Crash Course in intercultural communication

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Crash Course in intercultural communication

• Session 3
• The symbolic approach to culture

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Last time

• Hofstede and Hall
• Tools to handle with care
• Emic and Etic Approaches

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Outline for todays session

• The symbolic approach to culture
• Geertz text
• What is semiotics?
• Saussure
• Peirce
• Barthes
• Exercises

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The symbolic approach

• Covers a broad field of disciplins and
  epistemological traditons
• hermeneutic approach to science
• Interpretive approach
• The subject is central in the perception of
  communication

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Geertz view on culture

• "The concept of culture I espouse. . . is
  essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max
  Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of
  significance he himself has spun, I take culture
  to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be
  therefore not an experimental science in search
  of law but an interpretative one in search of
  meaning. It is explication I am after. . . . (pp.
  4-5)"

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Cultural analysis

• Geertz compares the methods of an anthropologist
  analyzing culture to those of a literary critic
  analyzing a text "sorting out the structures of
  signification. . . and determining their social
  ground and import. . . . Doing ethnography is
  like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a
  reading of') a manuscript. . . ."

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What is culture?

• Once human behavior is seen as . . . symbolic
  action -- action which, like phonation in speech,
  pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance
  in music, signifies -- the question as to whether
  culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind,
  or even the two somehow mixed together, loses
  sense. The thing to ask of actions is what
  their import is" (pp. 9-10).

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• Culture is public because meaning is
• Is not in someones head
• If it exists in reality or not doesnt matter
  (ex. Rocks and Dreams does both exist) what
  it means is important. (p. 10)
• Actor and context-oriented

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Peirces definition of the sign

• A sign, or representamen is something which
  stands to somebody for something in some respect
  or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is,
  creates in the mind of that person an equivalent
  sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign
  which it creates I call the interpretant of the
  first sign. The sign stands for something, its
  object. (Peirce, Elements of Logic,' 228, from an
  unidentified fragment c. 1897)

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Barthes

• Denotation
• First order meaning
• Connotation
• Second order meaning
• Myth
• Third order meaning

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Summing up

• All cultural phenomena is perceived as
  communication between human beings
• Tools and techniques
• Semiotic analysis (contradictions,
  naturalisations what is evident?, themes,
  aktant model)
• Grounded theory
• Discourse analysis

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Literature on Intercultural Communication     Geer
tz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of
Cultures Jandt, Fred E (1998) Intercultural
Communiation Hofstede, Geert (1980) Culture the
software of the mind Hall, E.T. (1959) The
silent language   Books in Danish Hjort, Katrine
et al (red. 1993) Interkulturel kommunikation
spændingsfeltet mellem det globale og det
lokale Jensen, Iben og Hanne Løngren (red. 1995)
Kultur og kommunikation Jensen, Iben (1998)
Interkulturel kommunikation i komplekse
samfund Peter Kvistgaard et al (19) Den
skinbarlige Hofstede, Aalborg Universitets
Forlag
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Next time

• Danish culture from a functionalistic and
  symbolic approach