From the earliest times that we have language written in a more convenient form than clay tablets, steles, or rune stones, we find travelers writing anecdotes about strange peoples. Herodotus (c.484 c.425 BC) was called not only the father of history but also the first travel writer. He was fascinated by the Scythians, whom he visited on the northern shore of the Black Sea, and so gave us the first description in western literature of a people living beyond the pale of civili­zation, as Casson puts it. He “describes the various tribes and how they live (by agriculture, grazing or hunting), how hard the winters are, how this affects horses very little but mules and donkeys very much” (Casson [1974] 1994: 108). We have Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born in Uzbekistan but Persian in language and culture (c.973 c.1048 AD), sometimes named the first anthropologist, who focused in his description of India on caste, class system, rites and customs, cultural practice and women’s issues. And there is Ibn Khaldun of the fourteenth century from Morocco, historian and inventor of sociology, also writer about strange facts.

Cultures may have been in contact since time immemorial but the means of sharing such experiences long-distance and over time did not exist as it does today. It does not need much reflection to realize that such sharing as did then exist was based on features which struck the writer as noticeable and unusual. In other words, consciously or not, these descriptions were based on a comparison with the writers’ native culture. Ethnographic descriptions still tend to be based on some comparison. That is why Nacirema works as a parody. These rather simplistic statements about comparison carry implications for the field and scholarship of intercultural discourse. The occasional reflections in this Handbook on culture as a process of social construction as well as critiques of an understanding of culture as reified and essentialist are certainly appropriate but become at times in the field at large somewhat strained by excess, given that such discussions of data are based on assumptions that people possess a culture, certainly a reified view.

Let us use an illustrative example of the same phenomena from another aspect of the study of language. Most researchers now agree that a man and woman exchanging meaningful utterances in society belong to a class called gender which is a social construct, not the essentialist class of sex which belongs to biology. But still the operational definition of gender in most if not all experi­mental research is one based on biological primary and secondary sexual characteristics. In other words, a certain degree of inconsistency thus holds between our theoretical and operational definitions. The careful reader will see traces of the same kind of inconsistency between some of the theoretical claims and intercultural phenomena of discourse. Inconsistency can be a good thing when it gives us Lebensraum to find new thoughts and not be boxed in by official theory as we were for example by Skinnerian habit-formation theory and audio-lingual language teaching methodology. But we should admit that such is the nature of our beast.

Another implication which follows from this background is that the ancient travelers were rarely idle tourists, but men (and they were men) of a practical bent, traders and businessmen, soldiers and explorers in search of gold and treasure. They had no interest in languages per se and got by with pidgins such as Sabir and lingua francas – in 250 AD you could travel from the shores of Euphrates to Britain under the pax romana with only two languages, koine Greek and Latin (Casson [1974] 1994: 122). Even today, many scholars writing about cross-cultural communication tend to ignore language. For example, under the Wikipedia heading of “Cross-Cultural Communication” there is no mention of linguistics or anthropology as disciplines which promote the study of cross-cultural communication, nor does the bibliography cite a single linguist. Nor has the subject received much interest or respect from linguists; communication is after all a topic with language at its core. Or as Piller puts it, if in another context: “Intercultural Communication [has had] a somewhat old-fashioned, dowdy, not quite-with-it … image”(this volume, p.3).

So called “Cross-cultural Studies” has fared differently in anthropology. During World War II and thereafter, various governmental departments turned to anthropologists for an understanding of national character (essentialist and implicitly comparative in nature); highly respected work by Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict was the result (Scollon and Scollon 2003: 542). George Murdock’s renowned data set “The Human Relations Area Files” and later Douglas White’s “Standard Cross-Cultural Sample” (see Murdock and White 1969) are collections of field data from a large sample of societies in a format which enables cross-cultural comparisons in quantitative studies to establish statistical evidence of significance.

It is only within the last half-century with the development of sociolinguistics that intercultural discourse has become a respected field of study and this Handbook is the result of it. We the editors and all the future readers owe considerable gratitude to the authors of these chapters for making sense of and providing coherence to these fairly untilled fields of human experience. In fact, this Handbook is a new experience, and we are grateful.

Christina Bratt Paulston

Scott F. Kiesling

Elizabeth S. RangelPittsburgh

September 2011

REFERENCES

Casson, Lionel. [1974] 1994. Travel in the Ancient World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Murdock, G. P. and Douglas R. White. 1969. Standard cross-cultural sample. Ethnology 8, 329–69.

Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Scollon. 2003. Discourse and intercultural communi­cation. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, and H. E. Hamilton (eds.). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. 538–47.

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cross-cultural_communication. Updated March 10, 2011.