Volume 7, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Symbolic power and conversational inequality in intercultural communication, Issue Editors: Zhu Hua and Claire Kramsch

This paper analyzes interactions that took place during a set of workshops involving biomedical doctors and indigenous healers in northern Tanzania which promoted the use of indigenous knowledge in public health education and training. Such workshops are needed since, despite their success in treating patients for a number of health problems, healers are still misrepresented in the media and in wider society and are often confused with witchdoctors. In the context of inequality, then, the purpose of the workshops was to encourage the participants to learn from one another and to find ways to collaborate so that they could better treat patients in their area. The analysis assesses the efforts of the non-governmental organization that organized the workshops to create a culture of inclusion and equality among the doctors. The analysis shows how both parties are first legitimated through narratives of equality in the official discourse of the workshops. Subsequently, however, the healers are delegitimized in their interactions with the biomedical doctors through unequal forms of address and through the conflation of indigenous healing with witchcraft. The analysis shows how inequality in discursive practices is a key site for enduring struggles over symbolic power, even in contexts where equality is explicitly on the agenda.

In intercultural interactions in which native speakers communicate with non-native speakers there is potential for asymmetries of power to shape how interaction occurs. These inequalities are not simply the result of a difference in command of the language between interlocutors but rather they relate to the social construction and performance of the identities of each participant. Using data drawn from intercultural interactions in a range of contexts, this article examines some of the ways in which the inequalities of power between native speakers and non-native speakers is an interactionally accomplished product by examining instances of intercultural interaction. Such inequalities are seen in instances of intervention in interactions that create and reaffirm the ideology of native speakers’ authority over language. The most obvious of such interventions are those in which the native speaker takes up an authoritative stance in relation to the linguistic productions of non-native speakers that emphasize the features and circumstances of their production rather than their communicative function. Such interventions may, however, occur in more covert ways. Where such interventions occur they may be ratified as legitimate activities by non-native speaker participants, and the power asymmetry is thereby co-constructed by the participant. However, such asymmetries may also be resisted by non-native speakers when they reassert their communicative intent and in so doing reframe the interaction away from inequalities.

Based on the research literature of the “native/non-native” distinction and on Bourdieu’s notion of field and social action, this paper proposes to use the specific case of foreign language (FL) teaching in the French educational system to conceptualize the FL teaching field as a highly contested space where unequal actors vie for symbolic power and influence. The FL teaching field is organised into two large spaces: one representing state school educational systems, the other representing private language schools. Symbolic power and teaching legitimacies have been jointly constructed giving more power and legitimacy to non-native teachers in state school settings, and more power and legitimacy to native teachers in private language schools. Universities occupy a middle position between the educational settings of the national education systems and the private settings of language schools: the teaching of language to future specialists is still in the hands of non-native speaker teachers whereas the teaching of language to non-language specialists seems more open to native speaker teachers. The “native/non-native” opposition that linguists thought to be relevant linguistically might no longer be a linguistic concept (Paikeday 1985; Davies 1991; Rampton 1990; Cook 1999; Muni Toke 2013), but, as a social construct, this opposition is still very much alive. It serves to design language policies within which actors-teachers of foreign and second languages confront one another. Due to the global deregulation of educational settings, language actors-teachers are therefore put into a highly competitive market: both native and non-native language teachers struggle to be recognized, and essentialist or even racist attitudes have developed into what Holliday (2006) calls “nativespeakerism”. Understanding the structure of the language teaching field worldwide makes it possible to clarify the power struggle and symbolic violence within the field, whose goals and values are paradoxically aimed at mutual understanding through language teaching and cultural mediation – and even more so in the age of multilingualism.

The article examines the significance of questions such as “where are you really from?” in everyday conversational interactions. Defining this kind of talk as nationality and ethnicity talk (NET), i. e. discourse that either explicitly or inexplicitly evokes one’s nationality or ethnicity in everyday conversation, the paper discusses what constitutes NET, how it works through symbolic and indexical cues and strategic emphasis, and why it matters in the wider context of identity, race, intercultural contact and power relations. The discussion draws on social media data including videos, blogs, on-line comments and the authors’ observations, and focuses on NET around Asian people living outside Asia. It argues that the question “where are you really from” itself does not per se contest immigrants’ entitlement. However, what makes difference to the perception of whether one is an “interloper” – someone who is not wanted – is the “tangled” history, memory and expectation imbued and fuelled by power inequality.

Misunderstandings in intercultural interactions are often taken as givens – unintentional side effects of coming to interactions with different languages and frames of reference – but also as givens that with enough effort and learning on the parts of participants might be repaired or even avoided. Researchers have warned, however, that assuming the intercultural-ness of these interactions to be the a priori cause of misunderstandings ignores possibly more complex, and less comfortable, explanations involving power relations and social identities. Drawing on data from a year-long ethnography of 11 Nepali- and Turkish-speaking children learning English in preschool in the United States, this paper argues that in some cases, it is less helpful to see intercultural-ness as a cause of misunderstanding than as an alibi for it. Through the lens of “strategic misunderstanding”, this paper shows how one English-speaking student exploited the gap in language ability and in symbolic power between himself and an English language learner (ELL) peer in order to fake misunderstanding and thus accomplish his own social aims.

This paper is a case study of a Filipino woman who migrated to Korea to marry a Korean farmer and who ends up using her knowledge of English to navigate power differences in her exchanges with Korean interlocutors. I extend the tradition of research on intercultural communication by drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power. Employing the ethnography of an embedded case study, this paper adopts inductive thematic analysis and discourse analysis to show (a) Natalie’s attitudes toward Korean and English, (b) her use of English in the Korean school setting as a parent to destabilize power differences, (c) her encounters with institutional/ideological walls that reinforce power differences, and (d) her daughter’s strategies of appropriating her mother’s English speaking status. The data reveal how Natalie – being in an inferior social position due to her status as a foreign bride – strategically used the symbolic power of English in an effort to position herself as a legitimate interlocutor. The clash between the global legitimacy of English and the local legitimacy of Korean replicates on a microscale the larger symbolic struggles that are going on the geopolitical level in intercultural encounters. By discussing the historical, (post)colonial reality that study participants faced, this paper ultimately demonstrates a conflict between various symbolic orders and highlights the eminently paradoxical struggle for symbolic power.