CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter will enable you to:

REINVENTING A NEW COMMON CULTURE

Talk of diversity, even ‘super-diversity’, leading to inter-, metro-, multior trans-cultures is everywhere these days. At the same time, we also see a resurgence of old nationalisms that hanker for some mythical past without migration, globalisation and the mixing and mingling of people they have brought. Insisting on maintaining ‘authentic’ cultural identities by dominant and subordinate groups alike seems to have reached an impasse that can only lead to more confrontation. Instead of clinging to old cultural identities, unity in diversity is predicated on bridge building and on ‘reinventing a new common culture’, as Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz put it in 1940 (quoted in Orellana 2016: 90). How intercultural communication scholarship can contribute to building such a new common culture based on engagement, interaction and service to the common good will be the focus of this final chapter.

Intercultural communication is a field that is home to a lot of goodwill, and many publications explicitly state the aim of intercultural communication research as being to contribute to bridging cultural conflicts, to developing intercultural competence or to contributing to world peace. The good intentions that emanate from numerous intercultural communication texts are best expressed in Deborah Tannen's (1986: 43) oft-quoted dictum: ‘The fate of the earth depends on cross-cultural communication.’ The rhetoric that a greater understanding of cultural differences will contribute to making the world a better place is embraced by many writers in intercultural communication. However, as I have argued throughout, rather than asking ‘How does group X communicate?’ there is a much more powerful question to be asked, namely ‘Who makes culture relevant to whom in which context for which purposes?’ This question is a realist one which embraces an understanding of culture and discourse as ultimately grounded in the material, socio-economic, embodied base of our lives.