INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION – 2ND ASSIGNMENT (SUMMARY)

 

CHAPTER 5: CULTURE IS COMMUNICATION

In recent years the physicist, mathematician, and engineer have accustomed themselves to looking at a wide range of events as aspects of communication. A book title such as Electrons, Waves and Messages does not seem incongruous. Another book title, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, seems so appropriate that it is readily accepted, at least by the scientifically inclined layman. However, the behavioral scientists have only recently begun to examine their respective fields as communication. The reader may wonder about the nature of the relationship between communication as I use the term and the communication theory of the electronics laboratory. In one way it might be said that the communication theory is shorthand for talking about communication events that have already been subjected to considerable analysis, such as the phonetics of a language, better than others. If a person really wants to help introduce culture change he should find out what is happening on the informal level and pinpoint which informal adaptations seem to be the most successful in daily operations. Talking is a highly selective process because of the way in which culture works. No culture has devised a means for talking without highlighting some things at the expense of some other things. The principal difference, as I see it, between the electronic engineer's approach and the approach of the cultural-communication specialist is that one works with highly compressed symbolic data while the other tries to find out what happens when people talk, before the data is stripped of all its overtones. In considering man's total life as communication we see a spectrum covering a wide range of communication events. It is possible to observe complete messages of differing duration, some of them very short and others covering years and years. In general the study of culture deals with events of fairly short duration. The psychology of the individual in his cultural and social setting presents communication events of longer over-all duration. The study of government and political science may involve messages that take years to unfold. The following examples show how the duration of these messages can vary over a wide spectrum. “When a husband comes home from the office, takes off his hat, hangs up his coat, and says 'Hi' to his wife, the way in which he says 'Hi',” reinforced by the manner in which he sheds his overcoat, summarizes his feelings about the way things went at the office. Yet the total message as delivered is not the significant components of a communication on the level of culture are characterized by their brevity as compared with other types of communication. The fact that communication can be effected in so brief a time on the cultural level is often responsible for the confusion which so often occurs in cross-cultural exchanges. As a whole, the personality comes basic to understanding culture as communication. He also has to learn to scale his perceptions up or down, depending upon what type of communication he is trying to unravel This leads to an understandable occupational blindness which makes it almost impossible for him to pay close attention to communications of other types, on other wave lengths, as it were. One person may be an expert in long-range events, another in short-term interactions. Further, if we return to language as it is spoken as a specialized communication system, we can learn something of how other less elaborated systems work. Most of what is known about communications has been learned from the study of language. Because the work with language has been so fruitful, there are certain analogies drawn. From it which can be useful in the description of other communication systems. Yet, whether a language is near or far, closely related or unrelated, there are certain steps which have to be taken in the analysis of the language in order that learning may proceed. At first the new language is nothing but a blur of sound. Soon, however, some things seem to stand out, recognizable through rather slowly and is only fully known after years. The portion of the communications spectrum which embraces political events is composed of units of much longer duration. The message is composed of numerous situations and acts-something which is understood by any political scientist or statesman. Beyond this, men like Toynbee have been trying to work out the grammar of a message which may last for several hundred years, thereby transcending the lifetime of an individual human being. The language of politics and the language of culture are a long way apart, yet each subsumes the other. A breakdown of messages into these components, sets, isolates, and patterns is events recur. In learning the new language, we discover, after having reproduced a number of words in our mouths, that the "words" are made up of sounds of various sorts, many of· which are quite different from the sounds of English. To repeat, in discovering how a new language works and in learning that language, one starts with something a kind to the word, made up of sounds, and put together in a particular way and according to certain set rules, which we call syntax. These are the basic steps and they identify the basic components of a language. Because the terminology of the linguist is specialized and overly complex, Trager and I introduced a new set of terms which apply to all types of communication, including language. The cover terms are used to designate the three principal elements of a message. The sets are what you perceive first, the isolates are the components that make up the sets, while the patterns are the way in which sets are strung together in order to give them meaning. The idea of looking at culture as communication has·been profitable in that it has raised problems which had not been thought of before and provided solutions which might not otherwise have been possible. The fruitfulness of the approach can be traced to the clear distinction which was made between the formal, informal, and the technical, as well as the realization that culture can be analyzed into sets, isolates, and patterns. It is interesting to note that the early studies of the material culture of the American Indian were originally approached in this way but became entangled in a methodological bog because the study of linguistics had not progressed sufficiently at that time to enable the worker to draw any useful analogies from the way in which language worked. The data suggested, however, that there were things like the isolate which were called traits and catch-all combinations comparable to the word which were called traitcomplexes. In many instances the earlier attempts at handling material culture foundered because the living informant, if available at all, was not used properly to provide a true basis for the field worker's analysis. Somehow field work tended then, as it does today, to become contaminated by the culture of the scientist. Like the philosophers and alchemists of the past who looked for the right things in the wrong way, many anthropologists have been searching for the essential building blocks of culture. Using the phoneme as a model, they tried to discover its cultural equivalent, assuming in the process that culture was an entity, like language. In reality the phoneme is a cluster of sounds recognizable to the speakers of the language.

Sources:

https://monoskop.org/images/5/57/Hall_Edward_T_The_Silent_Language.pdf