Abstract
Culture is one of the biggest concepts both in academia and on everyone’s lips in our daily life. For most of us, it has been taken-for-granted that cultures are divided by clear-cut Us-Them boundaries between countries, regions, religions, generations, among many others, manifesting a stark but ideologically imagined “boundary fetishism” (Pieterse, 2004, p. 224) that polarizes human beings between us/in-group and them/out-group. Interculturality is therefore confused with cross-national comparisons, for instance. This book Interculturality Between East and West: Unthink, Dialogue and Rethink urges us to question this taken-for-grantedness when we conceptualize culture and interculturality. By starting with a musician metaphor and some well-known idioms, especially, the “众盲摸象 (The blind touching an elephant)” (Dervin et al., 2022, p. 5) encourages readers to ponder upon the nature of multiplicity of flavors (i.e., the underlying but hidden ideologies of ways of thinking) to open up pluri-perspectival discussions of interculturality in the beginning of this book. Overall, this book, like its title, is one of the very few works that are intercultural in nature by engaging the authors and their students into reciprocal and honest dialogues throughout the writing process when power relations are constantly (re)balanced in intercultural encounters. To challenge the long-held, dominant and (post-)modern paradigms of interculturality/intercultural research exclusively from the West, no rigid definitions of culture or of interculturality are given throughout the whole book; a posteriori logic is therefore favored. It is also important to note that, like many other critical scholars in intercultural fields (e.g., Holliday, 2011), the main idea of this book is neither to demonize nor to blow up West/Westernization but to develop readers’ critical awareness of essentialist Othering/Otherization between superior Center and inferior Periphery when West and East meet each other; unquestioned and solid West-East binaries in this book are merely vivid cases for deepening and even reshaping our understandings of interculturality and diversity. After reading this book, by going beyond the superficial differentialist ideology in intercultural communication as a popular but commonsense-like template for collecting information of cultural differences (e.g., customs and traditions), readers will certainly be more able to bracket/unthink, thick description/dialogue and transcend/rethink when “doing” and “doing with” interculturality associated with politicality between ideological perspectives, which is never-ending and omnipresent in our everyday life. Simply put, interculturality is not about knowing of static cultural facts/differences but about processual engagements between interlocutors when identities are (re)created or (re)negotiated because of co-constructed strangeness; “[c]Cultures do not talk to each other; individuals do” (Holliday et al., 2010, p. 110).
This book has 11 chapters, and these chapters can be roughly categorized into three thematic clusters: unthinking the ambiguous but unquestioned theories and practices of culture, static a priori categorizations and interculturality (Chapter 1∼3), languages (Chapter 4) and translation (Chapter 5); listening to and dialogues between identities (Chapter 6), between perspectives on interculturality (Chapter 7∼8); rethinking and revisiting the East-West dichotomy (Chapter 9), intercultural competence (Chapter 10) and interculturality (Chapter 11).
In Chapter 1-5 (unthinking), the authors introduced (Chapter 1) the underpinning working methods of this book by starting with identifying the discursive monopoly of Western ideologies in East-West relations followed by discussing the lack of critical reflexivity that hides/unawares certain ideologies in intercultural relations preventing us from dialogues by imposing symbolic violence on periphery/vernacular perspectives through unquestioned othering mechanisms. After visiting a bookstore in Beijing, the authors analyzed how culture is used diversely within one premise by unmasking their underlying discourses, power as well as potential influences from the West throughout universal globalization processes (Chapter 2). Culture is therefore a fluid concept itself. By recognizing this, Chapter 3 calls for a fluid and dynamic approach towards culture and interculturality, moving from static cultural differences towards how culture/interculturality are defined by whose power serving whose interests. Chapter 4 is related to the concept of language ideology and language identity by uncovering how languages/linguistic groups are treated and perceived unequally by imposing stereotypical judgements and ethnocentrism, especially, from the perspectives of the authors’ native languages (Chinese and Finnish). Chapter 5 takes examples of how Chinese languages are mis-/un-translated in terms of ideologies and powers that mislead to miscommunications and otherization.
In the second thematic cluster of the book (listening to and dialogues), Chapter 6 discussed one essential concept in intercultural communication, identity, as an unstable and unpredictable phenomenon in intercultural encounters because self can change; each individual person has multiple identities, and one identity can be polysemous and complex itself; misidentification takes place when stereotypical imaginaries of a certain identity marker (such as race) has no shared meaning between interlocutors. Chapter 7∼8 illustrate multiple perspectives on definitions of interculturality, and how different meanings can be negotiated and emriching each other, for instance, between the authors and their students in a Minzu university in China.
Finally, in the third thematic cluster (rethinking and revisiting), one author (Fred Dervin) reflected on how his long-term engagements with China and experienced otherness in China diversified his understanding of the East-West binary, which is a concrete case of unnoticed intercultural competence on the go day by day, rather than confining intercultural competence within ready-made models from academia. In Chapter 10, the authors criticized the limited and limiting models of intercultural competence, which are usually western, recipe-like and success-only, disrupting the superiority of any ready-made models of intercultural competence.
As concluded by the authors in Chapter 11, this book cannot be used as intercultural orthodox either because listening to each other and dialogues for figuring out why are two essentials when we do interculturality (p. 157). After reading this book, readers, especially intercultural educators, should reflect on what interculturality meant for him/her before and how this book can deepen his/her understandings of interculturality; why (not)? Also, readers should practice interculturality on daily basis through long-term engagement with others; readers should also recognize and investigate the multiplicity nature of interculturality itself because “‘My intercultural’ might have different values and ideologies than ‘your intercultural’” (Dervin, 2016, p. 2). Even so, “[i]If people were not different, they would have nothing to say to each other. And if they were not the same, they would not understand each other” (Arendt, 1958, p. 155). For that point, it is always necessary for us all, including researchers, to constantly (re)think how people holding differing views can work together to co-create a better future—who holds the speakerhood? Who does not?
