Sojourning Through Intercultural Communication
This chapter is a personal reflection of William J. Starosta’s 45-year journey to become a transplanetary interculturalist. While Weaver (Chapter 2) recounted his own transformation through his involvement with the interdisciplinary studies of intercultural communication and international relations, Starosta marked his journey by his personal encounters with a variety of theoretical renderings of culture as a central concept of the intercultural communication field. He has travelled from the notion of culture as nation-state to the recognition of culture as an ongoing re(creation), that is, a site of contestations and intersectionalities. His “double-emic” research praxis grew out of the process of “third culture building” with scholars and students of diverse cultures. He insists that the transplanetary interculturalist (1) uncover coherence within cultural accounts and compatibility within rival accounts, (2) find ways around difference eventually, (3) listen for the emergence of differences of linguisticality and cultural prejudice and promote new and productive interunder-standings, and (4) locate sites of successful and failed interpenetration of cultural meanings.
A Sense of Direction
This year marks for me 43 years of wandering down unmarked paths, then deer trails, then carriage paths, then highways in search of “intercultural communication.” The colleagues who surround me will continue such wandering first down superhighways, then jetways, and finally into space, boldly venturing where no known interculturalist has gone before.
I started my study towards the world’s first Ph.D. degree called Intercultural Communication at Indiana University as an essentialist rhetorician and as an internationalist. In 1968 “culture” equated with “nation,” and those of a given nation communicated alike. Those of a nation were ungendered, high or low in context, used monochronic or polychronic time, practiced identical proxemics, uniformly looked to the future or to the past, elaborated their codes or restricted them, and favored or avoided ambiguity. I may have used the word “dialectic” to mean a search for the purest truth at a level higher than culture, but seldom did I make reference to “dialogue.” My state of insularity lasted too long, ten more years or more, by which time I came to teach at Howard University.
I was an undergraduate for a year in India. There I learned of the vast diversity that can be found within a single nation. I learned that a thing is not necessarily a This or a That, but it can be a This-and-That. Or, it can be a This from one side and a That from the other. There are those who “can never come home again,” of which I was one. I was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and USAmerica was a strange place to me upon my return home: friendships were shallower, smiles were less sincere, self-promotion was rampant, families were analytic formalities, and the mainstream held co-cultural groups in low regard or treated them as invisible. I started to see not one, but multiple Americas.
About this time I read work by Arthur L. Smith, Lyndrey A. Niles, Jack Daniel, Dorthy Pennington, Deborah Atwater, and Melbourne Cummings, along with Jahn and Iyasere and other African writers. I was pushed and pulled between the idea of Africa’s or America’s unity and its multiplicity. Thirty-five years ago, on an ECA panel with Molefi Asante, I asked him if the suitable level of analysis for African communication was the continent, the country, or the linguistic or ethnic group. I did not answer my own question for many years to come, when I raised the question again, this time for Asia.
Thus I moved from cultural centrist to cultural polycentrist. I still saw difference, but I became less and less able or willing to assign preference. I started to see differences projected from a certain standpoint or positionality as a political or a pragmatic choice. I discovered agency. The motto that guided me through an undergraduate year in India, “accept, accept, accept,” gave me new insight when applied to USAmerica. I experienced a swirl of smaller essentialisms within a larger national unit. It took me some years at Howard to also deconstruct co-culture to see that even co-cultural groups contained their hierarchies and their diversity, and that no single person, gay or straight, Black, White, or Other, was the quantum of that co-culture.
What was the rest of the field doing at this time? It was moving in an opposite direction, toward essentialism and covering laws. Interpersonal communication was equated with intercultural communication, and culture was used as a means to extend the generality of interpersonal theory. The research of that day was replete with binaries; a society was either a this or a that. It was high or low context, masculine or feminine, future or past oriented, tolerant of ambiguity or rule-bound, individualistic or collectivist (see Merkin, 2005). My Yin and the field’s Yang were steadily diverging, losing all sense of chi (Starosta, 2008).
Scholars of that day saw Strangers, who ached to reduce uncertainty (Gudykunst, 1995; Gudykunst & Kim, 1997), who longed to move toward an industrial model of society without extensive rules and with elaborated codes and neoliberal isolationism. The researchers saw or acknowledged no real difference within a nation, and looked down on those co-cultural researchers who attested to alternarity. Their subjects had no history and no context. They had no life narratives. They had no voice. They were objects to be aggregated in arrays as examples of one societal binary or another in order to explore for characteristic approaches to face negotiation or uncertainty reduction. While writing a chapter about how I had African American work associates and South Asian social circles back at home (Starosta, 2006), I could not find the place the new research considered to be USAmerica. I felt myself plunging from the “essentialist” generalities toward a “critical race perspective” from a point on the periphery.
Grasping What Lies Beyond the Reach
Alberto González, Dolores Tanno, Nobleza Asuncion-Landé, Guo-Ming Chen, Jensen Chung, Wei Sun, Ringo Ma, Ling Chen, and many East Asians then entered my professional life. The journal I had by then founded, The Howard Journal of Communications, went quickly from a one that was open to all communication research to one with a focus on race, culture, or gender (Starosta, 2010). The focus on gender was not then as key to my professional existence as it has become now. “Culture” or “ethnicity” started out with a focus on the African American or the communication of domestic Hispanic groups. In a short time the ties that I had forged with East Asian communication specialists formed a bridge to Howard’s journal. That bridge, when I crossed it, took me to the realization that most of what the positivist communication researchers of North America and North and West Europe called universal about human communication was severely limited in applicability and scope. My return from India took away my belief in a unitary USAmerica; and my co-authorship and service as a frequent panel critic for Chinese-diasporic researchers eroded my belief in a universal communication theory.
Gonzalez and Tanno gave me the enlightening opportunity to perform a 25-year retrospective on my connecting of intercultural communication and rhetoric. Seeing myself from the other side of 25 years rendered me a stranger to myself. Simultaneously, friendships I had formed with students and colleagues at Howard [a Historically Black College or University] provided me daily insights into the way mainstream researchers are viewed through Afrocentric eyes. I was losing a belief in culture. My race was racing, my place was placing, my identity was identifying, my gender was gendering, my nation was nationing, and my culture was culturing. Culture was not a thing, it was an ongoing (re)creation, a site of contestations and intersectionalities clashing with bright, acrimonious sparks. Students came to me to ask “the” way Greeks or Asian Indians communicated, and I could not tell them. Greece or Pakistan was a location, Africa and Brazil were locations, but they were places of richness and variety. Those who assigned a single race to Mexico in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City, or who specified one race for the residents of Brazil did so as blatantly political acts. They exercised the power of definition. Their discourse dripped with the trappings of power.
My discursive journeys with Guo-Ming Chen are trips I shall not forget. Chen, Wenshu Lee, and Ringo Ma were largely instrumental in drawing Chinese scholars from around the world to the Eastern Communication Association each year. For 15 years, starting about 1988, ECA became the destination of choice of those who were of a speech communication tradition from anywhere within the Chinese diaspora. Somehow, I came to travel with them on their academic voyage. That venue then shifted to the National Communication Association.
Maybe it was my Asian Studies graduate minor, with Mandarin and Hindi as my languages. Or it may have been fate. But the Chinese group started to turn to me as panel critic, sometimes for two or three panels at a single ECA meeting. I was adept in face negotiation, and would not lower the face of an author of weak work, nor laud too loudly the work of brilliant researchers. A sense of comfort and safety began to develop between me and members of the nascent Association for Chinese Communication Studies. I learned about China from ten or fifteen angles each conference, and was forced to try to offer responsive critiques of ACCS work. I was pulled farther and farther from my comfort zone. I had left the cart paths for the highways. I had to run even to stand still. Just ahead of me went Guo-Ming Chen.
Chen was part philosopher, part psychologist, part positivist, part religious leader, and altogether a scholar. We started to dialogue for one or another professional publication, and continued our dialogues over a period of 15 more years. Our interactions took my thinking to places that were unfamiliar, places down the rabbit hole, places that were one thing viewed from the West and another when viewed from the East. No other experience could have opened me to alternative views of culturing the way our conversations and dialogues did. I reached a realization that positivist research must be translated for end-users by means of experience close, thick examples of the phenomena being described (Mao, Qian, & Starosta, 2010).
A funny thing, culture. When I read about it in undergraduate texts, it has substance, form, dimensions, and takes the shape of binaries. But the closer I stand to it, the more I see Richardson’s crystalline reflections, deflections, refractions, and diffusions. The closer I stood to the thing called culture, the more I see myself gazing at a reflective surface that reveals me and my assumptions as much as it does any intrinsic quality of the thing being studied. It was at in invited plenary presentation in Sweden with the World Communication Association and the International Listening Association that I made one of my most important realizations: I no longer viewed culture as a thing “out there.” I could no longer apprehend it by seeing it from one fixed position. This thing called culture was apprehensible only through “listening” (Starosta & Chen, 2005). I had shed my cocoon as an intercultural communicator and had emerged as an intercultural listener!
While grasping for the truths that lay beyond my intercultural reach, I saw they would emerge only through a process of “Third Culture Building” (Starosta, 1991, 2009). I would have to risk a part of my cultural self in order to authentically engage the cultural other. I would have to set aside my power and privilege long enough to risk being changed by each new cultural encounter. Upon my return from Sweden I saw all matters of gendering and racing and culturing and placing with new eyes. I was at a site of becoming and contestation, a place replete with hierarchies and domination and hegemony, and was co-moving with students who, with me, were seeking safety from the tempest of identity negotiation. Every meeting became an adventure; and every conversation a co-creation.
Where the Known Meets the Other
I was invited as a featured presenter in Amman and in Shanghai. I gave an address to persons from 20 Islamic societies on the intersection of religion and politics, and talked with Chinese from all parts of the nation and from elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora about the way in which the “circumference” of cultural identities opportunistically expands in order to assert a position of greater power (Starosta & Chen, 2010). Did my message have implications for the new China? Probably it did if someone was inclined to listen for them, and it did not if one chose not to reflect on such connections. I found myself to be the postmodern author, whose words became the property of the reader, not the writer, once they left my pen. I was engaged in a Japanese dialectic process of calculating how to offer words that could hint at my meaning, and then awaiting a response to see if my interlocutor was ready to follow any suggested trails of my words.
I wrote an article with Lili Shi, a recent Howard Ph.D., on the rhetoric of Mahatma Gandhi. I tried to view him as an outgrowth of Indian society, whereas Dr. Shi saw him first through Chinese, then European eyes. Missing was the North American gaze (Starosta & Shi, 2007). I found myself drawn to the work of Yoshitaka Miike on Asiacentric communication. We both knew Asia to be a place of diversity, but we shared with Molefi Asante the need for a counterpoint to Western generalizations about the universality of human communication. Yes, we overgeneralized and we reinscribed, but the freedom we experienced in chasing “What If’s” was exhilarating! The holism, the perpetual change, the relationships, the harmony, the almost mystic interconnectivity, the idealism that became the focus of our work was exciting beyond recounting. And it drew down bolts of lightning from the pontiffs of many mountaintops across Asia and from Asian Americans.
The “What If?” the “What Would It Be Like If It Weren’t Like This?” the “Why Not This?” was our springboard to the unknown. Our new essentialisms and new inscriptions created a stir, then provoked a counter-literature. In probably too few cases our work created a Zen-like realization that the truth was neither here nor there, neti-neti in Sanskrit. It was the product of the collision of the impossible with the What If. The “What If?” goes beyond the Aristotelian to grasp at the Thought Experiment, to startle Schrodinger’s intercultural cat from its essentialist slumber. Rethinking settled propositions moves the scholar from a remote campfire and places her at the launch site of an extraterrestrial study capsule.
Responsiveness to What We Cannot Control
What to pack on the extraterrestrial sojourn where so few interculturalists have dared to go? Dialectics, for one. Wenshu Lee, Tom Nakayama, Aaron Cargile, Shinsuke Eguchi, and others have noted that the cultural is not a static location, but rather a series of locations that can be accessed only through the triangulations of a particular intercultural exchange. We will know from our essentialisms roughly where to search, but will know only at that moment what we will find.
Third Cultures, for two. That Netherlander Hofstede and his followers have built a value system that implicitly renders Western industrial society as the final harbor for all good interculturalists. Their sampling of mostly White employees from IBM world worksites provides an essentialist, prefabricated model of what life resembles to an elite Westerner, and poses that the model fits nations, not elements within nations, not genders or technical specialists, not classes or gender orientations, not those of one or another generation (Merkin, 2005). And so the Third Culture Building model starts with the waters that lap at the walls surrounding the “netherlands,” and questions what these walls would look like from space. It engages local residents in Dialogue that changes, uplifts, challenges, comforts, and enriches both interactants, and carries both to a vantage point they would not have achieved alone; a vantage point that stands beyond the periodic storms of the North Sea. Having achieved an unfamiliar point of aerial vantage through authentic dialogue, both interactants may stay skybound, and neither may wish to return to life below sea level, at the mercy of cultural and national and class essentialisms. Except that the interculturalist’s flight will not be solo and it will not be whimsical, it will not be a flight solely of privilege or of vanity or of pathologic individualism. It will aim toward vital places that neither interactant would have thought to approach alone. It will seek the repair of wrongs, the amelioration of oppression, the cooperative addressing of problems, and the sharing of material and nonmaterial resources in the cause of teaching others also to fly. It will move from a place of individual indulgences to joint gratifications.
Third, Asian perspectives. The future will leave the static belief in essentialisms that equate with nation, and will move in places of competing but complementary forces. The activation of one’s most familiar cultural possibilities will be met by the resistance and corrections of alternate cultural possibilities. While the solo researcher may be able to plot cultural starting points, all final cultural destinations will be mutually negotiated. Forces of privilege and power will try to define the conversation, and to keep it within comfortable and controllable bounds, but will fail.
Every attempt to impose false essentialisms will be undone by the forces of change. Every attempt to individualize will dash against the possibilities of the holistic. Every truth that tries to stand alone will be viewed dialectically against the counter-standards of other truths. Stand-alone studies will be related to other cultural knowledge, and will lose their claims to cultural certitude. The “stellar” researcher will require the navigation tools provided by the imagining of new harmonies among elements that previous generations of researchers viewed as unique and disparate. What If? and Why Not? will provide the star maps to approach “accept, accept, accept.”
Fourth, merging horizons. Hans-Georg Gadamer looked for a place of merged horizons, a place of interlinguisticality, a place governed by philosophic hermeneutics (Roy & Starosta, 2001). In his view, each person carries a set of prejudices that incline her to see the world in a familiar way. This equates easily with “Culture.” But the responsible researcher does not stay immutably mired in these initial prejudices. She sees over the horizon, beyond the individual range of sight. In Edward T. Hall’s or Edward Stewart’s parlance, she goes “beyond culture” through interaction with the Other. Each conversation with the other lays bare a fuller vision of the self. What cultural prejudices were earlier followed blindly now become options and starting points, and “playing a role” moves toward the self-conscious playing “of” a role.
Fifth, multiple authenticities. My work in intercultural communication repeatedly came back to the “authentic.” Is it authentic for a White scholar to research a Black rhetor? Is it authentic for a patriarchic theory of acculturation to be applied to women? Is it authentic to claim knowledge of an experience that had been gained by means of book knowledge, not daily living? My answer to the problem of authenticity was to work toward “double-emic” perspectives and criticism. Each participant to an exchange has pertinent cultural, generational, and gendered experience. Though individuals have formed a community identity by means of different paths, they may yet come to share some categories of experience, or an emic understanding. The task of interpretation of intercultural and interethnic events by a third party entails the gathering of emic understandings of the events that are the subject of discussion. As critic or facilitator, both (or all) of the community perspectives must be developed and used to generate possible points of non-isomorphic interpretations of the event at hand. An intercultural critic may then try to explain those places where the various community or gender representatives will be inclined to view the matter at hand differently. This critic would have little to say about “right” or “wrong,” just about isomorphic on non-isomorphic understandings of the issue at hand.
Sixth, internarrativity. Finally, the interculturalist of the future will develop tools for internarrativity. In the Fisherian tradition, humans narrate. They build stories that are true to internal logic, true to the individual’s experience, true to the collective experience of the narrator and others, and good, or moral, in some larger sense.
The transplanetary interculturalist will hone tools to locate coherence within cultural accounts and compatibility within rival accounts. She will find ways around difference, even while philosophically recognizing socialized difference as the starting point of culture. She will listen for the emergence of unnoticed differences of linguisticality and cultural prejudice, and ease the route toward new and productive interunderstandings. She will locate sites of the successful or failed interpenetration of cultural meanings.
Conclusion
Samuel Coleridge awakened from an opium dream with the verse “Kubla Khan” rattling through his head. He hurried to try to capture the perfect words that filled his clouded mind. Meanwhile I, humble interculturalist, have never been to “where Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man.” And my drug of choice has been culture, not opium. Yet, the visions that flooded my mind as I prepared this presentation may, however lyrically, converge with some of the work of others. I await the launch of their research as they search for even more distant, ever higher understandings of culture and its consequences.
Author’s Note
A version of this paper was presented for a panel on the future of intercultural communication at the 2010 Eastern Communication Association. This accounts for the largely oral style.
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