The multiple faces of symbolic power

1.1 The power to play with signifiers

We first encounter the notion of symbolic power in Christina Higgins’ paper on the encounter between biomedical doctors and indigenous healers in a workshop organized by the Tanga AIDS Working Group NGO in a small village in Northern Tanzania (Higgins, 2016). The organizers are keen on negating the symbolic differential between the two kinds of medicine, but the distinction is reactivated by the very participants in their interaction with one another. On the face of it, this study reports on a failure of NGOs to bring about more equality of legitimation between biomedical doctors and indigenous healers. Indeed, the author writes: “this study has shown that despite their best intentions to produce more equality, educators and participants alike are complicit in perpetuating in equality through discourse” (Higgins, 2016). By using doctor titles unequally and by joking about witch doctors, the participants in that workshop seem to have reintroduced discriminatory practices into a workshop that was precisely meant to abolish all difference between the two kinds of medicine.

But have they really? Symbolic power does not operate in linear ways but in often highly indirect ways through self-reflexion and irony. The efforts of the NGO workers to establish equality of ascription and naming might have been thwarted by traditional conventions and naming practices, but that would be without factoring in the crucial element of these exchanges, namely humor. The ability of indigenous healers to use Western stereotypes of themselves to make fun of Westerners, and the efforts of biomedical doctors to include indigenous healers even in this stereotypical way might be where cooperation and meaningful inclusion have to be sought. This is not to downplay the well-intended efforts of the NGO organizers to change the relations by changing the discourse. But symbolic power is also the power to use language against itself.

Symbolic power in this encounter is defined not just as the power of the organizers to rename the participants in the exchange, but as the power of the participants themselves to play with signifiers, embed them in invisible quotes, and use them tongue-in-cheek in a humorous way. Where does this leave the researcher? How is she to name the participants in this exchange: by the way they name themselves? By the way the workshop organizers wished to name them? This is an interesting conundrum that concerns all researchers in intercultural communication when they write up their research reports. It obliges them to make their subject position explicit as researchers.

1.2 The power to reframe the interaction

The second encounter with symbolic power is Tony Liddicoat’s paper that studies the relations between native (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of French in electronic blogs, forums and chatrooms (Liddicoat, 2016). Although these were spontaneous events in which the learning of the language itself was not the focus of the online interaction, drawing attention to the form rather than the content of the message has the effect of immediately making the identity of the native speaker interactionally salient. By foregrounding an ideology of authenticity, this move by the NS implies a hierarchy between speakers with the NNS being perceived as having less symbolic power. This study shows convincingly that symbolic power is thus not inherent in the category “native speaker” but is co-constructed in interaction with other speakers who are thereby constructed as “non-native”. But, of course, the NS has only as much power as the NNS is willing to grant him/her, including the privilege of recasting the communication from an exchange of information to a linguistic performance. The NS might be positioned by linguists and language educators as having greater cultural capital if what is made salient is linguistic expertise, but if, as Liddicoat’s Examples 7 and 8 show, the NNS themselves are willing to contest the position ascribed to them by the NS, they can in turn claim the reverse privilege of recasting the linguistic performance as communication.

Symbolic power in these online encounters is thus defined as the ability to reframe the interaction from an exchange of ideas to a display of linguistic competence and vice-versa. Such a re-framing may have a destabilizing effect on interlocutors, as it does even when the exchange takes place between two NS. But the ability to see both through language (with a focus on the communication of content) and at language (as the display of linguistic or communicative performance) and to (re)frame the interaction according to the needs of the moment is precisely what constitutes symbolic competence (Kramsch 2009, 2011). Symbolic competence is a most valuable competence to have, both for NS and NNS, as it enables them to question explicitly the very rules of the communicative game and thus gives them greater reflexivity and control. The researcher, as in the Higgins paper, is called upon to occupy a more reflexive position as well. On the one hand, it is his/her position as NS or NNS that makes him/her sensitive to symbolic power games and to be acutely aware of the social inequalities these games create; on the other hand, because symbolic power is never a one-way inequality but is always co-constructed with the assent of all those involved, the researcher is also in a position to uncover the complicities that such games require and to identify the possibilities for resistance.

1.3 The power to position oneself institutionally in times of educational change

The symbolic power struggle between NS and NNS is examined by Martine Derivry-Plard from another angle, namely, the institutional/non-institutional and the public/private distinction that is made by the foreign language profession in France (Derivry Plard, 2016). Because traditionally French foreign language teachers have been trained within the educational institutions of the French nation-state and feel therefore that they are the legitimate experts in matters of pedagogy, their status as NNS has not meant any loss of symbolic power, on the contrary. Non-native language teachers have been backed by their prestige status as civil servants in the French national educational system. Native language teachers have traditionally been appreciated for their authentic pronunciation and therefore have served as “conversation tutors” in the public schools; they have also been employed as regular teachers in private schools and non-institutional settings, but they have not been placed at par with non-native teachers in terms of pedagogic skills. Now, however, with the deregulation of educational settings and the Common Framework of Reference for all European foreign language education, today institutions of higher learning are encouraged to redefine themselves within a global economy that values multilingualism and transnational diversity. Correspondingly, the goals of French foreign language education have changed from mainly humanistic and cultural to mainly instrumental and pragmatic. With the increased mobility of academics within the European Union, the distinction native/non-native language teacher has become blurred and the native language teacher has gained in symbolic power, creating tensions among foreign language educators in the French educational system.

Symbolic power under these changing institutional conditions is defined as the ability of individuals to adapt to or resist the traditional roles imposed by institutions themselves in the throes of a power struggle between the forces of tradition and those of (Zhu Hua & Li Wei, 2016) globalization. The power inequality between native and non-native teachers plays itself out in the curricula and lesson plans in which the two kinds of teachers value differently two different pedagogies: native teachers value groupwork and creative writing, communicative performance and peer interaction; non-native teachers value metalinguistic analysis and reflection, translation and formal precision. Inequality plays itself out also in the distinction between three kinds of language teaching: the teaching of foreign languages at French institutions where non-native teachers wield the greatest symbolic power, the teaching of English as an international language where native speakers have the most prestige, and the teaching of French as second language to immigrants, where native and near-native teachers have equal symbolic legitimacy. Researching the language teaching field thus reveals tensions within the field that mirror the tensions language educators are avowedly trained to resolve through linguistic and cultural mediation. There again, as in the papers by Higgins and Liddicoat, the study of the symbolic violence at work in language teaching and language use yields important insights into the multiple layers of reality that confront the researcher in an age of multilingualism and global mobility.

1.4 The power to manipulate the context

Zhu Hua and Li Wei’s paper is a dramatic illustration of the symbolic power struggles to define one’s identity in intercultural encounters in an era of globalization (Zhu Hua & Li Wei, 2016). While one would think that the increased mobility and diversity across the globe would make such a simple question as “Where are you from?” rather futile, or at least quite complex, local and global prejudice against people from a different race or ethnicity can make such a question, also called “NET talk”, into an insult, especially when it is repeated in the form of “Where are you really from?” which insinuates the addressee’s intention to deceive. The study, based on the responses to an on-line article by Adriane Sherine complaining of such discrimination against people with a different appearance, shows a surprising range of responses. The majority vigorously disagreed with the author on the interpretation of the question “Where are you from?”, adducing “innocent curiosity”, “good intentions” on the part of the questioner, and trivializing or normalizing the practice. The responses of those who empathized with the author ranged from impatience to exasperation to outright anger, they felt delegitimized as citizens and members of the community by this constant questioning of where they were from.

Symbolic power is clearly defined here as the power to define and manipulate the social context of the encounter. The person who asks “Where do you really come from?”, by implicitly thematizing the outward appearance of the interlocutor (skin color, facial features, accent) rather than what the interlocutor might have to say, is potentially committing a face-threatening speech act. This speech act or “performative” (Austin 1962) is all the more hurtful as the questioner can easily deny having intended any offense. As Judith Butler has argued (1997), a performative can act as injurious speech, not because it was intended as such, but because of the historical weight that it carries and the past contexts that it evokes. Questions like “Where do you come from?” hurt as they do because they “interpellate” (p. 24) and disorient the addressee, who thought he/she was a citizen like all the others, and suddenly gets thrown back to being a mere “foreigner” through a question that reactivates former contexts of racism, xenophobia and exclusion. Butler writes: “The act works in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation” (p. 33). The person who asks such a question is clearly responsible for such speech, but that person is rarely the originator of that speech.

However, the very historicity of a question like “Where are you from?” makes possible its resignification at other times in other contexts. As Butler forcefully argues, language is not only defined by social context, it is also marked by its capacity to break with context. The performative holds “political promise”, says Butler, precisely because it can “rework the force of the speech act against the force of injury” (p. 40) by redefining the context. We see examples of this resignification in the transcription of the YouTube video “What kind of Asian are you?”. Here again, as in the other papers, the researchers’ experience with such situations helps them see through the symbolic power game without losing sight of the larger context.

1.5 Power to gain a profit of distinction

We find another instance of symbolic power at work in the study by Jaran Shin of a Filipina minority woman in South Korea who uses the aura of the English native speaker to her advantage in a country that avowedly admires English speakers and is keen on learning American English (Shin, 2016). Even though her English is far from native-like, Natalie draws symbolic benefit from the possession of a distinctive, scarce and therefore desirable capacity to speak English to acquire what Bourdieu calls a “profit of distinction” (1991: 55), i. e., a way of distinguishing herself from other foreign brides and increasing her symbolic capital on the market of symbolic goods. This symbolic capital is all the more important to her as she finds herself as a foreign bride at the bottom of the social ladder and does not know any Korean. The playing field, however, is leveled in this case by the symbolic value of the Korean language for Koreans and the symbolic struggle for dominance between the old local order of Korean institutions which insist that new immigrants learn the national language of the host country, and the new global order of multinational corporate power which imposes global English as the language of economic prosperity.

Symbolic power here is defined as the struggle to attain a profit of distinction by playing the global against the local and vice-versa. As we saw in Derivry’s study of French institutions, globalization disrupts the old symbolic order and exacerbates symbolic tensions. Natalie can be given a profit of distinction only if it is recognized as such by others. If they see in her only someone who refuses to learn Korean, she loses her global advantage. The struggle is a symbolic one, not a material one, because it plays itself out on the level of people’s perceptions, social identities, and moral values. As Bourdieu has shown, symbolic power is relational, it works only if it is recognized by others as natural and legitimate, i. e., if all are complicit in the symbolic power game. In the words of Bourdieu’s editor, J.B. Thompson,

Symbolic power is an “invisible” power which is “misrecognized” as such and thereby “recognized” as legitimate... Even those who benefit least from the exercise of power participate, to some extent, in their own subjection. They recognize or tacitly acknowledge the legitimacy of power, or of the hierarchical relations of power in which they are embedded... Symbolic power requires, as a condition of its success, that those subjected to it believe in the legitimacy of power and the legitimacy of those who wield it.

(Bourdieu 1991: 23)

Natalie capitalizes on the legitimacy granted to her as a native speaker of English by most Korean parents and children; but this legitimacy is not recognized by the Korean educational institution that insists that she should learn and speak Korean. The striking feature of this case is that Natalie refuses to “participate in her own subjection” even though she accepted to marry a Korean man and settle in Korea as a foreign bride.

1.6 Power to exploit power relations through strategic misunderstandings

Natalie’s ability to manipulate the global and local contexts in her interactions with Koreans is mirrored by the ability of the preschoolers in Katie Bernstein’s study to exploit their knowledge of power relations to strategic conversational and social ends (Bernstein, 2016).

Bernstein documents in exquisite detail the amazing deftness of 3–4 year olds to strategically use such innocuous features of speech as “misunderstanding” or “speaking for” another person to position themselves favorably vis-a-vis the teacher and their peers and to place another child in a less desirable position. Their intricate facework and interactional positioning, and their manipulation of participant frames (Goffman 1981) are all evidence of symbolic power at work among preschoolers who, despite their young age, are acutely aware of unequal power relations between NS and NNS of English, between girls and boys, and between teacher and students.

Symbolic power as it is exercised in this study is defined as the power to invoke and draw others into a desired participant frame through “parasitic” misunderstandings and through the strategy of “speaking for the other” – a strategy that positions the other as less capable and in need of assistance (Bernstein, 2016). With regard to the children who are NNS of English in that classroom, they face a far greater challenge than the mere acquisition of cognitive and social strategies observed by Lily Wong Fillmore in 1979. What they have to acquire is a symbolic competence that goes beyond communicative competence and that includes the ability to reframe the context, reposition oneself and others and redefine the rules of the symbolic game. This symbolic competence can grow as their communicative competence grows, but is not dependent on it, as shown by the self-assured behavior of other preschoolers in Bernstein’s study, who are socially more savvy than Hande even though their English is less proficient.

2.1 Impact of power inequality on the way language is used and vice-versa

What we called in the Introduction “romanticized intercultural communication” studies usually argue for engaging people in intercultural conversations and “giving them” equal conversational power. But, as we saw in the studies under discussion, the name of the game is not “giving someone equal conversational power”. If the exercise of symbolic power is a symbolic struggle inherent to all human interaction, it is “one aimed at imposing the definition of the social world that is best suited to [one’s] interests” (Bourdieu 1991: 167). The challenge is how to use that struggle to one’s local advantage.

The six studies presented here illustrate the paradox of what Charles Taylor has called the “politics of recognition” (Taylor 1994: 25) in conversational exchanges. On the one hand people go to great lengths to emphasize solidarity and what we have in common despite our differences. For example, a NGO tries to erase differences in status between biomedical and indigenous doctors (Higgins); non-native speakers strive to be taken as seriously and transparently as equal conversation partners (Liddicoat, Zhu Hua/Wei); a minority Filipina in Korea wants to be treated as a legitimate speaker even if the language she speaks is English instead of Korean (Shin). On the other hand, people seek recognition of their difference and the legitimation of that difference. For example, the indigenous healers are proud of their difference from Western doctors and use humor to express that difference; the non-native speakers in Liddicoat’s and ZhuHua/Li Wei’s study, while seeking conversational equality, are proud of their multicultural identity and want that difference to be recognized and respected; the minority Filipina in Korea wants to make her English a legitimate everyday language in a country whose national language is Korean.

Each case also highlights the possibility of breaking out of this paradox through resistance to the way others “define the social world” (see Bourdieu above) and the way they define power relations. Resistance from speakers who are placed in a minority position can come in the form of humor (Higgins), explicit counter-attack (Zhu Hua/Li Wei, Liddicoat), fending for recognition by an institution that has traditionally given priority to national civil servants (Derivry), retreat from social engagement and silent pursuit of other goals, such as improving one’s knowledge of English (Bernstein), or lateral move to seek recognition outside the educational institution (Shin). But such counter-moves only reverse the power relations without necessarily changing the context itself. The challenge that each of these cases brings to the fore is the need to redefine the distribution of symbolic power altogether.

Ideally, the field of western medicine would need to include indigenous ways of curing diseases, a multilingual world would have to eliminate the distinction between native and non-native speakers altogether, national educational systems would have to include English as the second language of the land and give equal power to foreign instructors, and multilingual preschoolers would need to respect each other’s deficiencies in the dominant language. Such changes, however, are part of the larger struggle of individuals and institutions to come to grips with the geopolitical changes brought about by economic and cultural globalization. There will always be symbolic power struggle and conversational inequality in intercultural encounters.

These studies show that the challenge is to recognize the nature of the symbolic game and choose the best local strategy to turn the game to one’s advantage. Symbolic competence is precisely the ability to judge when to speak and when to remain silent, when to talk about the inequalities of the ongoing talk and when to let them pass, when to complain or counter-attack, and when to gently but unmistakably readjust the balance of power through humor or irony. Symbolic competence, as the ability to frame and re-frame the distribution of symbolic power in conversational encounters is the indispensable component of intercultural communicative competence (Kramsch 2009).

2.2 What is the most appropriate research approach to studying the workings of power in ICC?

If power is a diffuse, self-regulated disciplining mechanism, exercised by all with the complicity of all, then the researcher does not stand outside the game. Hence the need for a high degree of reflexivity and self-objectivation. Pierre Bourdieu, who was acutely aware of the inequalities in symbolic capital of the people he studied, both in Kabylia and in France, and was deeply conscious of his ethical responsibility as a sociologist, coined the term “reflexive sociology” for the new approach he proposed for doing sociological fieldwork (Bourdieu 1990). This approach included what he called “participant objectivation” wherein the researcher being herself a part of the social world she is investigating, factors into her analysis her own vision of the field and the scientific, political, economic, symbolic conditions of possibility of implementing this vision in that field.

Participant objectivation undertakes to explore not the “lived experience” of the knowing subject but the social conditions of possibility – and therefore the effects and limits – of that experience and, more precisely, of the act of objectivation itself. It aims at objectivizing the subjective relation to the object which, far from leading to a relativistic and more-or-less anti-scientific subjectivism, is one of the conditions of genuine scientific objectivity (Bourdieu 2001). What needs to be objectivized, then, is not the anthropologist performing the anthropological analysis of a foreign world but the social world that has made both the anthropologist and the conscious or unconscious anthropology that she (or he) engages in her anthropological practice – not only her social origins, her position and trajectory in social space, her social and religious memberships and beliefs, gender, age, nationality, etc., but also, and most importantly, her particular position within the microcosm of anthropologists.

(Bourdieu 2003: 282–283)

In addition to the questions raised by the contributors of this special issue, e. g., how can we empower indigenous healers and put them at par with biomedical doctors? how can we prevent native speakers from focusing on the linguistic ability of non-native speakers rather than on what they are saying? what is the best way to respond to the question: Where do you really come from?, Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology would prompt us to ask also: What conditions made it possible for an NGO to want to include “traditional” doctors besides the “medical” doctors? Who has an interest in upholding the distinction NS/NNS? What larger circumstances prompt people nowadays to ask not just “where do you come from?” but “where do you really come from?”. In the spirit of self-objectivation, researchers could ask themselves: What life trajectories, political and economic circumstances and historical events made it possible for me to investigate the topic of symbolic power and conversational inequalities in intercultural encounters? What personal and professional experiences sensitized me to this topic and how have my biography and inclinations shaped my understanding of the nature of symbolic power? Each one of the authors in this special issue would have their own responses to these questions that would shed light on the passion they show for their topic and the intensity of their scientific inquiry.