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2 - The Genealogy of Intercultural Communication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2017

Ingrid Piller
Ingrid Piller
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
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Summary

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter will enable you to:

  • • Gain an overview of the historical and socio-economic contexts in which the contemporary concern with cultural difference, multiculturalism and intercultural communication is embedded.

  • • Critically engage with the ideologies and material interests informing specific understandings of culture, multiculturalism and intercultural communication.

    • ‘CULTURE’

    Generations of Latin students have had to memorise the beginning of Caesar's account of the Gallic wars (59–51 BCE):

    All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in our Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws. (Caesar 2009 [ca. 50 BCE])

    Compare Caesar's account of the Belgae, Aquitani and Gauls with the beginning of this modern text about the Kurds:

    A largely Sunni Muslim people with their own language and culture, most Kurds live in the generally contiguous areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Syria – a mountainous region of southwest Asia generally known as Kurdistan. (‘Who are the Kurds?’ 1999)

    What Caesar saw as important in describing a people or a tribe – or, to put it in more contemporary terms, an ethnic group – are, in the Latin original, lingua, institutis, legibus (‘language, customs, laws’). There is no mention of culture where the contemporary text has ‘language and culture’ – a ubiquitous collocation in modern writing about ethnic groups. Conversely, reference to customs and laws is typically absent from modern accounts of ethnic groups. This is even more striking when one considers that ‘customs’ – which sometimes does appear in modern writing – may not be the most accurate translation of Latin institutis. As is obvious, Latin institutis is closely related to English ‘institutions’ and its precise meaning lies somewhere on the spectrum between English ‘institutions’ and ‘customs’.

    Type
    Chapter
    Information
    Intercultural Communication
    A Critical Introduction
     , pp. 13 - 30
    Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
    Print publication year: 2017

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