Contrasting rhetorics/contrasting cultures: why contrastive rhetoric needs a better conceptualization of culture

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front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

.2004.07.002

Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 277–289
www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap
Contrasting rhetorics/contrasting cultures: whycontrastive rhetoric needs a better

conceptualization of culture

Dwight Atkinson �

Graduate College of Education, Temple University Japan, 2-8-12 Minami Azabu, Minato-ku,

Tokyo 106-0047, Japan

Abstract

This paper deals with an underdeveloped notion in the EAP sub-discipline of contrastiverhetoric: culture. It argues that a better conceptualization of contrastive rhetoric needs toinclude a better conceptualization of culture. After engaging with the complex question‘‘What is culture?’’ the paper moves on to consider four sets of current issues regarding theconcept of culture: (1) received culture versus postmodern culture versus cultural studies cul-ture; (2) culture as product versus culture as process; (3) culture in the head versus culture inthe world; and (4) big culture versus small culture. The paper then ends with a call for great-er attention to the culture concept in contrastive rhetoric studies.# 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: EAP; Contrastive rhetoric; Culture; Postmodern; Identity; Globalization

1. Introduction

Let me begin with a short personal narrative which, in the present context, is

also an embarrassing public confession: in my 15 years of speaking at academic

conferences and 13 years of publishing in academic journals, I have done my best

to avoid a concept of central interest in EAP: contrastive rhetoric (hereafter CR).

This despite the fact that the ‘‘eureka!’’ experience that led me to do my doctorate

back in the 1980s was reading Robert Kaplan’s (1966) classic CR article while

teaching L2 writing in Japan, and this despite the fact that I then went happily off

D. Atkinson / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 277–289278

to the University of Southern California to study with Kaplan himself, thinking todo a CR dissertation. Unfortunately, I cannot recall everything that subsequentlyhappened in my up-and-down relationship with CR, but there are two things I doremember: having some of the shortcomings of CR rather graphically pointed outto me in the intervening years; and my own growing sense that I could not verywell compare or contrast rhetorics and genres across cultures and languages if wedid not have good baseline descriptions of those rhetorics themselves within cul-tures and languages. These are perhaps two of the reasons why I branched off intothe area of scientific writing (e.g. Atkinson, 1996, 1999a), which luckily my disser-tation advisor was both interested in and publishing in (e.g. Kaplan & Grabe,1991) at that time.

But, generally speaking, I think I avoided the field of CR for so long mainlybecause of its overwhelming complexity. After all, this is a field which combines atleast three large areas, each enormously complex and variegated in itself: (1) writ-ing (especially in EAP/ESP contexts); (2) learning and using second/additionallanguages (not to mention language itself); and (3) culture. Whereas any of thesetopics would be enough to spend a lifetime trying to unravel, what is my weakhuman mind to make of a field that combines all three of them? And—I almostforgot—I have not even mentioned teaching! Having spent all my energy trying toclimb the first three Himalayas of understanding, how would I then be able to con-vey in the classroom whatever small, but unquestionably complex, wisdom I mightmanage to achieve?

Fortunately, I hope, I have more recently started to feel a bit differently aboutCR. This is perhaps because one of the few joys of aging is learning to be lessafraid of complexity. My own solution, therefore, to the problem of CR’s over-whelming complexity—a weak, insufficient human solution, to be sure—is to startright here with just one of its components (i.e. culture) and to try to understand itbetter. As Paul Matsuda (2002) argues, it is important to think of CR as a commu-nal endeavor—a field in which each of us does our own small part to build a com-munity-wide repertoire of tools and resources. It is only in this way that thetremendously complex issues underlying CR will open up to our better understand-ing and better teaching. Let me add, however, that my discussion in this article willbe unapologetically theoretical; culture has not yet been adequately theorized inCR specifically or EAP or applied linguistics more generally (Atkinson, 1999b, inpress), so, it is with a better theorization of culture that our venture must begin.

2. What is culture?

One of the founders of cultural studies, Raymond Williams, said that culturewas one of the two or three most complex words in the English language (Wil-liams, 1983: p. 87). I tend to agree. The pioneer anthropologists Alfred Kroeberand Clyde Kluckhohn would no doubt have agreed as well: in the mid-1950s, theywrote a monograph (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952) in which they culled some 160different definitions of culture from English-language authors, stretching from

279D. Atkinson / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 277–289

Tylor’s famous 1871 definition of culture as ‘‘that complex whole which includes

knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits

acquired by man as a member of society’’ (Tylor 1871, quoted in Kroeber & Kluc-

khohn, 1952: p. 43), to Bryson’s 1947 definition, ‘‘human energy organized in pat-

terns of repetitive behavior’’ (Bryson 1947, quoted in Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952:

p. 72).Although Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s main reason for collecting these definitions

was to establish a firmer basis for their own definition, it is fair to say that neither

they nor any other expositor has provided in the interim a version of the culture

concept which has commanded universal assent, or in most cases, even general

respect (although, as I will suggest below, there is still something like a ‘‘received’’,

almost pre-theoretical notion of culture which continues to exert powerful effects).

This fact—along with the various controversies surrounding the culture concept I

will describe in a moment—has lead some (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1991; Fox & King,

2002) to call for its abandonment.Despite the lack of any single broadly agreed-upon definition, culture has

become, in the second half of the 20th century, one of the most contentious

concepts in academia, not to mention the rest of the world. Thus, academics (e.g.

Abu-Lughod, 1991) have argued that most, or all, cultural description is at base

deterministic and therefore anti-human, reducing human beings to ‘‘cultural

dopes’’. In some instances (e.g. Michaels, 1995), they have even argued that the

notion of culture is fundamentally racist; this despite the fact that the original

popularizers of the concept (i.e. Franz Boas and his students) developed it largely

to oppose the idea that putative racial differences in intelligence and social develop-

ment existed, and were natural and innate (e.g. Boas, 1940, 1974; Benedict, 1940).

Beyond the academic world, ‘‘culture wars’’ have raged in multicultural settings

like the US over whether children should be educated in ways that meaningfully

address this multiculturality, or according to more specific (usually ‘‘western’’)

norms. Suffice it to say, that both in and beyond academia, culture is very much a

burning issue at the beginning of the 21st century.In a short article like this one, there are obviously limits to how far one can go

in discussing culture. For purposes of convenience then, I will divide my discussion

of current issues in the study of culture into four sets of binary oppositions (the

first is, in fact, a ‘‘trinary’’ opposition): (1) received culture versus postmodern cul-

ture versus cultural studies culture; (2) culture as product versus culture as process;

(3) culture in the head versus culture in the world; and (4) big culture versus small

culture.1 Although along the way I will try to draw relevances to CR, I must admit

that this article is primarily about culture ‘‘something I would argue CR needs to

think more about’’ rather than about CR, per se. It cannot be primarily about CR

1 I fully realize that in breaking down these issues in this way, I run the risk of portraying them as

mere choices between opposites, which is certainly not the way nature is organized. But dualities are also

useful cognitive and pedagogical devices, as long as they are not taken too seriously.


as it stands, because CR itself has not yet engaged the notion of culture in a ser-ious, critical way.

3. Received culture versus postmodern culture versus cultural studies culture

This trinary contains three current views of culture that differ from each other incrucial ways. Whichever of these perspectives (singly or in combination) oneassumes will strongly influence both how one goes about studying culture/s andwhat one finds when one does so.

By received culture, I mean something like the traditional, commonsense notionthat still seems dominant in applied linguistics, EAP, and second language edu-cation, among many other fields (Atkinson, 1999b, in press). Critical anthro-pologists have nominated this the ‘‘peoples and cultures’’ view of culture, defined,in the words of two of them, as ‘‘the idea that a world of human difference is to beconceptualized as a diversity of separate societies, each with its own culture’’(Gupta & Ferguson, 1997: p. 1).2 While I call this a traditional, received view, it byno means covers all (or perhaps even much) of what has been written and thoughtabout culture in the 20th century; pioneer cultural anthropologists like Boas, forexample, emphasized the intense hybridity and cross-cutting influences of small-scale cultural groups, as seen in their histories of intermarriage, trade, and ritual,technological, and aesthetic diffusion and transfer (e.g. Boas, 1974). We have none-theless come to a point where cultures are often conflated with big-picture politicalgroupings like nation states and ethnic communities (American culture, Japaneseculture, Latino culture, African-American culture, etc.). As pointed out by Connor(2002), CR has largely assumed such a ‘‘received culture’’ perspective.

What, then, are some current alternatives to such a received view? One majorone, which in fact has arisen significantly in opposition to it, is what I will call a‘‘postmodern’’ view of culture.3 Postmodern views of culture (e.g. Appadurai,1996; Lyotard, 1984) highlight radical change, disruption, discontinuity, inequality,movement, hybridity, difference, and deterritorialization. In other words, theydirectly address the relentless, chaotic mixing-and-matching that globalization,

2 Many of the criticisms of received views of culture have centered particularly on their neglect of the

dimensions of inequality and power that seem to infiltrate cultural scenes. Appadurai (1996: p. 12), for

example, characterizes received notions of culture in the following way:

[They present culture as] some kind of object, thing or substance, whether physical or metaphysi-

cal. . .[which] appears to privilege the sort of sharing, agreeing, and bounding that fly in the face of

the facts of unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles, and to discourage attention

to the worldviews of those who are marginalized or dominated.3 I should say here that I do not take ‘‘postmodern’’ and ‘‘postmodernist’’ to mean exactly the same

thing; the former emphasizes the new and dramatically changing influences on social and cultural forms

and processes in so-called ‘‘late capitalism’’, while the latter describes the cluster of beliefs held by those

particular social theorists we call the ‘‘postmodernists’’. I focus especially on the former here, despite the

clear and significant overlap between them (see Atkinson (1999b) for a brief account of the views of the

postmodernists as they relate to culture).


world capitalism, neo-imperialism, and the diffusion of ‘‘western’’ popular culturethrough the media provide at the beginning of the 21st century. When one con-siders, for example, that in the US alone reside some half-a-million or more Cen-tral American immigrants, who, in one of the greater ironies of the 20th century,fled their homelands in fear of armies and death squads materially and morallysupported by the US, only to arrive at the end of their journey in that very samecountry, one gets a sense of the unpredictable chaos and disruption that post-modern culture theory attempts to capture. Global flows of people, media, ideas,technology, and money are endemic aspects of the late 20th and early 21st cen-turies (Appadurai, 1996), and any definition of culture which ignores their unfore-seen and often-chaotic character does so at the cost of its own relevance.

But perhaps this is putting it a bit too grimly. According to theorists of post-modern culture like Appadurai (1996), globalization has also led to all kinds offortuitous and interesting cultural synergies and combinations. For example, theways in which youth culture practices like rap and hip-hop have been universalizedand radically indigenized across the world; the popularity and cultural adaptationof East Asian martial arts traditions throughout much of the world; and the inter-nationalization of academics, although of course on a highly Western model (seeCanagarajah, 2002). Or consider the case of those fascinatingly hybrid world citi-zens we meet in EAP, TESOL and L2 writing these days, such as Ulla Connor orPaul Matsuda, who defy neat categorization as this or that, no matter what pass-port they are carrying or what language they happen to be speaking at themoment. If this is the world we are actually now living in—and for more and moreof us, it is—then shouldn’t our notions of culture actively reflect it? This, in short,is the argument for the postmodern view of culture.

The third view of culture I wish to describe is cultural studies, a field which,despite its name, has taken a rather particular view of culture since its beginningsin 1950s Britain. Heavily influenced by a Marxist view of culture as ‘‘a contestedand conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes offormation and re-formation of social groups’’ (Frow & Morris, 1996: p. 356), itwas initially interested in the effects of consumer-oriented democratic capitalism onthe ways of life of the British working class. Since mass, popular culture appearedto be playing a determining role in the alienation of this group from its traditionalclass consciousness, the focus was on how such forms of culture were ideologicallyemployed to naturalize forms of thought and behavior.

Cultural studies has changed and broadened over the years, in part due to theinfluence of postmodernism, but its focus is still substantially on viewing ‘‘contem-porary culture’’ (During, 1992: p. 1) from an ideological and hegemonic perspec-tive, the underlying claim being that cultural beliefs and practices are developedpredominantly under the influence of exposure to mass, popular culture in all itsforms and all its power. This does not mean that we cannot resist, or even go sofar as to appropriate, contemporary cultural forms for our own purposes—indeed,much of current cultural studies has been at pains to describe such resistance andagency. But it certainly does mean that mass culture is a dynamic, ideological,


power-involved force, and quite differently organized than it was, say, 50 yearsago, before the television became a central fixture in our lives.

4. Culture as product versus culture as process

Much of the work of those studying culture has historically been to describe theproduct-oriented side of culture. Kinship systems, myth systems, linguistic systems,belief and cultural rule systems of everyday life (e.g. Frake, 1964), as well as thepowerful organizing properties of rituals, both formal and informal (e.g. Geertz,1973), have been the mainstays of cultural anthropology and anthropologicallinguistics. Other fields, such as cross-cultural psychology and intercultural com-munication, have also tried to develop taxonomies and formal models of culturalbehavior. Written texts, of course, have been massively studied across fields thatconcern themselves with culture; CR is merely one of the areas that have takenwritten texts seriously.

Analyzing cultural artifacts is an important endeavor to undertake; this isbeyond question. As a way of studying culture, it is also in and of itself insufficient.The main reason of course is that such products are residues or byproducts—if notdownright after-the-fact constructions—of historical (including political, social,and economic) processes which are ongoing, ever-changing, and non-systematic inmany ways; they can hardly be considered fair representations of the multifariousactivities that actually went into producing them (e.g. Hutchins, 1995). As Connor(2002) points out in her recent attempt to update CR, we need to refocus ourvision on the processes that produce the products, rather than looking solely at theproducts themselves. I believe that this will be a highly challenging endeavor, giventhat CR has had a strongly product-oriented, structuralist bias since its inception37 years ago.4

Various ways of conceptualizing culture as process have arisen in recent years,one important one being the postmodernist-influenced notion of identity (e.g. Hol-land, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1999; Norton, 2000). I believe the popularity ofthis concept comes largely as a response to the shortcomings of studying culture asproduct—from a collective desire for more dynamic and less top-down ways ofthinking about cultural activity, especially the individual’s role in such activity. Icannot describe the contemporary identity concept at length here, but briefly, itdoes not assume a modernist, unitary, rational self. Rather, it assumes a more orless postmodern, decentered, disunified individual who, at the same time as she issubject to multiple (and often contradictory) sociocultural influences, is also some-

4 Bourdieu (1977: p. 9) characterizes the problems with describing social processes in terms of static

structures (e.g. rules and diagrams) as follows:

The detemporalizing effect (visible in the synoptic apprehension that diagrams make possible) that

science produces when it forgets the transformation it imposes on practices inscribed in the current

of time. . .simply by totalizing them, is never more pernicious than when exerted on practices defined

by the fact that their temporal structure, direction, and rhythm are constitutive of their meaning.


how able to creatively use these influences to shape herself into something resem-bling an agentive actor. At any rate, the concept of identity refocuses inquiry fromthe impact that big-picture cultural or social forces have on the person to the waysthat people actually fashion themselves into social agents by using whatever resour-ces and responding to whatever constraints they have.

This revised focus, however, is no more sufficient in itself than the one it isrejecting. We still need to understand both how individuals and social structureswork—both product and process—and especially how they work in relation to eachother. This is why I value synthetic models of society and culture like AnthonyGiddens’ structuration model. According to Giddens (1979), in order to adequatelyconceptualize either social structure or individual action, we need a model whichtreats them both in interaction. In this model, the only actual social activity is indi-vidual social activity, captured in the concept of agency (i.e. individuals’ capacityto act as they do). Individual human activity is messy, in many ways non-system-atic and non-rational. But it is not unguided; it is ‘‘activity’’ only in relation to asocial definition of what activity is.

To put it more directly, individual social activity is influenced by social struc-tures or systems—by more or less durable social products such as laws, rules,social practices, social roles, institutions, marriage and child rearing norms andpractices. These entities exist at a virtual level as resources for and constraints onsocial behavior, but they do not simply determine it. Human beings are hardlyrobots or computers that simply execute their social or cultural programs algor-ithmically. Rather, they interpret, adapt, forget, make mistakes, resist, subvert,improvise—the typical stuff of everyday life. So far then we have a unidirectionalchain of influence (but by no means absolute control or determination) from struc-ture to activity.

Giddens now goes one step further. He hypothesizes that what human beings doin their messy, everyday human activity feeds back into the social structures/sys-tems level, sometimes incrementally, sometimes radically changing the nature ofthe social structures themselves. We therefore have a total feedback loop whichaccounts not only for how humans act under the influence of (capital-S) Societyand (capital-C) Culture, but also how Society and Culture adapt and changeaccording to individual human agency and action. The real society or culturetherefore becomes the whole thing: the full feedback loop comprising both concretehuman activity and abstract social or cultural structure.

5. Culture in the head versus culture in the world

A recurring question in the study of culture has been its proper location: is itsomething residing mostly in the minds and brains of people, or does it somehowexist mostly out in the social world? For influential anthropologists such asClifford Geertz (e.g. 1973), the answer was clear—culture is embodied in publicsymbols and institutions:


[My] view of culture begins with the assumption that human thought is basicallyboth social and public—that its natural habitat is the house yard, the market-place, and the town square. Thinking consists not of ‘‘happenings in the head’’[. . .] but of a traffic in what have been called [. . .] significant symbols—words forthe most part but also gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical deviceslike clocks, or natural objects like jewels—anything, in fact, that is disengagedfrom its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon experience. From thepoint of view of any particular individual, such symbols are largely given. Hefinds them already current in the community when he is born, and they remain,with some additions, subtractions, and partial alterations he may or may nothave had a hand in, in circulation after he dies (Geertz, 1973: p. 45).

Geertz’s ideas, often described under the rubric of symbolic or interpretiveanthropology, have been deeply influential in the late 20th-century social and cul-tural thought, although they have also been criticized as simply re-inscribing moreor less ‘‘received’’ views of culture (e.g. Kuper, 1999).

Another branch of anthropology, cognitive anthropology, has been concernedwith locating culture largely in the heads of individuals, whether through schemas,cultural models, or—more recently—connectionist networks (e.g. Strauss & Quinn,1997). Following the lead of Ward Goodenough, cognitive anthropologists haveargued that culture is basically shared cognitive knowledge rather than anythingexternal: ‘‘What people must know in order to act as they do, make the things theymake, and interpret their experience in the distinctive way they do’’ (Quinn & Hol-land, 1987: p. 4; italics added).

Here is one instance in which I will try to break down a binary opposition I haveset up: it seems pointless to try to argue for the primacy of culture in the head orculture in the world—can only be in both. Even if culture is made up in large partof public symbols, as Geertz claimed (for his more recent views, see Geertz, 2000),we need to be able to make sense of those symbols; they have meaning only foractively cognizing, interpreting, complex pattern-recognizing beings. Thus, Geertz’sprivileged example of social symbols in the above quotation (i.e. language) obvi-ously not only has an active public life in the world, but also a dynamic private lifein the head. In fact, I would argue against setting the head and the world in anykind of a fundamentally oppositional relationship here: it seems far more sensibleto say that culture exists co-constitutively in the world and in the head, and thatheads and worlds may therefore not really be such separate and isolated locationsafter all. At any rate, this is the argument I have made in several publications (e.g.Atkinson, 1999b, 2002, in press), and one that is becoming increasingly popularand increasingly important across the social and behavioral sciences (e.g. Clark,1997, 2001; Gee, 1992; Hutchins, 1995; Rogoff, 1998; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch,1991).

As for what this has to do with CR, I am not completely sure. But here is onepossibility: it gives us another way of thinking about such things as the widelyknown gap between textual coherence or social meaning and the formal character-istics of text (e.g. Carrell, 1983). As Kaplan (e.g. 1987) has pointed out many times


since, the straight-line English-language rhetoric in his notorious squiggles diagram(Kaplan, 1966) was ‘‘straight’’ not because of any special intrinsic quality of thetext, but because it was interpreted in that way by the cultural insiders for whom itmade sense as a means of expression, or because of what was in those insiders’heads, although it was a very socially shared kind of knowledge. We could alsoview the interaction as actually having something to do as well with the formalnature of text itself, with its formal properties as a culturally produced set of sym-bols (e.g. top-down forms of organization including thesis statements, topic sen-tences, and point-driven prose—see Atkinson, 2003). It is, therefore, the interactionof mental models or schemas for directness (and since communication and valuesare usually elided in everyday thought, perhaps straightforwardness or honesty aswell) with socially designed and socially construable symbols on the page that con-structs the kind of coherence which leads a cultural insider to say: ‘‘Ah, that’sgood, direct American academic prose’’.

6. Big culture versus small culture

My last binary opposition involves an attempt to make the notion of culture amore flexible analytical tool by varying its scale of application. The basic idea isthat: (1) various social scenes, big and small, seem to have many of the same char-acteristics as (usually more or less received versions of) culture: methods of sociali-zation; more or less durable norms, values, and social practices; well-defined rolesand hierarchies; symbolic and material artifacts; and (2) we should therefore beable to use the concept of culture to study these phenomena, and to adjust thescale of the notion to fit our analytical needs. Similar ideas have also been activelyendorsed in popular usage and the media, where we hear, for example, of hip-hopculture, legal culture, the culture of dependency, drug culture, etc. In education,the idea of classrooms as cultures has been an important concept, although it hasalso undergone critique (e.g. Heath, 1982; see also Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999).

One of the best and most concrete conceptualizations of ‘‘small cultures’’ in edu-cational settings comes from the work of Adrian Holliday, also the author of arecent article of the same title (Holliday, 1999). In earlier work on developing cul-turally appropriate teaching methodology in EFL settings, Holliday (1994) dis-cussed the array of complex and overlapping social institutions that any trulyappropriate methodology would have to take into account. Fig. 1 is a substantiallymodified version of Holliday’s (1994: p. 29) diagram; it indicates both the differentsizes and levels of these interacting cultures, from the culture of individual class-rooms to national culture (the latter not a small culture at all), and the partiallyoverlapping relations among them.5

5 I have in fact modified Holliday’s original diagram in three important ways: (1) I have made all cate-

gories/boxes presented there overlapping with rather than subsumed under any other categories; (2) I

have left out or modified several of the elements/categories of the original; and (3) I have added a box

labeled ‘‘youth culture’’ to the diagram.


Thus, for example, student culture (near the bottom of the diagram) would have

both its own unique internal norms and practices—e.g. particular interaction pat-

terns, particular socialization practices—in any particular education situation, and

these would overlap (but not be subsumed under) national cultural norms and

practices, those of youth culture (which would themselves partly overlap with

national culture, but by no means be subsumed by it since youth culture spreads

well beyond national boundaries), etc. Likewise, the professional–academic culture

of teachers/professors in a particular situation would partly overlap with national

culture, but would also in part be shared with other professors in other parts of the

world:

Professional–academic cultures [. . .] are the cultures connected with professional

peer and reference groups, schools of academic thought and practice, pro-

fessional approach etc., generated by professional associations, unions, univer-

sity departments, publishers etc. It is significant that these extend beyond the

boundaries of the national culture: in particular, English language teachers, in

countries where English is not the mother tongue, where the subject matter, the

language, is considered to be foreign, have international links which they depend

on for much of their sense of professional-academic belongingness (Holliday,

1994: pp. 29–30).

The idea behind the notion of small cultures, then, is that when we break our

analysis down into complexly interacting small, medium-sized, and large cultures,

we get a much more complex (if still probably somewhat structuralistic) notion of

the interactions of different cultural forces. In no sense, then, could the ‘‘cultural

action’’ taking place in any particular educational setting be accounted for solely in

. 1. Complexly interacting small cultures in an educational settin
Fig g.


terms of the national culture in which that educational setting appeared to be loca-ted, as has so often been done in the past. If Holliday’s assumptions are correct,then small cultures have crucial roles to play in our analysis of any particular edu-cational practice or educational scene.

7. Conclusion

My purpose in this paper has been to briefly sketch out some of the complexitiesand current issues involving the notion of culture, one of the important (but largelyunexamined) concepts in the study of CR, as well as in many other areas of EAPand applied linguistics. I have not attempted to lay out a theoretical proposal ormodel (for which see Atkinson, 1999b, in press), but rather have tried to offer arange of thinking tools: new and perhaps different ways of thinking about culturewhich I would suggest do justice, or begin to do justice, to the ways culturalphenomena currently impact peoples’ lives.

One of the distinctive characteristics of CR is that it actively uses the notion ofculture to explain differences in written texts and writing practices. So far, however,CR has been seriously limited in this respect—the view of culture most widelyassumed in accounting for textual forms and practices has been overwhelmingly areceived one (Connor, 2002). As a result, real problems have arisen: cultures havebeen unproblematically conflated with national entities; internal consistency andconsensuality within cultures have been assumed or valorized, in tandem with dif-ferences and even incommensurability between or across them; and CR practi-tioners have neglected the place of unequal power relations and the role of conflictin describing cultural influences and processes.

It may also be that as our text-analytic tools become more powerful and wide-ranging (witness, for example, the growing emphasis on corpus analysis in CR stu-dies: e.g. Connor, 2002, this volume; Moreno, 1998), there will be a temptation topay even less attention to culture than previously. This, to my mind, would be agrave mistake. To me, at any rate, the notion of culture is still a ‘‘great unknown’’in CR studies, and increased attention to it and its analysis will do much to put thefield on a more secure and better-recognized academic footing, as well as to makeit more relevant to our students’ lives.

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Dwight Atkinson teaches in the Graduate College of Education at Temple University Japan. His research

interests include L2 writing, qualitative research methods, culture, and sociocognitive approaches to

learning and teaching. Recent publications include: ‘‘L2 writing in the post-process era’’ and ‘‘Writing

and culture in the post-process era’’, both in Journal of Second Language Writing, 12 (2003); ‘‘Writing

for publication/writing for public execution: on the (personally) vexing notion of (personal) voice’’ in

C. Casanave & S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for scholarly publication (2003); ‘‘Language socialization and

dys-socialization in a South Indian college’’ in B. Bayley & S. Schecter (Eds.), Language socialization in

bilingual and multilingual societies (2003); and ‘‘Toward a sociocognitive approach to second language

acquisition’’ in Modern Language Journal, 86 (2002).

Documents

Contrasting rhetorics/contrasting cultures: why contrastive rhetoric needs a better conceptualization of culture