ABSTRACT
Much of the work in intercultural communication studies in the past decade,
especially in the field of applied linguistics, has been devoted to ‘disinventing’ the
notion of culture. The problem with the word ‘culture’ as it has been used in
anthropology, sociology, and in everyday life, it has been pointed out, is that it is
used as a noun, conceived of as something ‘solid,’ an essential set of traits or
characteristics of certain people or groups, something people ‘have’ rather than
something they ‘do’ (Scollon, Scollon, & Jones, 2012). Among the most famous statements of this position is Brain Street’s classic paper ‘Culture is a Verb’ (1993), in
which he argues that culture should be treated as ‘a signifying process the active construction of meaning rather than the static and reified or nominalizing’ sense in which the word is often used in anthropology, some linguistics circles, and in
everyday conversation.
