.” However, poststructuralists consider the scientific method of meticulous parsing, as applied by structuralists, as too rigid a system to facilitate the analysis of the very complex and ever-changing cultural systems of meaning. They reject the notion of a coherent single or stable meaning in a given text; instead, they put much more emphasis on the particular contexts of the processes of meaning-making within a culture to the extent that they doubt, in principle, the possibility of gaining coherent and meaningful insights and knowledge by the study of cultural form. There are always several possible ways of reading a text, never just one correct method. For example, the meaning of a flag is not universally the same; whereas, for instance, the Union Jack signifies for British people the national symbol for patriotism and shared history, in Ireland the same flag is culturally loaded by memories of sometimes violent and bloody oppression by the British colonizer; it is seen by some as a symbol of oppression and injustice and therefore sometimes referred to as “the butcher’s apron.”

The same instability is true of structures; whereas structuralists focus on textual structures, poststructuralists argue against the idea of a structure for a given text, pointing out that any such structure is collapsible. Jacques Derrida (1974), one of the most influential theorists of post-structuralism, has argued that the texts that constitute culture can never be pinned down semantically because signs refer only to other signs in a never-ending process of signification. Therefore, any definite meaning and knowledge evades the cultural analyst: it is constantly deferred. Furthermore, there is always partiality and subjectivity at play in understanding cultures; culture consists of a myriad of multiple realities, as construed by different subjects and Discourses, which can never be understood in their entirety, be it by the professional external “reader” or by the (inter-)actants within cultural texts.

Julia Kristeva (1986) has expanded the concept of intertextuality, developed by Barthes (1977) and Derrida (1974), to grasp the multiple realities existing within a culture, seen as text. Kristeva refers to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980: 69); this idea was informed by Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (cf. Section 4.1). In the post-structural conception of intertextuality, human agency is downplayed, because authors and readers are de-centered, and the intertext is portrayed as operating independently of readers and writers, making its own connections. The status of authorship is conceptualized in a way that makes the efforts of the autonomous author as the sole originator of his or her text problematic; the author is seen more as the orchestrator, or bricoleur (Lévi-Strauss) of texts and elements of texts that have already been created. The author blends several texts together into a complex “tissue of quotations” which then becomes his or her text, as Roland Barthes explains: “A text is (...) a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations (...). The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (Barthes 1977: 146). Based on Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and Barthes’ “tissue of quotations,” it is argued that any text can be analyzed in terms of the other texts that it has absorbed and transformed. In this conception, a signifier refers to what seems to be signified but the latter turns out instead to be itself a signifier because it points to another, and so on. Instead of a final signified tied to something in the “real world,” there is an infinite regression in language itself.

Structuralists and poststructuralists both make the assumption that recurring patterns of discourse are tied to culturally and socially distributed knowledge of Discourse, and they make the assumption that something may be learned about that cultural and social knowledge through analyzing the cultural texts of that speech community as its constituent units, and the relations among them. It is important, however, to remember that culture does not consist of such texts but that it reveals itself within texts; it is always more than the text.

In addition, and as aforementioned in the context of the intercultural translator, there is a heavy emphasis on the semiotician who tries to uncover the layers of texts and meanings inherent in a single text. Although presented as purely objective and scientific accounts, their analyses are sometimes rather subjective interpretations, especially if the semiotic analysis is impressionistic, unsystematic, or too abstract and irrelevant. The assumption that categories such as membership of a social group or nation are not facts of an objective reality, as semioticians frequently imply, is wrong, because these categories are already part of cultural schemata of construal which we apply to interpret our world as a sociocultural fabric of significance; they are themselves part of cultural knowledge, and they cannot be understood as independent of this knowledge. This means that the focus of semiotic analysis must shift from describing cultural texts to the provision of empirical evidence which is used for particular interpretations and self-reflection in the sense that the semiotician is aware of the fact that, like the texts he or she is analyzing, he or she is operating in a medium which cannot be neutral.

For the purpose of learning a second language in its cultural context this implies that, although the textual approach to culture can contribute to revealing its structure and patterns, the agency of people as carriers of culture cannot be neglected. This is particularly true of the L2 learners who consciously, actively, and creatively construe meaning from the basis of embodied experience as members of a different cultural community. Culture is neither static nor neatly definable; therefore it has relevance for L2 learning only when one is conscious of the perspectivity and selectivity of notions of culture presented and discovered in the L2 classroom. Access to understanding the Other can only be achieved from carrying out activities co-operatively in the other language and culture, with all its implications for experientially-based learning in pragmatic and Discursive contexts.

7.3 Culture and social practice

The structuralist and poststructuralist conceptions of culture as text or symbolic code place prominence on the autonomous structures of cultural texts, codes, and intertexts, and suppress the role of the authors of these texts, i.e., the subject and his or her social, intersubjective, and societal (inter-)actions. The whole sphere of cultural pragmatics is neglected in their analyses, i.e., the social and societal practices that are conducted with a certain degree of consistency and competence by individuals and groups of people within a cultural collective, based on tacit cultural knowledge and shared presuppositions.

In order to understand the motivations and practices of what people are doing in a given social and cultural context, it is not sufficient to focus on isolating the structures of a society and the underlying patterns of culture (although, of course, they also have to be taken into consideration for analyzing the whole picture) and examine them in abstract categories of binary oppositions and propositional knowledge. These structures and patterns have been, and are, formed mainly as a result of social activity in the sense that experiences of contingency in social life require the construction of cultural meaning. Thereby they maintain the cultural networks of knowledge in a process of providing answers or explanations to these social (and subjective) experiences. Thus, society can be understood as “a multi-layered network of interconnected activity systems, and less as a pyramid of rigid structures dependent on a single center of power” (Engeström 2005: 36; cf. Section 5.3). At the core of social activity is the subject and his or her socioculturally developed faculties of construction which have been developed by object-centered mediation. Recent studies in cognitive linguistics emphasize the notion of the embodied mind, taking into consideration that our human embodiment shapes to a large extent both what we are and how we think: “All dimensions of human thought emerge from increasing levels of complexity in organism-environment interactions, and all of these interactions require and are grounded in our bodies” (Mark Johnson, cited in Oliveira and Bittencourt 2008: 22). In this context, the notion of body is not restrained to the fleshy boundary of the skin and to the central nervous system, but it “extends out into its environment, so that the organism and environment are not independent, but rather interdependent aspects of the basic flow of bodily experience” (Mark Johnson, cited in Oliveira and Bittencourt 2008: 23). We only can make sense through interaction with others, based on our bodily experience.

The structuralist and poststructuralist approaches therefore have to be complemented by an analysis of the ways and manners in which cultural knowledge influences social and subjective practices of action, and how embodied subjective and social practices of activity form and maintain cultural knowledge. This is even more important because of the polyphonic nature of cultural “realities” which are tied to social activity in a mutually active manner. Cultural phenomena are not just abstract constructs, charged with symbolically mediated meaning. They are fundamentally embedded in historically specific and socially structured contexts and processes. Within, and as a product of, these processes, symbolic forms are created, transmitted, modified, and received (cf. Thompson 1990: 135). Hence, cultural texts are generated in a myriad of social practices through routinely initiated and executed activities and actions on the basis of certain patterns. These, in turn, have been institutionalized by social action. Within a given geographical area, people who interact with one another over time form social bonds that help to stabilize their interactions and patterns of behavior. These relatively stable patterns and structures become the basis for making predictions and forming expectations about others. By doing things together frequently and regularly, common customs develop that solidify and turn into collective patterns and styles of action. Subsequently, they structure social practice in ways that can make certain relations of action and reaction socially predictable and expectable. Thus, the structures of social action can have a guiding and motivating influence on the activities of the individual in the sense that much of his or her social activities are facilitated by being part of certain social practices, for example, Discourses, or genres. These social structures can only have an effect on subjective activity, if the individual actively participates in social interaction and at the same time appropriates the given regulative social framework and inherent forms of cultural knowledge (cf. Section 7.4). These routinely executed patterns of action provide a stabilizing framework for social practice which, from a subjective point of view, opens up a thoroughly familiar field for action, the life-world. At the same time, they constitute the expressions of collective knowledge of meanings and actions. This knowledge is tacit because it is presupposed in all understandings and actions of members of a cultural community; therefore, it cannot be equated with verbalizable insights of the (inter-)actants into the mechanisms of their social world.

If certain procedures of social practice are repeated over and over again in a fairly similar manner in different places at different times within a cultural community, then there must exist certain intersubjective accounts of knowledge and meaning that serve as a basis for the (re-)creation of these actions. Bourdieu (1977), for example, suggests that these kinds of social practice, relating to social fields (e.g., economic, religious, political, cultural, etc.), are ontologically more relevant than the subjectively intended actions of individuals. He developed the notion of habitus which refers to the social framework wherein and whereby the habitual aspects of everyday social thought and action operate.⁷² Bourdieu defines the habitus as:

The habitus is thus simultaneously social and subjective; Bourdieu even suggests that these socially mediated dispositions literally mold the body and become second nature to the person; they are durable, structured, generative, and transposable. They supply the subject with a practical and durable sense of how to act in society; once acquired by an individual through explicit and implicit learning, but also through direct experience and imitation, they are ingrained into the body, “embodied and turned into a second nature” (Bourdieu 1990: 63). The habitus, as an embodied structure of society, reproduces the conditions of its own genesis via social practice. This process, as well as the guiding structural influence of the habitus on the actions, perceptions, and constructs of the individual and the society, is tacit: “Because habitus is, it never asks why, for it does not know otherwise. The language of familiarity presumes habitus, and therefore ignores it” (Harman 1988: 110). Habitus is the product of the sedimentation of attitudes, beliefs, and ways of doing things that have been subjectively internalized during the process of socialization and reinforced over time. Habitus is “the source of cognition without consciousness, intentionality without intentions, and a practical mastery of the world’s regularities which allows to anticipate the future without even needing to posit it” (Bourdieu 1990: 12). This implies that habitus allows the regularities of the social world to be mastered and predicted, without consciously having to construe the social workings of the environment as such. This signifies neither total ignorance on the part of the protagonists nor complete awareness of what guides their practical actions.

However, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus appears to be too stable when he says that it tells people what to do in a certain situation (cf. Bourdieu 1998: 42). It does not take into account the fact that in dynamic and differentiated postmodern societies, the subject is always involved in manifold D/discourses of social practice that continuously complement and shift his or her repertoire of social and cultural knowledge and habits. Similarities in construction, facilitated by tacit cultural knowledge and habitual social action, generate, both on subjective and social levels, a common sense of social activity and interaction. This is understood as a communicatively constituted social and cultural repertoire of everyday processes of cognitive and communicative orientation of action (cf. Feilke 1994: 67, 363). Based on this common sense, people can know, act, interact, and construct the “realities” of the world in which they are involved and are active participants in the socially constructed and maintained web of significance in which they are suspended. Construction in this sense happens; it is an event. Common sense does not usually ask for the reasons of certain instances of social behavior because it is based on distributed social conventions. Feilke (1994: 200) demonstrates this phenomenon with the example of the social act of thanking for receiving a present at a birthday celebration; it is socially completely irrelevant why one is expressing thanks to the donor, but it is of social relevance that one thanks him or her.

However, the deeper basis for this kind of regular practice of action and common sense in a society is provided by the implicit cultural knowledge as knowledge shared by the members of a community (cf. Section 7.1). Cultural knowledge is produced and maintained by social actions, because the meaning of particular acts, objects, events, and experiences are created socially. If these particular items are repetitive and regular on a larger scale, social knowledge is transformed into cultural knowledge, not in a one-dimensional process, but in a complex dialectical process, wherein social and cultural knowledge interpenetrate and mutually enrich one another. Socially generated cultural schemata of meaning, then, provide the framework for smooth interpretations and ascriptions of meaning for actions, theoretical figurations, understandings, and interactions. As such, they gain entry into the social world of subjects, groups of people, and societies where they take effect as either implicit facilitators or prohibitors of action, depending on which forms of usage are favored or, on the other hand, excluded as unsuitable for certain instances. According to Parekh (2006: 146), “society refers to a group of human beings and the structure of their relations, culture to the content and the organizing and legitimizing principles of these relations.”

Viewed in this way, culture is not only a specific repertoire of knowledge that is recorded and stored in many forms (e.g., texts, symbols, rituals, codes, artifacts, schemata of interpretations, and technologies) and then passed on within and between social and societal communities and generations in a selective manner, as structuralist and poststructuralist approaches suggest. Culture also consists of repertoires of practical social knowledge and interpretative abilities. Only through these applicative repertoires can cultural knowledge take effect in social practice, in that they are made explicit and concrete in certain socially practiced and embodied abilities and skills which allow people to interact smoothly in a predictable and comprehensible manner with other people, things, and events. In contrast to the definition of culture as a text which depicts culture as recorded reservoirs of declarative knowledge, the social aspect of culture concerns procedural knowledge in the sense of cultural abilities that supplies itself with selected skills and customs. Consequently, culture influences social structure, just as social structure influences culture. This can be seen as the double character of culture which combines and unites the two aspects of “cultural system” and “social practice” in a complex dialectical relationship (cf. Hörning 2004: 146).

In the perspective of social practice, then, culture is not so much an abstract network of schemata for interpretation, separated from its socio-practical origins, that constitutes something like an autonomous text. Culture, in this view, is a network of implicit knowledge that tacitly undergirds and structures intersubjective social practice; the former cannot be separated from the latter, as the tacit patterns of culture have to be performed in a social practice to become evident in its effect on individuals as well as on groups of people (from small groups up to whole societies). It would make sense to introduce aspects of culture as elements of social practice into the L2 classroom so as to enable learners to find ways of constructing certain dimensions of the other socioculture from the angle of habit formation on social and cultural levels.

7.4 Culture, social practice, and the subject

The mental capacities of the individual are socially constituted, hence the subject is a thoroughly social being; cultural patterns are symbolic, hence the subject is also an animus symbolicum (cf. Section 7.1). The subject has appropriated linguistic concepts, cultural patterns, and social norms to a point that he or she is completely dependent on them for any rational actions, behaviors, or thoughts. However, this is not true in the deterministic sense that structuralism would have us believe. The subject does not internalize the cultural patterns, social conventions, and norms in an identical fashion to others. Social structures and cultural patterns can only have a shaping effect on the subject by him or her actively participating in social interaction, not by internalizing them in an atomistic and isolated manner. During the process of active participation in the social (and, through it, in the cultural) sphere, the subject appropriates in ongoing and recurrent processes the given regulative social framework and cultural knowledge which suits his or her particular situation in certain circumstances. At the same time, by acting in society, he or she contributes to the process of continuing and reproducing the sociocultural knowledge, values, and norms, as Sharifan (2008) explains:

Rogoff (1995: 142) combines these notions of participation and appropriation in the concept of “participatory appropriation” which refers to how individuals change through their own subjective adjustments and understandings of sociocultural activity:

However, this is a “process of becoming” not only for the subject, but also for the social norms, values, and beliefs which cannot exist without human participation, as Wittgenstein (1953: § 432) has shown (cf. Section 5.1)⁷³. This means that culture depends on ongoing human agency because subjective and collective activities form the basis for the production of subjective and collective normative frames and schemata; only these collective and intersubjective actions lead to cultural products and cultural change: “Being an action field, culture offers possibilities of, but by the same token stipulates conditions for, action; it circumscribes goals which can be reached by certain means, but establishes limits, too, for correct, possible and also deviant action. (...) As an action field, culture not only induces and controls action, but is as much a process as a structure” (Boesch 1991: 29). An example of culture in social action is provided by Kumaravadivelu (2008: 48-50), where the culturally induced deference of the co-pilot of a Korean passenger airplane to the captain’s authority prevents him from making the captain aware of the fact that he had forgotten to put the plane on autopilot for landing in Guam in August 1997, although the co-pilot was aware of the imminent danger. The plane subsequently crashed, killing 228 of the 254 people aboard. Here, the action field of the dominant Korean culture in which absolute deference to people in authority is inscribed, led the co-pilot to adhere to the culturally induced and expected behavior at the expense of his and 227 other lives.

Culture, as an action field, is a historically developed medium of human activity. This conception of culture emphasizes the active part of the subject in the context of socioculturally situated acting and interacting. He or she is not a passive pawn in the game of cultural patterns and social norms, beliefs, and values, but plays an active part, not only in conducting his or her own life, but also in continuously negotiating and thereby reconstructing social structures and cultural patterns in a minor, yet important, manner. Thus, social structure is conceived as providing fluid patterns of action and positioning, and therefore can be seen as immanent rather than real. Culture, in turn, is conceived as being a constituent of actions, and hence an essential part of the thoughts, feelings, and activities that characterize meaningful human existence. Culture, society, and human subjects as agents are essentially interdependent and require each other’s interplay, directly and indirectly. Any action plays a part in the development of structures to which it relates, and, reciprocally, social structures and cultural patterns have no existence of their own beyond their occurrence in the activity that they structure. Culture, therefore, is a symbolic order that is inherent in social practice and individual action (cf. Straub 2004: 580). On the other hand, in order to explain a social or cultural phenomenon, one can, with some analytical effort, reduce it to the elementary individual actions and operation of which it is composed.

In this context, activity theory (cf. Section 5.3) can be drawn upon because it expands culture from being a realm of more or less stable structures and processes to an individual and social activity organized in a specific socio-technological system. As Ratner (2001) points out, “psychological phenomena have a basis in concrete, practical social activity. They are formed as people participate in social activities, they embody features of this activity, and they normally reinforce this activity although they can initiate change in activity” (Ratner 2001: 76). From this perspective, the separation of individual and social activity from distributed schemata and concepts of culture does not make sense, because this view of culture does not take into consideration the dynamic, emergent character of concepts. Furthermore, this conception implies that psychological change can be accomplished simply by autonomously changing one’s concepts or perspectives. By contrast, the concept of culture as inherent in and structuring practical activity implies that intersubjective psychological change cannot be separated from social and societal change because both concepts and psychological phenomena are grounded in practical action. Therefore, “significant psychological change requires corresponding changes in the organization of social life” (Ratner 2001: 77), including the underlying cultural schemata.

Agency is defined as a subjective concept, and the planning of actions is closely linked to control over actions (as well as over the physical environment). Consequently, an action is participatory to the structures to which it relates. At the same time, social structures could not exist beyond their occurrence in actions which they structure. An example of this relationship was presented in Section 5.3 on activity theory, where the complex activity of the hunt demands a break-down of the complex activity into several actions (e.g., beating, shooting, and retrieving). However, the subject has a modicum of personal agency; he or she is initiating action within the activity system and the person who to a large extent gives subjective meaning to what he or she does, even if the activity is structured by the overarching activity system and prescriptive social and cultural norms, including Discursive validations. Hence, people are both active participants and passive objects in social and cultural causation. They are exposed to certain contexts in a relational manner; therefore, they can also develop a reflexive distance to cultural schemata and Discourses. From this detached position, they can develop different forms and different degrees of relationships with social and cultural dynamics (for example, by invoking contextual meaning differently), according to subjective preferences, construals of situation, or interpretations of action. Thus, the potential for construction by people is not completely determined by linguistic, cultural, and social categories, but they are, to a certain extent, free to make their own choices (albeit within the scope of what is socioculturally on offer to them).

It follows, then, that every individual occupies a specific dynamic space within his or her community and culture – as construed by himself or herself and by his or her peers (and this might vary) (cf. Chapter 6). This intracultural space is made up of the many threads of different D/discourses in which the individual participates; it is not stable, but is constantly changing on the basis of the continuously ongoing process of (inter-)action and construction. It also follows that this space is facilitated by and tied to a specific language and culture which provide the structure and the categories for construction that are not available in an exactly identical manner in any other language, culture, and community. Therefore, the individual finds himself or herself positioned in a personal space in-between many different D/discourses, concepts, and categories which are necessary for the construction of meaning, action, and identity.

The glue that connects and holds people together in a cultural community is language, which is also the main medium for distributing cultural patterns and social structures. Concepts of self, Other, and world are basically constructed through communicative acts. By the use of language, ideas and practices can be passed on to others, even through time, space, and across cultures. This is true even for complex sociocultural normative concepts, such as habitus which can be described, thus generating an awareness of these processes in people for whom a particular habitus may be alien. However, the differences in the historically shaped modes of Discourses, activity, and comprehension between cultures make the cross-cultural communicative aspect difficult to enact in a meaningful way. Full participation in culturally shaped linguistic activities implies the implicit and explicit understanding of a set of existing cultural resources (values, interpretive patterns, modes of action, identity formation of people, norms, attitudes, and beliefs) and the ability to assess these for present and future activities. In contrast to cultural theories which treat the individual as an insignificant cipher in the complex cultural system, the subject must be seen as a central agent in the field of culture and society who is enabled and restrained simultaneously by cultural patterns (tacit cultural knowledge) and social norms, values, and beliefs.

The implications here for L2 learning lie in the richness of experiential contexts that must be provided for the learners in the classroom, facilitating the discovery of some cultural patterns that inform the social framework of discourse. Rogoff’s (1995) notion of participatory appropriation can play a role in the structuring of these activities. The L2 learners can negotiate their subjective participation in the other social context and its underlying cultural patterns in explicit relationship to the comparable social situations and cultural patterns of their native society and culture. Through their engagement in the activity, the subjective stance changes. This facilitates learners to handle later situations in ways prepared by their previous participation in the current activities. This is a “process of becoming” (Rogoff 1995: 142), in that learners co-construct the other social situation and cultural patterns collectively, as well as their relation to the corresponding patterns of the native culture, but they internalize it subjectively. The process of becoming refers to the subjective changes in the potential of construction (in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions) with the perspective of changed future action.