Interpersonal communciation class due in 12 hours

2

Culture Blends

Michael Agar

Introductory note from the Editors

Communication is inseparable from culture. As Michael Agar shows, even the grammar of a

language makes no sense without culture. Agar experienced this firsthand when he tried to greet

someone in Austrian German: should he use an informal or formal second-person pronoun?

Have you faced a similar challenge when learning a foreign language? If choosing the proper

pronoun requires cultural knowledge, what do you need to know in order to negotiate more

complex social behaviors? For instance, how do you figure out who is expected to pay for drinks

on a date? What happened to Agar when he faced this conundrum (not in Austria, but at the

University of Maryland)? How did cultural norms and expectations, gender relations, status

hierarchies, and perhaps even regional differences come into play?

A few years ago I was talking to a Black colleague at the University of Maryland, a

faculty member from another department. I was trying to jump-start a program, but

to do so I had to tangle with the university bureaucracy; and universities are just as bad

as governments and corporations. I complained because the various offices that were

supposed to help start programs actually made it more difficult to do so.

My colleague looked at me, shook his head, and started talking: "The system is not

your friend." He talked some more, with the "not your friend" chant repeated every so

often. The irony is that his life was the mythic American success story. He'd worked his

way up from poverty to a Ph.D., but, as far as he was concerned, he'd done it in spite of

the walls American institutions had built rather than with their help.

From Michael Agar, Language Shock, 13-30. © 1994 by Michael H. Agar. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins

Publishers.

A C11lt11ral Approach to Interpersonal Comnrnnication: Essential Readings, Second Edition.

Edited by Leila Monaghan, Jane E. Goodman, andjennifer Meta Robinson.

Editorial material and organization© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Culture Blends 13

His journey out of an Afro-American urban neighborhood had convinced him that

institutions - the "system" - took care of themselves and nobody else. My journey out

of a White small town had led me to expect institutions to do their job and help you

out; if they didn't, you had a right to complain.

These different ways of looking at things had come to life in our common language,

and they tied in with who we were, with our different social identities. The differences

happened inside the same language, just as differences do between languages as distinct

as Japanese and English.

One Friday afternoon, not long afterward, I went to a faculty reception. I met a

colleague whom I'd corresponded and talked on the phone with but never met in

person. She'd helped me out, a lot, by sending me some bibliographies and course

outlines from her field. She'd handed me a shortcut into the way things of mutual

interest looked from a different discipline's point of view.

When I finally met her, I thanked her and said something like "The least I can do is

buy you a drink."

She snapped to attention and said, rather sharply, "I can pay for my own drink."

I explained that I'd have made the same offer to any colleague who'd helped me out,

male or female or any other variation on the theme. I guess you could say that she just

didn't understand. But, in this case, we both did. She'd read my invitation as a come­

on, converting her from colleague to pickup; I'd meant it as thanks.

Something happened, in our common language, something that had to do with

who we were. Something came up, jolted us with a difference, made us aware that the

"natural" way of doing things wasn't "natural" at all. And, once again, it happened

inside the same language, not between two different ones.

Differences like these - the sort of misunderstandings that we usually associate with

a foreign language - happen inside a language all the time. It happens when a traveler

stops in a small southern town during his drive from New York City to Atlanta and

realizes that his impatience with slow service in a store is deeply rooted in how

New Yorkers expect a customer to be treated.

It happens when a doctor sees that what a patient is trying to tell her won't fit the

tried and true diagnostic categories, so if she wants to figure out the patient's illness,

she's going to have to learn more about the patient's world.

It happens when a graduate of a Black university lands his first job in an all-White

office, finds that some of his humor doesn't work, and sets out to learn what it is that

people in the office think is funny.

Differences happen within languages as well as across them. The way of seeing

I'm trying to bring to life in this book works inside your own language as well as

when you learn a second language. In the course of the book, stories about American

English will come up frequently. By the end of the book, the moral of these stories

will have been brought into focus more sharply - learning a second language and

learning more about your own language are, in principle, the same thing.

Usually when the subject of language differences comes up in the United States,

images of ethnic groups come to mind. And usually the subject carries a message that

the differences are a problem.

14 MichaelAgar

A while ago The Washington Post reported a riot in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood

downtown. A police officer had shot a Hispanic man. Some said the latter had pulled

a knife. Others said he was already in handcuffs.

At several points in the story the Post mentioned that communication had been a

problem, that the officers didn't speak Spanish and many of the neighborhood residents

didn't speak English. Suspicions of bad intentions, with no chance of communicating

to the contrary, fueled both sides until the situation exploded like lighter fluid poured

over smoldering wood.

The Post pointed out that Spanish-speaking officers are conspicuous by their absence

on the D.C. police force. The Post mentioned the obvious solution-hire more Hispanic

officers and teach the others Spanish. Another solution, not mentioned in the paper -

provide free English instruction for all new immigrants.

The Post, and most everybody else, assumes that language instruction would solve

the problem. The Post, and most everybody else, is wrong. The majority think that

language is mostly grammar. Teach people the grammar, give them a dictionary, and

they'll communicate. But anyone who's studied a second language in the classroom

and then tried to use it in the real world knows better than that. A friend's main

memory of his Spanish course was the sentence El oso ni baila ni canta - "The bear

neither dances nor sings." The main use for this timeless passage was to show his

Hispanic colleagues how little he'd learned.

Popular ideas about "language" squeeze the concept much too tightly. The tendency

is to draw a circle around language, to herd neat sentences into the corral and wrangle

out the parts of speech. But most problems with language, the problems that come up

when you try to use it to communicate, aren't about sentences and parts of speech. They

have to do with wild herds of sentences, out on the open range.

D on't get me wrong. Had there been a shared grammar and dictionary in the midst

of that passionate confrontation between Hispanics and police in Mount Pleasant, it

couldn't have hurt. But, as the meetings and arguments and newspaper articles since

the riot make clear, the confrontation in Mount Pleasant was an encounter between

different worlds of meaning, meaning that travels well beyond the dictionary, meaning

that tells you who you are, whom you're dealing with, the kind of situation you're in,

how life works and what's important in it-meaning that ties language inside the circle,

grammar and the dictionary, to the world outside.

If you want to use language, if you want to communicate, language inside the circle

isn't enough. The circle is a lie. It's like saying that if you can put rings on a piston, you

can drive in traffic.

To understand language, you have to understand that differences in language go well

beyond what you find in the grammar and the dictionary. Otherwise, why would my Black and

female colleagues and I have had trouble, even though we all spoke the "same" language?

[ ... ]

Recently an Austrian friend of mine came to Washington to teach and study at

Georgetown University. She could tack through English grammar with the best of

them and had a better vocabulary than most of the native-born undergraduates in my

lecture class.

Culture Blends 15

After a couple of months I met her for dinner and asked her how everything was

going. "Fine," she said, and then, after a moment's hesitation, "But what is a 'date'?"

She knew how to use the word in a sentence - 'Tm going on a date"; "How about a

date?" She wasn't confused because the word also means a number on a calendar or a

sweet piece of fruit. But none of that explained what a "date" was.

I started to answer, and the more I talked the more lost I became in how Americans

see men and women, how they see relationships, intimacy - a host of connected

assumptions that I'd never put into words before. And I was only trying to handle

straight dates. It was quite different from her Austrian understanding of men and

women and what they are to each other. For a while she looked at me as if I'd just

stepped out of a flying saucer, until she finally decided I was serious.

I gave up trying to explain date. I told her I'd just try to do one. But what with

wisecracks and shifts between Austrian German and American English, the scene

turned into a Marx Brothers movie. She never did learn what a date was all about, at

least not from me. But we found out that whatever date meant, it went far beyond

what the grammar and the dictionary could handle.

It hadn't been easy moving in the other direction, either. I've lived in Austria several

times, and even after all these years I'm still puzzled by Du and Sie.

Du is "you," the informal second person singular pronoun, and Sie is "you," only it's

the formal version. English hasn't made the distinction since we lost thou, but many of

the world's languages do - tu and vous in French, tu and usted in Spanish, to mention a

couple of other European examples.

The grammar books are clear as freshly washed crystal. Du, the informal version, is

for relatives, friends, and kids. Sie is for everybody else. However, the rule doesn't carry

you very far.

I was at a professional meeting in Vienna. A female colleague, about my age, talked

with me in the hall between sessions. We called each other Sie. At midday I was walking

down the street, alone, and she passed me, alone. As she passed, she chatted for a

second and used Du. That's nice, I thought, she's promoted me to a friend.

Later in the afternoon, back in the hall, she called me Sie. I turned to a male

friend, with whom I was already per Du, as they say in Austria, and asked him just

what was going on. He stared back, amazed at how stupid the human species could

be when it tried.

"She's flirting with you. Obviously."

More embarrassing still - at a party a few months later, an Austrian man, about my

age, one of the few other people informally dressed, walked up and started a conversa­

tion. I used Sie, and so did he. After a while, his girlfriend walked up, said hello, turned

to me, and said, "W hat do you do in Vienna?" using the Du form.

I smiled and asked her what it was that made her choose Du instead of Sie. I meant

it as a pure research question.

She stiffened, looked annoyed, and said, "Entschuldigen Sie" - "You excuse," using the

formal pronoun. You'd have to translate that as "Excuse me" to get the right effect in English.

After some social acrobatics on the part of every body, we straightened out the mis­ understanding. Since her boyfriend and I were talking in a friendly way, she assumed

16 Michael Agar

we were already friends, and a friend of her boyfriend got an automatic Du. The rule

was hers, not a general one you could rely on.

I turned to the amused boyfriend and asked how he figured out what to call people.

He shrugged his shoulders and said the Austrian equivalent of "Hell if I know, I just

listen to the other person and fake it from there."

I still can't spell out the rules. And I've barely touched all the generational, political, and

lifestyle issues that move Du and Sie around. Pronouns, something you'd think would be

classic grammar-book material, turned out to be one of the worst problems I had.

There's no escape, either. Every time you talk you have to use pronouns, though I

learned that some tortured German is produced just to avoid the issue. Little wonder

that people try to avoid it. Every time you use the pronouns you have to look at who

you are, whom you're talking with, and the circumstances, and then make a choice, a

rapid choice that won't disrupt the flow of talk. And you have to do it using rules that

not everyone will agree are correct.

A couple of years ago, my friend and colleague Ruth Wodak and I taught a seminar

in Vienna. We decided to take on Du and Sie. The first day we asked the students to tell

one or two stories that showed how the rules weren't clear. These, remember, were

Austrian German speakers talking about their native language in their native language.

Each of the students had several stories. They told them with passion. It turned into

a linguistic therapy group. I imagined - it never happened, but it wasn't difficult to

picture - that at any moment they were going to fall from their chairs, crying and

pounding the floor with their fists, and scream, "God, please free us from this pro­

nominal system that causes so many traumas and crises in our lives!"

On the one hand, you might be speaking the same language - like my American

colleagues and me. On the other hand, you might be learning a different language - like

Spanish or German. Grammar and the dictionary, language inside the circle, are

important, no doubt about it. But grammar isn't enough to communicate, and com­

munication can occur without all the grammar.

Language has to include more than just language inside the circle. To use a language,

to live in it, all those meanings that go beyond grammar and the dictionary have to fit

in somewhere. The circle that people - and some linguists - draw around language has

to be erased.

Culture is the eraser.

Usually people think of "culture" as something that a particular group of people

have. Cultures roll around the planet like so many billiard balls, self-contained objects

that might collide or bounce off the cushion but still retain their perfect round shape.

People use "culture" this way all the time. I just gave an example of Austrian culture

using Du and Sie. Before that, the example had to do with American culture surround­

ing the word date. The newspaper story dealt with Hispanic culture, and the two

anecdotes the book opened with were about Black culture and women's culture. The

labels are way too general, because a lot of variations on the theme live under those

names, but that's a problem that will fill a later chapter.

Culture is something those people "have," but it's more than that. It's also something

that happens to you when you encounter them. As long as they're just out there, just a

Culture Blends 17

different group of folks, you won't have to deal with them. When you deal with them,

culture turns personal. Culture is no longer just what some group has; it's what happens

to you when you encounter differences, become aware of something in yourself, and

work to f igure out why the differences appeared. Culture is an awareness, a conscious­

ness, one that reveals the hidden self and opens paths to other ways of being.

Culture happens when you learn to use a second language. It happened to my

Austrian friend when she tried to figure out what a date was, and it happened to me

when I stumbled over Du and Sie in Austrian German. But it also happens inside your

own language, as it did with my colleagues and me.

Culture starts when you realize that you've got a problem with language, and the problem

has to do with who you are. Culture happens in language, but the consciousness it inspires

goes well beyond it.

Meanings usually float at the edge of awareness. Even when meanings make a selec­

tive appearance in the mind's eye, they're somehow "natural" or "right." They're not

only the water in which you swim; they're the water in which you first learned to swim

at all.

Culture changes all that. The "natural" or "right" meanings, the ones that tell you

who you are and how the world works, turn arbitrary, one of a number of possibilities.

Your "natural" language shines under the light of a new awareness; it blossoms into a

fascinating complexity; you see possibilities you never imagined existed. Culture

changes you into a person who can navigate the modern multicultural world.

Culture is an elusive beast. Different cultures color the landscape of modern life.

But as long as they stay out there, objects of contemplation, problems won't get solved

and minds will chug along as they did when we all lived in isolated villages.

In this book, culture is about to change from a distant object into a personal experience.

Culture may be something they have, all well and good, but personal contact makes

culture your own. Until it's your own, culture won't make a damn bit of difference.

Americans carry an unfortunate stereotype. They're known world-wide for holding

culture at bay. Several years ago, I went to live on a Greek island for the summer.

A friend of mine, a Swiss architect who owned a home there, invited me up for dinner.

After dinner I chatted with him and his wife, in English. He hated to speak High

German, he explained, because of its associations with Nazi Germany. He was old

enough to remember the war.

Culture has to do with who you are.

We got around to the image of Americans as the world's worst second-language

learners. There's an old linguistics joke: What do you call a person who speaks three

languages? A trilingual. Two languages? A bilingual. One language? You guessed it, an

American.

My friend wasn't an America-hater. Far from it. But he was genuinely puzzled. It's

not, he said, that Americans aren't capable of learning grammar as well as anyone else.

Maybe even better. The problem, he thought, is that they have trouble understanding a different mentality.

I thought about how America had never understood Vietnam, how it was shocked

when the Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran. I thought about Mexican friends and

18 Michael Agar

acquaintances who told stories of how Americans hadn't shown them any "respect."

I recalled a party in Austria, where two Americans who knew German grammar much

better than I did spoke in American ways that the Austrians found abrasive.

Americans have trouble understanding another mentality, suggested my Swiss

friend. They have trouble entering into another world that goes with another language,

another point of view, another way of doing things. Americans have trouble with

culture. That's a stereotype I've heard all over the world.

I don't know how true the stereotype is, and God knows I've met plenty of people

from other lands who showed little awareness that anything other than their way of

seeing things ever existed, or even deserved to. But the fact remains: You can't use a new

language unless you change the consciousness that is tied to the old one, unless you

stretch beyond the circle of grammar and dictionary, out of the old world and into a new

one. And Americans are famous for thinking they've got the best consciousness around.

Americans are the best, number one, free and rich and capable of doing anything.

Where did such a stereotype come from? It's easy to think of reasons. A nation of

immigrants who broke with tradition and improved their economic situation. A melt­

ing-pot ideology that cried out, "Hurry and become one of us." The insecurity of a

colony vis-a-vis the former masters. An exploitable frontier that called out that the sky

was the limit. The anti-immigrant mentality that grew up at the turn of the century.

A global savior role in two world wars, followed by a righteous stance against the

Stalinist state.

Do all Americans run around with the number-one mentality, looking at other

languages only through their own? No, of course not. Don't people from other places

besides America live locked into a one-dimensional consciousness? Of course they do.

But, for a while anyway, I'm going to let the stereotype stand. Americans without

the experience of culture are number-one Americans. I've met plenty of them. Some

of them run the most important institutions in the country. They hold America back

from sailing in the new winds of history. The mentality that the number-one types

represent - in America or anywhere else - must change.

There are two ways of looking at differences between you and somebody else. One

way is to figure out that the differences are the tip of the iceberg, the signal that two

different systems are at work. Another way is to notice all the things that the other

person lacks when compared to you, the so-called deficit theory approach.

Number-one types - American or any other - use the deficit theory. They're the

best, anything else is less than the best, and anyone who would call into question who

they are when they're already the best is a fool or a masochist or even, as they used to

say in America before perestroika, a Communist. Ronald Reagan was elected, in part,

on a wave of number-one sentiment.

The deficit theory does have its advantages. But it's a prison. It locks you into a

closed room in an old building with no windows. It inoculates you against culture. You

might tinker with the grammar and dictionary of a language, but you never commu­

nicate - except in terms of the world that shaped your attitudes, the language designed

to fit your assumptions about what the world is and how it works, the native language

you learned when you first stumbled around the house in diapers.

Culture Blends 19

The situation has to change. It's a cliche of the nineties to observe that we live in a mul­

ticultural world, whether we want to or not. Revolutions in information and transportation

have pulled us all together. Wars and the economy move us physically all over the globe.

It's hard to think of many jobs in which contact with "different people" isn't normal.

Entertainment - film, food, and fiction - often involves the products of "foreigners."

Communication in today's world requires culture. Problems in communication are

rooted in who you are, in encounters with a different mentality, different meanings, a

different tie between language and consciousness. Solving the problems inspired by

such encounters inspires culture.

For number-one types, it means changing from "best" to "different." If they take

culture seriously, they embark on a lifelong process of transformation that only ends

when they do. It opens up new possibilities and stokes the fires of creativity. It subverts

the amiable na"ivete that Americans are famous for the world over.

Those wedded to the number-one identity, the identity that holds them captive in

the monolingual prison, see culture as a threat. They are right. Personally, I think the

real threat is the way the number-one identity holds culture at bay. Without it, such a

person stands banished from the growing global conversation.

When people learn culture, when they burst out of their former unconscious ways

and gaze at the new landscape of possibilities, they change in positive ways. I've seen

it happen more times than I can remember.

Just after I'd returned from a year in Austria, I talked with a businessman in that

great purgatory that brings us together, an airport waiting lounge. He was an "America

is number one" man who complained about how "foreigners" did business.

I told him a story. I told him how Austrian businessmen I'd met who worked with

Americans knew our language, watched our TV shows and movies, read our novels,

looked at the Herald Tribune and our weekly newsmagazines. They had come up with

theories of what we were like. They knew about us, about our ties between language

and consciousness, but we knew nothing about them.

In a business negotiation where X knows a great deal about Y, and Y knows almost

nothing about X, who has the advantage? I asked. The businessman bought me a beer.

In an interview with Felipe Gonzalez, the socialist prime minister of Spain, a reporter

asked what it was like dealing with the Americans. At first, he said, he'd had the usual

stereotype - who do these world colonizers think they are, anyway? But after a few

meetings, he changed his mind. It's kind of touching, he said. In walk the representatives

of this world power, and the main thing they care about is whether you like them or not.

In the corridor of a train, a German woman and I struck up a conversation while we

stared out the window at the passing farmland. She'd just returned from a month- long

trip around the United States. I asked her how she liked Americans. She launched into

an enthusiastic story about how she'd learned from them, how they looked at

themselves and the situations they faced as something you could change, something

you could transform in a favorable direction.

In her world, she'd learned that you are what you are, you do what you have to, and

that's it. No more. Now her world was full of new possibilities that, she said, sometimes

shocked her family and friends.

20 Michael Agar

The stories of the businessman in the airport, the prime minister of Spain, and the

German woman on the train show what happens when you "catch" culture. They all

noticed a difference in language tied to who they were, realized other ties were

possible, set out to figure them out, and then changed themselves as a result.

Culture lights the darkened countryside into a landscape of new choices. It changes

the way you look at things.

Culture has its downside as well. It can wash you away into a sea of anomie. Some lose

the certainty of the world that tied them to their original language and never recover.

In Vienna, an older Kurdish student attending one of my classes had trouble with

the final paper. Toward the end of the semester, he came in to talk with me. His

German was confused and confusing. I'd attributed it to what was probably his recent

immigration to Austria. I was wrong.

He spoke of a childhood with one Kurdish parent and one Iraqi, of migration to

Vienna years ago when he was still a child, of his study of English, since he really

wanted to go to the United States or Canada and thought and read about little else.

He'd taken my course, he explained, because he thought I'd be teaching about

American language in English.

He didn't know who he was anymore, he said. He couldn't speak any of his four

languages well enough to give voice to what was inside of him, and what was inside of

him was a contradictory mess any way. He had culture, but for him it was a cancer that

consumed his coherence.

His story was a sad one, and it's not the only time I've heard it. Stories like his are

sometimes used by proponents of the number-one theory to explain the dangers of

going outside the circle, of venturing into culture. From their point of view, it's dan­

gerous, no matter what, because it always knocks you out of the "our way is the only

way" mentality, which the number-one types fight to preserve.

Cases like the Kurd's show that culture is powerful, and power unrecognized and

uncontrolled can destroy rather than create. The answer isn't to fight it, to banish it, to

legislate it away. The answer is to understand it, to keep an eye on it, to learn how to

use it to shift into gear for lifelong travel into the contemporary multicultural world.

Culture has come out of the American closet. America was built - so goes the old story,

which conveniently ignores Indians, slaves, and the Chinese - on waves of European

immigration, waves made up of people committed to melting into the pot. Nowadays,

the waves of immigration are neither Anglo nor European, and a lot of them don't

want to melt. They want to be Americans, but they don't want to be Anglo-Europeans.

"Multiculturalism" is the new cliche of our times, a call to recognize a new American

phenomenon on the part of our institutions - education, health care, the workplace,

law enforcement, and the rest. But no one quite knows what to make of it or what to

do about it. The results are tragic. Rich differences are converted into threatening

deficits. The old myth is dead, but the new reality still baffles, confuses, and sometimes

explodes into violence.

America has an opportunity, a chance to change a breaking point into a turning

point, a chance to make a global contribution, a chance to make multiculturalism work.

Culture Blends 21

One traditional strength of America is the ability to innovate, to look at a problem and figure out a solution without holding hands with centuries of tradition. Remember the story of the German woman on the train, the one who learned during her American travels that she could change? Even Abbie Hoffman, former sixties radical and cultural critic until his death, said he couldn't imagine working anywhere else because of America's "can do" attitude.

Culture and language aren't just issues here, either. Recent events in the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the old Soviet Union, in Iraq and Ethiopia, in Kenya and South Africa, in Mexico and Nicaragua, in India and Indonesia, to name just a few examples, testify to the global concern with multiculturalism, the feeling that it's a situation to be feared rather than a historic possibility to be celebrated.

Besides, the world economy, the speed of information and transportation, tourism and war, the internationalization of business and politics and academics, not to mention music, have taught growing numbers of people that multicultural­ ism isn't just a feature of home; it's a feature of anyone's life, any where, when that life expands beyond national boundaries. And the number of lives so expanded increases each year.

There are alternatives to circling the wagons, alternatives to forebodings of fear or aggressive threats to bring those "different" people into line. But to figure out alternatives, we've got to figure out what those differences are all about and how to handle them. Conversations and newspapers often hang the problems on "culture" and "language," but the concepts are more complicated, more interesting, than what those conversations and newspapers would lead you to believe.

"Language," goes the first mistake, lies inside the circle. People don't speak the same language; if they'd only learn the other one everything would be fine. But the stories I've told show that grammar and the dictionary - what we usually think of as "learning a language" - aren't enough. People who speak the same language don't always communicate, and people who learn a second language and stay inside the circle don't either. The concept of "language" has to change.

"Culture," goes the second mistake, is something "those people" have. Cultures, those different-colored billiard balls, roll around, collide with each other, and wreak havoc with what used to be a straightforward game. But the stories I've told show that culture is more than just something a group has. It's something that happens to people when they realize that their way of doing things isn't natural law, that other ways are possible. Something they've just heard, something that jolted their sense of who they are, invites them into a different way of seeing. The concept of "culture," like the concept of "language," has to change.

The two concepts have to change together. Language, in all its varieties, in all the ways it appears in everyday life, builds a world of meanings. When you run into different meanings, when you become aware of your own and work to build a bridge to the others, "culture" is what you're up to. Language fills the spaces between us with sound; culture forges the human connection through them. Culture is in language, and language is loaded with culture.

If you do start to see things this way, you change. The old "self," the one in your heart and mind and soul, mutates as it comes into relationships with others.

22 Michael Agar

The self stretches to comprehend them all. A life of Being turns into a life of

Becoming. You turn into a sailor and an immigrant for as long as you live - a theme

I'll return to later.

This way of seeing, a way that grew out of several fields, mostly linguistics and

anthropolog y, is one I've been talking about for years, to undergrads and grads, to

community groups, to organizations, and I thought the time was right to write it

down. I thought the time was right because the world in general, and America in

particular, is waking from its long, number-one slumber. It has to. The way the

world works now, the only alternative is isolation, and the way the world works now,

isolation is no longer an option.

[ ... J

But lessons learned in encounters with radically different worlds apply at home as

well. At home those other kinds of people, those other ways of using the "same" lan­

guage, aren't as distant. You and they, whoever the "they" of the moment happens to

be, already share some common grammar and some common experience. Differences

close to home are less different, more immediately accessible, but fascinating and

complex all the same.

What I want to do is show you how interesting and important language and cul­

tural differences really are, how encounters with them disrupt buried routines and

open up possibilities previously unimagined. Differences aren't a threat; they're an

opportunity.

When you finish the book, what you will have, if I've done my job, is a way of

seeing, one you'll never lose, one that will change the way you move through daily

life. I want to tr y to reveal language and culture in a new way, because I want to

help make a multicultural world work. This book is aimed at people, not institu­

tions or countries, because the secret - the one that Tom Paine knew - is that if

enough people change the way they see things, institutions and countries have to

follow suit.

It's a vision through rose-colored glasses, I know, to think a piece of writing could

have such an effect. With all the conflict around us based on language and cultural

differences, why even try? When an independent trucker I once interviewed talked

about his second marriage, he called it "the triumph of hope over experience." I'd like

to twist that a little and try to show that experience, some of it anyway, might turn out

to be a source of hope.

Hope, of course, isn't enough. While I was writing this book, I presented some of

the ideas in it to a conference on intercultural communication in Germany. Afterward,

a colleague from Bulgaria came up to talk. Interesting, he said, and optimistic, thereby

attributing to me one common stereotype of Americans. But what do you do, he

asked, with hatred of the Moslem minority in Christian Bulgaria, a hatred grounded in

the occupation of Bulgaria by the Ottomans centuries ago?

Language and culture savvy won't wave a magic wand over deep-seated historical

hatreds and make them disappear. It won't dissolve the gross social inequities that

often drive conflicts attributed to language and culture. What it will do is open lines of

communication based on what people are rather than on what they are not. When the

time comes for talking instead of shooting, such lines of communication can only

Culture Blends 23

help. With any luck, a little talking before the shooting might melt the bullets. That's

where the hope part comes in.

Culture erases the circle around language that people usually draw. You can master

grammar and the dictionary, but without culture you won't communicate. With

culture, you can communicate with rocky grammar and a limited vocabulary. This

statement seems paradoxical because of the circle around language, the circle that

exists in most people's imagination. Without the circle, the paradox disappears.

The circle has to go.