ABSTRACT
Intercultural communication research in applied linguistics has traditionally been based on the assumption that cross-cultural encounters between individuals who have been socialized in one culture and who come into contact with individuals from another culture are more often than not a source of problematic talk, fraught with potential difficulties. The phrase “intercultural contact” (IC) itself evokes colonization or tourism. But, as modern societies have ceased to be the stable homogeneous communities they were imagined to be, IC occurs not only when abroad, but is a fact of life within industrialized societies between autochtones and immigrants, as it has always been among people from different ethnic groups in African countries, for example. Although some feel threatened by the contact with people whose culture is different from their own, IC has come to be seen as an opportunity to put into question one’s own cultural assumptions and as a source of enrichment. Indeed, IC is seen by some as the very condition for the survival of culture. The colonialist origins of the term still adhere to the way culture has been largely conceived
in applied linguistics. IC has been associated with asymmetrical relations of linguistic proficiency and technological power. The positivistic, structurally oriented descriptions offered by anthropologists trying to make sense of the logic of IC between natives and non-natives has been echoed in the studies of native and non-native speakers in second language acquisition (SLA) research and research on study abroad. In the same manner as anthropologists studied how the Spaniards went about making the Indians into Christian subjects of the Spanish crown (Hanks 2010; Pratt 1992), applied linguists have been interested in exploring how immigrant non-native speakers can be helped to better understand and adopt the native speakers’ ways of talking. Students in study abroad programs are encouraged to be ethnographers of foreign customs and ways of life. Professionals view IC as the encounter between speakers from various languacultures (Risager 2006: Ch. 8) or discourse systems (Scollon and Wong Scollon 1995/ 2001) and the way they manage the cross-cultural “traffic in meaning” (Pratt 2002). However, in our current era of globalization, IC has become more complex than just speakers
of different languages encountering one another. Nowadays, many of these intercultural encounters take place in English, which does not necessarily make cross-cultural understanding
any easier. Applied linguistics research has become interested in the location of culture in “third spaces” (Bhabha 1994) that defy the neat national territorializations of yesteryear. Culture has become deterritorialized, crystallized in the forms of memories, identifications, and projections that people carry in their heads. It is passed on in the form of stories, images, and films, multimodal creations, and multilingual speech productions that problematize the one language = one culture equation and that foster hybridity, mestizaje, and the shape-shifting avatars of the internet (Pennycook 2007). Rather than focusing on IC as a problem, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, following the cultural theories of Bakhtin, Butler, Weedon, and others, are now interested in exploring the potential of IC for personal and discursive growth on various scales of time and space (Blommaert 2005; Lemke 2002) and various degrees of heteroglossia (Briggs and Bauman 1992). The study of IC today brings to the fore issues of power and ideology, historicity, and subjectivity, within a poststructuralist perspective.
