Social domain theory: interpreting intercultural communication
Conclusion
We have developed our account of the stratified nature of the social world, illustrating how culture, agency and structure are different kinds of things, with different properties and powers. We have suggested that some of the key concepts used in mainstream studies of intercultural communication are vulnerable to theoretical critique. The approach we are advocating seeks to provide greater conceptual clarity through a fuller appreciation of the importance of a variegated social ontology. We have thus sought to demonstrate the utility of the concept of analytically separable yet experientially linked social domains for this particular branch of applied linguistics.
Social realism conceptualizes culture as an emergent property of the social world, which entails a radical shift in the way it is understood in social research. Culture is frequently presented as though it were an attribute of the individual, a property of - or possession held by - people, as a result of where they live, the religion they practice, the color of their skin and so on. This view carries the implication that cultures are fixed, limited, bounded and essentially connected to certain people by dint of the place they were born or the language they speak. (Connections between place, language and culture are quite explicit, for example, in the discourse used by the Foundation for Endangered Languages, whose call for conference papers in 2003 invites exploration of whether, on the one hand, 'knowledge of the language of your forebears [can] link you to a place that you have never seen', and, on the other, whether 'widespread languages (national, imperial, commercial) [are] cut off from their roots'.)
Against this, we have argued for a view of culture which regards it as comprising the limitless realm of human resources which we have referred to, following Popper, as World 3. This makes culture ines capably intersubjective. Just as no-one can have a private language (as Wittgenstein has observed), no-one can have a private culture. Since cultural resources are always mediated through agency, people fashion their own ways of being in the world in accordance with those cultural resources that are available to them. This concept of culture is dynamic, highlighting the fact that people move around (and draw from, as well as contributing to) those areas of the cultural realm within which they feel comfortable and 'at home'. (And where one feels at home, the ease one feels in a particular cultural context or milieu is itself partly constituted through that context or milieu itself. An individual's habitus, to use Bordieu's term, predisposes them to see themselves as a particular type of person for whom certain pastimes and recreations, ambitions and expectations are appropriate or attainable.)
If culture is an emergent and necessarily open-ended realm, then claims that nation-states can be founded on a singular or unique cultural or linguistic heritage, or that language can function as a simple badge of ethnicity, are highly problematic. Static accounts of culture have to find a way of incorporating into their theories the very large numbers of people who do not fit into a neat correspondence of culture: nation: language. These people are likely to find themselves classified as 'between two cultures', as having 'hybrid' or 'diasporic' identities and so on. There is a strong implication in such formulations that there is an originary, authentic culture from which certain people are displaced or marginalized. A less rigid, less essentialist view of culture, such as we have outlined, might facilitate a more inclusive, cosmopolitan approach to the links between language and culture.
None of this is to deny that access to the resources of World 3 is restricted and unequal, both linguistically and politically. For example, if a proposition has only ever been articulated in one particular language, and has not yet been translated, it is available only to speakers of that variety. In extreme cases, it is possible that shared world-views, expressed through one of the threatened languages found only in very tightly bounded geographical locations, will never become available at all to most of the human population: when a language 'dies', part of World 3 expires with it - unless or until other people restore the code in which it was expressed. If student places in educational establishments are restricted by wealth (or by an ability to speak a particular language), people's mobility in World 3 is correspondingly differentiated. In such ways are language, power and culture intimately related.
Using some authentic examples of intercultural communication, we have taken further the account we are aiming to present of the links between language and social action, from both applied linguistic and social theoretical perspectives, and have sought to demonstrate the inherent complexity and multidimensionality of any proposed account of intercultural communication.
