Zhu Hua* and Claire Kramsch Symbolic power and

Introduction

Zhu Hua* and Claire Kramsch

Symbolic power and conversationalinequality in intercultural communication:An Introduction

DOI 10.1515/applirev-2016-0016

1 Inequality in intercultural communication

While intercultural communication (abbreviated as ICC) has conventionally beendefined as interactions between individuals from different ethnic groups andnationalities, we follow the discourse perspective offered by Scollon and Scollon(2001) in defining the scope of intercultural communication. This discourseperspective, as Scollon and Scollon (2001: 543–4) explain, approaches intercul-tural communication as ‘interdiscourse’ communication, i. e. the interplay ofvarious discourse systems such as gender, generation, profession, corporate,religion, ethnic discourses, and focuses on the co-constructive aspects of com-munication and social change. Rather than locating meaning in some generalanthropological or sociohistorical realm called “culture’, it sees meaning asemerging from the way people use symbolic systems like language in dialoguewith one another. Discourse, then, is the name for “language as social practice”(Fairclough 1989: 17), or for “ways of organizing meaning that are often,though not exclusively, realized through language.” (Pennycook 1994: 128).This approach has been used widely by such discourse analysts as BarbaraJohnstone (2008), Ochs (2002), Gee (1999), and many others. Because of ourinterest in the way discourses, as vectors of symbolic power (Kramsch 2009), notonly reflect but also reproduce social inequalities, we align ourselves withcritical discourse analysts who, like Pennycook (1994), Weedon (1997),Cameron (2005), Wortham (2005), and Jan Blommaert (2005), have adopted apost-structuralist approach to discourse, as captured by the following definitiongiven by Chris Weedon:

*Corresponding author: Zhu Hua, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet St, LondonWC1E 7HX, UK, E-mail: [email protected] Kramsch, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, E-mail: [email protected]

Applied Linguistics Review 2016; 7(4): 375–383

Discourse is a structuring principle of society in social institutions, modes of thought andindividual subjectivity… Meanings do not exist prior to their articulation in language andlanguage is not an abstract system, but is always socially and historically located indiscourses. Discourses represent political interests and in consequence are constantlyvying for status and power. The site of this battle for power is the subjectivity of theindividual and it is a battle in which the individual is an active but not sovereignprotagonist. (Weedon 1997: 41)

By using a post-structuralist discourse approach, we eschew the tendency inintercultural communication studies to essentialize culture and to reduce it tostructural, national characteristics. Instead we strive to underscore the subjectivityof meaning-making practices, their relationality and their historical contingency.We explore not only how cultural differences and similarities are discursivelyconstructed in interactions, but how their construction, reproduction and contesta-tion are part of a larger symbolic power game in which we are all imbricated.

1.1 Perpetuated intercultural differences

Parties involved in intercultural communication are rarely in an equal powerrelationship. As Piller (2011: 172) points out, without studying inequality andasking the question ‘who makes culture relevant to whom in which context forwhich purposes?’, culture is ‘nothing more than a convenient and lazy explana-tion’. There are ample examples in which intercultural differences are perpetu-ated, manipulated, or distorted due to political divide, distrust or fear for eachother, and culture is blamed when it should not be to suit the needs of thosewhat want to play the Othering game.

‘Swedish diplomat insults Iran’s Islamic president by exposing soles of hisshoes’ is a headline in many English language newspapers in December, 2012. Itwas alleged that the newly appointed Swedish ambassador to Iran, Peter Tejler,insulted the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by ‘exposing the soles ofhis shoes’ when he was sitting with his legs crossed during a formal meeting.The Wire: News from the Atlantic (2012) has gone one step further and invited anintercultural expert to explain that it was a taboo in the Muslim culture to showsoles, because soles are ‘considered dirty, closest to the ground, closer to thedevil and farther away from God’. However, several Iranian students and scho-lars whom we talked to attested that similar to many other cultures, it wasnothing unusual to sit with legs crossed in their home culture and whetherexposing soles or not was not a problem at all. When we traced the news storyback to the Arabic newspaper, Asriran, where the news first appeared, it tran-spired that the Swedish diplomatic was frowned upon, not because he exposed

376 Zhu Hua and Claire Kramsch

the soles of his shoes, but because he breached a diplomatic etiquette by sittingtoo comfortably in a formal diplomatic meeting. The question is why ‘culturaldifference’ is blamed for the incident in so many English newspapers. Thedifference presented in the newspapers is nothing but an Othering discoursethat portrays the Muslim culture as different, strange, and exotic.

1.2 Pecking orders and the burden of adaptation

In intercultural encounters, there is often a pecking order that is subtle and deeplyingrained in one’s sub-consciousness. “I am from Ontario, Canada. I can speakEnglish like an American now” was the self-introduction by a student in aninterpersonal communication class at an American University (Tsuda 1986: 38).Tsuda (1986) argued that this statement is an example of ‘arrested interculturalcommunication’, i. e. the intercultural communication which allows a person ofthe dominant group to ‘double-bind’ a person of the dominated group. Thestudent concerned clearly thought that speaking English like an American wasan important milestone during her process of assimilation into American culture.But by doing so, she was complicit in accepting the pecking order ofAmericanness over Canadianness.

During the 2012 London Olympics, a sign in the international Media Centremade newspaper headlines and led to heated debate on its appropriateness.Written in simplified Chinese characters in its apparent attempt to target Chinesejournalists, the sign requested (presumably, Chinese-speaking) photographers toseek permission before taking pictures out of respect for privacy. The publicdebate that followed focused on the apparent ‘cultural’ differences, i. e., it is aknown fact that photograph-taking is a very common practice amongst theChinese and some other groups; the boundaries between private and publiclives are different cross-culturally. There was also the issue of discriminationthrough the choice of language in a multilingual and multicultural workplace.Why was the sign in Chinese only and not any other languages? But the mostrelevant question here is who is expected to accommodate whom when there aredifferences in cultural practices and who has the authority to make decisions insuch matters in a supposedly ‘international’ space.

1.3 The ‘penalty’ that comes with being different

Being different from norms of dominant groups can have serious consequences.How would you respond to the question ‘why did you apply for this job’, or ‘tell me

Symbolic power and conversational inequality 377

about the advantage of a repetitive job’ if you are asked in a job interview? Suchquestions, seemingly simple, require the interviewee to have some knowledge ofthe discourse structure of the interview as a whole (It is a lead-in question; I needto give some information about my motivation and potential opportunities andbenefits, but not to overdo it since it is just a question meant to warm up me andeveryone else on the panel), as well as an understanding of the nature of compe-tency-assessment (so they want to know that I am a reflective and self-organisedperson and I can survive and even make the best out of a repetitive task). Bycomparing the interview performance of migrant and minority ethnic groups withthat of their white, native-English-speaking counterparts in the UK, Roberts andher colleagues (Campbell and Roberts 2007; Roberts 2011, 2013) found that theformer tend to fare less well than the latter, not because of their ethnicity per se,but because they have not developed the social-cultural knowledge and thelinguistic capital required for the interview. The penalty which comes with beingdifferent not only results in the poor marketability of the group whose discursiveskills may be different from those of their white, native-English-speaking counter-parts, but also masks the social inequality on the pretence that all candidates havebeen given an equal opportunity in the interview.

Ultimately, such scenarios described above testify that ICC carries with it theweight of history, memory and the construction of expectations and calls for amore historically situated and politically sensitive examination of perceived, con-structed and perpetuated differences as well as similarities (e. g. Nakayama andHalualani 2010; Sorrells 2013). When two people meet, these are not two freestanding individuals, but two histories that meet, with all the expectations thatthe encounter will be similar to or different from past encounters. They anticipatethat the other will match (or not) what has been said of him/her through his/herreputation, the media, the family, the many discourses that both interlocutors haveparticipated in and expect to continue participating in. The work of memory andimagination creates a representation of the other that inserts him/her into asymbolic order that has its own conventions and that confirms the two interlocu-tors’ sense of reality. It is the very symbolic order and power that permeate theconversational encounters that this special issue wants to focus on.

2 Focus of this issue

2.1 Symbolic power

For a field like ICC that has been traditionally dominated by social and cross-cultural psychology, it may sound a little faddish to use the term ‘symbolic’ to


refer to a social order that consists, after all, of the usual societal do’s anddon’ts. Isn’t this social order anything else but what we call the culture ofmembers of a given society, which both constrains and enables them to functionappropriately in a variety of circumstances? And isn’t this what we mean whenwe say that foreign language teachers need to “teach culture” in languageclasses, namely the social conventions of speech and behaviour that regulatepeople’s interactions and give them the power to participate in the everyday lifeof a given community? Indeed, the field of ICC has taken this kind of power to bethe natural, self-evident and taken-for-granted order of things. In the samemanner as children get socialized into the culture of their family and commu-nity, so must members of a different culture adapt to the demands of the cultureinto which they immigrate. And ICC is expected to facilitate this integration.

However, the task is not that simple. For example, newcomers are able tolearn whether and how far to bow when in Japan, and what this form of greetingmeans, but they are not able at first to understand the deeper meaning of theJapanese value of “deference” or “respect” without learning what bowing standsfor in terms of historico-cultural value. They might grasp the iconic manifesta-tion of power hierarchy (e. g., the bowing posture of the body), and even theindexical meaning of the experience that such a bowing displays (e. g., respect,politeness) but they might not get its symbolic meaning, namely the hierarchicalstructure of the Japanese social world and its high sensitivity to rank and status.Without an understanding of symbolic power of the Japanese society, theycannot make sense of the symbolic system of relations that links Japanesebehaviors and speech forms to other social, cultural, political and historicalphenomena in Japanese society. In other words, they don’t understand thesymbolic order from which they acquire a larger meaning.

Indeed, symbolic power is more than just a psychological form of impositionexerted by a social or political institution on individuals. It is the name of arelational game that every social actor has to play for fear of stigmatization orexclusion, i. e., social death. As the biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon(1997) shows in The Symbolic Species, our symbolic self is the most sacred aspectof our identity precisely because it encompasses the power to construct a versionof reality that is accepted and respected by others. It is not just useful orappropriate behaviour or etiquette. It is a whole way of giving meaning to thesocial world and our role in it. It is our social face that some call ‘honour’ or‘dignity’. It enables us to play the game, to retain our good sense of self, to feellegitimate, authorized and authoritative, and to gain what Bourdieu calls a“profit of distinction” (Bourdieu 1991: 55), i. e., the symbolic capital that willdistinguish us from others and give us value on the market of symbolicexchanges.


Unlike economic capital, symbolic capital is all the more powerful as it isinvisible. The strategies we put in place to gain distinction strive to makesymbolic power invisible by making it seem natural, such as when we pretendthat “deep down we are all the same” and that bowing in Japan is the same asthe handshake in France. It is just a form of greeting. Or when we pretend thatspeaking English is just a mode of communication like any other. These are allways of negating the symbolic order of things all the while that we are reinfor-cing it. In this sense, symbolic power is ambiguous and paradoxical, as PierreBourdieu has shown.

According to Bourdieu, we don’t have the choice of playing or not playing thesymbolic game. As social actors, we are imbricated in a hierarchical symbolic orderwith which we are complicit and which changes according to time and place.Today, for example, the symbolic global order is likely to give a Western whiteethnicity more value in global encounters than Asian ethnicity (Zhu Hua/Li Wei,this issue), English speaking minorities a superior status than non-English speakingminorities (Shin, this issue), native speakers more prestige than non-native speak-ers (Derivry-Plard; Liddicoat, this issue), western medical doctors more legitimacythan traditional doctors (Higgins, this issue), and interactional competence moresocial clout in the classroom than communicative competence (Bernstein, thisissue). But the symbolic order is not unitary, and there will be social spaces inwhich local languages have more symbolic prestige than global English, NNS havemore symbolic value than NS, and traditional medicine than Western medicine.

In this regard, Bourdieu makes an important distinction between socialspace (espace social) and symbolic space (espace symbolique) (Bourdieu1994: 15). While the former has to do with who is positioned where and howin relation to whom in the social structure, the latter has to do with who has theright to construct the social space and give it meaning. While social space is astructure known and recognized by all, symbolic space is an invisible, hierarch-ical, relational order in which social actors struggle and vie for the power toimpose their way of classifying people and events, their judgment of what istrue, good and beautiful and their moral view of what is appropriate andinappropriate.

2.2 Conversational inequality

Symbolic power never plays itself out more strongly than in daily conversations,in which not only turns-at-talk are exchanged and vied for but also subjectpositions, identities, authenticity and legitimacy (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). As acollaborative endeavour, conversation is characterized by a complicity in which


power is both allocated and exercised, imposed and subjected to, in a self-disciplining loop with the connivance of all (Bourdieu 1982). Native speakershave only as much symbolic power as non-native speakers allocate them, forexample, Anglophone Filipinos in Korea have only as much symbolic distinctionas non-Anglophone Koreans give them (Shin, this issue). The exercise of sym-bolic power in conversation is locally managed and mutually allocated. Forexample, as Liddicoat (this issue) shows, a non-native speaker (NNS) savesface by acknowledging ahead of time lack of competence (either explicitly orimplicitly by asking for clarification of a vocabulary item), but he might threatenthe native speaker’s (NS) negative face by obligating the NS to compliment theNNS (“No, your English is not bad at all”). Or the NNS might grant the NS aprofit of distinction whereby the NS feels entitled to correct the NNS’s grammar.If the NNS had not first anticipated evaluation/criticism by the NS, the NS wouldhave been much less inclined to correct him/her and to thus assert his NS-ness.As for the non-native speaker, by acknowledging his NNS-ness, the NNS triggersa vicious circle of assertion of symbolic power: the NNS asserts the power ofdisclaimer/disculpation (e. g., “My English is not very good”), the NS asserts thepower of evaluation that the NNS has implicitly granted him/her.

Thus conversation is not just a systematics for the turn-taking, topic manage-ment and repairs that interlocutors abide by if they want to have an orderlyconversation (Sacks et al. 1974). It serves, inter alia, to pursue the wages ofdistinction. While, as conversational analysts remind us, the fact that two inter-locutors come from a different social class, have different levels of education orhave a different nationality or ethnicity might or might not be relevant to theconversation at hand, this doesn’t mean that the conversation is a low-stakesgame. Through careful attention paid to indexicalities, i. e., stances, acts, actionsand identities (Ochs 1996), their relationalities and their interpretation in context(Bucholtz and Hall 2005), the conversation analyst may conclude that the partici-pants indeed were orienting to differences in symbolic power that raised the stakesof their investment in such a mundane game as conversation in everyday life.

3 Key questions and scope of the special issue

This special issue aims to investigate the following key questions:– How is symbolic power defined and constituted in intercultural communication?– How does power inequality impact the way language is used?– What is the most appropriate research approach to studying the workings of

power in intercultural communication?


The articles in the collection address these questions from their individualperspectives: the issues of authorization and delegitimation in interactionsamong biomedical and traditional doctors in Tanzania (Christina Higgins), theconstruction of native and non-native speaker identities in on-line interaction(Anthony Liddicoat), the power struggle and symbolic violence between nativeand non-native speaker teachers within the foreign language teaching field inFrance (Martine Derivry-Plard), the issues of marginalization through nationalityand ethnicity talk in everyday interactions (Zhu Hua & Li Wei), the languagechoices of a multilingual immigrant Filipina mother in South Korea (Jaran Shin),and the use of ‘strategic misunderstanding’ by English-speaking preschoolchildren in their interactions with their peers who are learning to speakEnglish (Katie Bernstein). The last chapter (Claire Kramsch) will bring theinsights from each article together by revisiting the three key questions.

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Documents

Zhu Hua* and Claire Kramsch Symbolic power and