Symbolic power and conversational inequality in intercultural communication: An Introduction

1.1 Perpetuated intercultural differences

Parties involved in intercultural communication are rarely in an equal power relationship. As Piller (2011: 172) points out, without studying inequality and asking the question ‘who makes culture relevant to whom in which context for which purposes?’, culture is ‘nothing more than a convenient and lazy explanation’. There are ample examples in which intercultural differences are perpetuated, manipulated, or distorted due to political divide, distrust or fear for each other, and culture is blamed when it should not be to suit the needs of those what want to play the Othering game.

‘Swedish diplomat insults Iran’s Islamic president by exposing soles of his shoes’ is a headline in many English language newspapers in December, 2012. It was alleged that the newly appointed Swedish ambassador to Iran, Peter Tejler, insulted the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by ‘exposing the soles of his 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 an intercultural expert to explain that it was a taboo in the Muslim culture to show soles, because soles are ‘considered dirty, closest to the ground, closer to the devil and farther away from God’. However, several Iranian students and scholars whom we talked to attested that similar to many other cultures, it was nothing unusual to sit with legs crossed in their home culture and whether exposing soles or not was not a problem at all. When we traced the news story back to the Arabic newspaper, Asriran, where the news first appeared, it transpired that the Swedish diplomatic was frowned upon, not because he exposed the soles of his shoes, but because he breached a diplomatic etiquette by sitting too comfortably in a formal diplomatic meeting. The question is why ‘cultural difference’ is blamed for the incident in so many English newspapers. The difference presented in the newspapers is nothing but an Othering discourse that 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 deeply ingrained in one’s sub-consciousness. “I am from Ontario, Canada. I can speak English like an American now” was the self-introduction by a student in an interpersonal communication class at an American University (Tsuda 1986: 38). Tsuda (1986) argued that this statement is an example of ‘arrested intercultural communication’, i. e. the intercultural communication which allows a person of the dominant group to ‘double-bind’ a person of the dominated group. The student concerned clearly thought that speaking English like an American was an important milestone during her process of assimilation into American culture. But by doing so, she was complicit in accepting the pecking order of Americanness over Canadianness.

During the 2012 London Olympics, a sign in the international Media Centre made newspaper headlines and led to heated debate on its appropriateness. Written in simplified Chinese characters in its apparent attempt to target Chinese journalists, the sign requested (presumably, Chinese-speaking) photographers to seek permission before taking pictures out of respect for privacy. The public debate that followed focused on the apparent ‘cultural’ differences, i. e., it is a known fact that photograph-taking is a very common practice amongst the Chinese and some other groups; the boundaries between private and public lives are different cross-culturally. There was also the issue of discrimination through the choice of language in a multilingual and multicultural workplace. Why was the sign in Chinese only and not any other languages? But the most relevant question here is who is expected to accommodate whom when there are differences in cultural practices and who has the authority to make decisions in such 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 about the advantage of a repetitive job’ if you are asked in a job interview? Such questions, seemingly simple, require the interviewee to have some knowledge of the discourse structure of the interview as a whole (It is a lead-in question; I need to give some information about my motivation and potential opportunities and benefits, but not to overdo it since it is just a question meant to warm up me and everyone else on the panel), as well as an understanding of the nature of competency-assessment (so they want to know that I am a reflective and self-organised person and I can survive and even make the best out of a repetitive task). By comparing the interview performance of migrant and minority ethnic groups with that of their white, native-English-speaking counterparts in the UK, Roberts and her colleagues (Campbell and Roberts 2007; Roberts 2011, 2013) found that the former 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 the linguistic capital required for the interview. The penalty which comes with being different not only results in the poor marketability of the group whose discursive skills may be different from those of their white, native-English-speaking counterparts, but also masks the social inequality on the pretence that all candidates have been given an equal opportunity in the interview.

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

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 and don’ts. Isn’t this social order anything else but what we call the culture of members of a given society, which both constrains and enables them to function appropriately in a variety of circumstances? And isn’t this what we mean when we say that foreign language teachers need to “teach culture” in language classes, namely the social conventions of speech and behaviour that regulate people’s interactions and give them the power to participate in the everyday life of a given community? Indeed, the field of ICC has taken this kind of power to be the natural, self-evident and taken-for-granted order of things. In the same manner as children get socialized into the culture of their family and community, so must members of a different culture adapt to the demands of the culture into which they immigrate. And ICC is expected to facilitate this integration.

However, the task is not that simple. For example, newcomers are able to learn whether and how far to bow when in Japan, and what this form of greeting means, but they are not able at first to understand the deeper meaning of the Japanese value of “deference” or “respect” without learning what bowing stands for in terms of historico-cultural value. They might grasp the iconic manifestation of power hierarchy (e. g., the bowing posture of the body), and even the indexical meaning of the experience that such a bowing displays (e. g., respect, politeness) but they might not get its symbolic meaning, namely the hierarchical structure of the Japanese social world and its high sensitivity to rank and status. Without an understanding of symbolic power of the Japanese society, they cannot make sense of the symbolic system of relations that links Japanese behaviors and speech forms to other social, cultural, political and historical phenomena in Japanese society. In other words, they don’t understand the symbolic order from which they acquire a larger meaning.

Indeed, symbolic power is more than just a psychological form of imposition exerted by a social or political institution on individuals. It is the name of a relational game that every social actor has to play for fear of stigmatization or exclusion, i. e., social death. As the biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon (1997) shows in The Symbolic Species, our symbolic self is the most sacred aspect of our identity precisely because it encompasses the power to construct a version of reality that is accepted and respected by others. It is not just useful or appropriate behaviour or etiquette. It is a whole way of giving meaning to the social 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 feel legitimate, authorized and authoritative, and to gain what Bourdieu calls a “profit of distinction” (Bourdieu 1991: 55), i. e., the symbolic capital that will distinguish us from others and give us value on the market of symbolic exchanges.

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

According to Bourdieu, we don’t have the choice of playing or not playing the symbolic game. As social actors, we are imbricated in a hierarchical symbolic order with 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 white ethnicity more value in global encounters than Asian ethnicity (Zhu Hua/Li Wei, this issue), English speaking minorities a superior status than non-English speaking minorities (Shin, this issue), native speakers more prestige than non-native speakers (Derivry-Plard; Liddicoat, this issue), western medical doctors more legitimacy than traditional doctors (Higgins, this issue), and interactional competence more social clout in the classroom than communicative competence (Bernstein, this issue). But the symbolic order is not unitary, and there will be social spaces in which local languages have more symbolic prestige than global English, NNS have more symbolic value than NS, and traditional medicine than Western medicine.

In this regard, Bourdieu makes an important distinction between social space (espace social) and symbolic space (espace symbolique) (Bourdieu 1994: 15). While the former has to do with who is positioned where and how in relation to whom in the social structure, the latter has to do with who has the right to construct the social space and give it meaning. While social space is a structure known and recognized by all, symbolic space is an invisible, hierarchical, relational order in which social actors struggle and vie for the power to impose their way of classifying people and events, their judgment of what is true, good and beautiful and their moral view of what is appropriate and inappropriate.

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 subject positions, identities, authenticity and legitimacy (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). As a collaborative 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 speakers have only as much symbolic power as non-native speakers allocate them, for example, Anglophone Filipinos in Korea have only as much symbolic distinction as non-Anglophone Koreans give them (Shin, this issue). The exercise of symbolic power in conversation is locally managed and mutually allocated. For example, as Liddicoat (this issue) shows, a non-native speaker (NNS) saves face by acknowledging ahead of time lack of competence (either explicitly or implicitly by asking for clarification of a vocabulary item), but he might threaten the native speaker’s (NS) negative face by obligating the NS to compliment the NNS (“No, your English is not bad at all”). Or the NNS might grant the NS a profit 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 would have 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 triggers a vicious circle of assertion of symbolic power: the NNS asserts the power of disclaimer/disculpation (e. g., “My English is not very good”), the NS asserts the power of evaluation that the NNS has implicitly granted him/her.

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