An Introduction to Intercultural Communication. Fred E. Jandt
values of one culture. But when one is surrounded by a more powerful culture or exists within the culture of the other, the less powerful culture must accept the laws and legal system of the other, thus subordinating any other understanding of legal systems. At least in this one way, the groups are not mutually powerful. The case of American Indians supports the argument that the term co-culture does not accurately reflect reality in the United States. Just as the term subculture has undesired consequences, so too does co-culture. In an attempt to avoid misunderstandings, this text avoids using either word.
Subgroup and Counterculture
In the past, some used the term subculture to refer to groups that in some way deviate from the dominant societal standard (Hebdige, 1979). While members of subcultures present themselves differently than the larger culture, they still function and abide by its rules. The term Counterculture was more typically used to refer to groups that actively go against mainstream culture. To avoid confusing groups based on geographic region, ethnicity, and economic or social class with groups based on occupations and interests, the term Subgroup was sometimes used to refer to these groups.
Psychologists have long recognized that subgroups, or membership groups, have an important influence on the values and attitudes people hold. Like cultures, subgroups provide members with relatively complete sets of values and patterns of behavior, and in many ways pose similar communication problems as cultures. Subgroups exist within a dominant culture and are dependent on that culture. One important subgroup category is occupation. Think of large organizations and of occupations in which most people dress alike, share a common vocabulary and similar values, and are in frequent communication, as through magazines and Twitter. These subgroups include nurses and doctors, police officers, and employees of large organizations such as Microsoft. Subgroups usually do not involve the same large number of people as cultures and are not necessarily thought of as accumulating values and patterns of behavior over generations in the same way cultures do.
The term subgroup has at times been negatively linked to the word deviant. Actually, however, deviant simply means differing from the cultural norm, such as vegetarians in a meat-eating society. Unfortunately, in normal discourse, most people associate deviance with undesirable activities. To understand what is meant by subgroups, you must recognize that vegetarians are as deviant as prostitutes—both groups deviate from the norm, and both are considered subgroups.
Membership in some subgroups is temporary; that is, members may participate for a time and later become inactive or separate from it altogether. For example, there are organizations devoted to Ford cars and trucks. Some people are preoccupied with that for a while and then lose interest and relinquish membership in the group. Membership in other subgroups may be longer lasting. One person may be a firefighter for life and another gay.
However, it is a mistake to think of membership in a culture or subgroup as being so exclusive that it precludes participation in other groups. All of us are and have been members of a variety of subgroups. Think of times in your life when you were preoccupied with the concerns of a certain group. At those times, you were a subgroup member. Examples range from Girl Scouts to Alcoholics Anonymous to youth gangs to religious cults to the military.
Recognize, too, that individuals can adhere to values and attitudes and behaviors of groups of which they are not members. The term Reference group refers to any group in which one aspires to attain membership (Sherif & Sherif, 1953). This behavior is identified in contemporary slang as the wannabe, an individual who imitates the behavior of a group he or she desires to belong to. Some people dress like and talk like gang members but are not members of any gang.
Just as each of us has a cultural identity and one or more subcultural identities, we may also have a subgroup identity. While that group membership may be short-lived, it can, for a while, provide some symbols, rituals, values, and myths that we acknowledge and share with others.
Microculture and Community
We’ve seen that some believe the term subculture implies “less important.” Others point out that co-culture doesn’t seem to be a realistic term as history suggests that one culture will be dominant over the other. The term subgroup seems also to imply “not important.” Others now advocate using the term microculture, which in biology refers to a small culture of microorganisms. Applied to human behavior, Microculture refers to any identifiable smaller group bound together by a shared symbol system, behaviors, and values. Microculture, then, clearly communicates a smaller size, but national cultures can be large while others are so small that they may be smaller than some microcultures.
Popular media today more commonly use the term community for what was defined earlier as a subculture, subgroup, or counterculture. While the term community may not be commonly used in academic literature, it has an important advantage. The effects on identity of labels matter. The terms subculture, subgroup, and counterculture all carry negative connotations. Therefore, this text recommends and only uses the terms culture and community.
Let’s now begin to address the statement from the beginning of this chapter that “culture and communication can only be understood together.”
Communication
From the perspective of the study of cultures, Communication has two critical functions:
Communication is the means by which individuals learn appropriate behaviors and the means by which those behaviors are regulated.
Communication is the means by which individuals having one group identity interact with individuals with other group identities and on a more general level the means by which the groups interact with one another as formal groups.
As we saw earlier, the history of human interactions between groups has been fraught with suffering and death. Can there be a more critical time to study intercultural communication?
The remainder of this chapter is devoted to developing an understanding of communication. Our purpose is not to highlight any one definition or model of communication. Rather, the purpose here is to develop an understanding of how communication is defined and performed differently by diverse cultures.
Cultural Definitions of Communication
It has often been said that communication and culture are inseparable. As Alfred G. Smith (1966) wrote in his preface to Communication and Culture, culture is a code we learn and share, and learning and sharing require communication. Communication requires coding and symbols that must be learned and shared. Godwin C. Chu (1977) observed that every cultural pattern and every single act of social behavior involves communication. To be understood, the two must be studied together. Culture cannot be known without a study of communication, and communication can only be understood with an understanding of the culture it supports.
Confucian Perspectives on Communication
That cultures define communication in diverse ways demonstrates that communication is an element of culture (Krippendorff, 1993). Definitions of communication from many Asian countries stress harmony (Chen & Starosta, 1996). This is most notable in cultures with a strong Confucian tradition. Societies heavily influenced today by Confucian history or tradition are China, North and South Korea, Singapore, and many East Asian countries with large Chinese communities.
The Chinese scholar K’ungFutzu, a title the Jesuits later Latinized as Confucius (550–478 BCE1), lived in a time when the feudal system in China was collapsing. Confucius proposed a government based less on heredity than on morality and merit.
Confucius set up an ethical-moral system intended ideally to govern all relationships in the family, community, and state. Confucius taught that society was made up of five relationships: those between ruler and subjects (the relation of righteousness), husband