INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I will be reviewing a selection of intercultural and cross-cultural studies of communication in apartheid South Africa. My purpose in doing so is, first, to distinguish between cross-cultural and intercultural communication studies in terms of the theories that inform and the research methods that are used in them. Second, it is to explore what each type of study has contributed to an understanding of the sources and consequences of intercultural miscommunication in South Africa and, more generally, of how dominant ideologies and power relations associated with them affect, and are affected by, the quality of such communication.

In sociolinguistics, as elsewhere, the terms ‘intercultural’ and ‘cross-cultural’ tend to be used interchangeably. However, following Carbaugh (1990: 292), I distinguish between them, reserving the term ‘cross-cultural’ for studies that explore particular features of communication (e.g. compliments, refusals, apologies, turn-taking) across two or more cultures. I use the term ‘intercultural communication’ to refer to studies that, by contrast, focus on particular intercultural encounters, and attend to whatever communication features are salient in them.

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION STUDIES

Among the communication features most extensively investigated crossculturally are speech acts. Researchers who investigate cross-cultural diversity in the rules for the performance of speech acts (refusals, promises, accusations) or speech-act sequences (invitations–acceptances/ rejections) have drawn eclectically from the philosophic tradition of linguistic pragmatics, from the anthropological tradition of the ethnography of communication and from the sociological tradition of conversational analysis. Linguistic pragmatics contributed a number of theoretical understandings.