1.2 Intercultural Communication and Competence

Edward T. Hall

The anthropologist Edward T. Hall, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, is credited by many scholars as the founder of the field of intercultural communications. This is a term he first used in his 1959 book about nonverbal communication, The Silent Language.1

Hall wrote in the book’s introduction: “Difficulties in intercultural communication are seldom seen for what they are. When it becomes apparent to people of different countries that they are not understanding one another, each tends to blame it on ‘those foreigners,’ on their stupidity, deceit, or craziness.” (emphasis added)

He also urged his readers to learn about themselves “by taking seriously the cultures of others.”

Such incisive soul-searching was not a typical feature of American life in the 1950s, when TV series like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver reflected a homogenized vision of white suburban values.

Hall has written that his personal experiences influenced his decision to pursue the study of how different cultures interact. Specifically, he cites time spent with the Hopi and Navajo Tribes, as well as serving as an officer in an African American regiment in World War II.2

From 1950–55, Hall was the director of the Point IV Training Program at the Foreign Service Institute, Washington, DC. It was at this institute that US diplomats studied the language and “culture” of the countries where they would temporarily serve. And it was this experience of applied cultural anthropology—teaching State Department representatives how to get along with foreigners—and his scholarly training at Columbia University, that helped Hall formulate the theories that would form the foundation of intercultural communication.

Whereas anthropologists had previously focused on behaviors within a single culture, Hall was more interested in the interactions between cultures. Hall’s theories on communication between cultures were influenced by leading academics in linguistics, Freudian psychology, anthropology, and animal behavior (ethology). His scholarly endeavors were an extension of a practical course he taught to American diplomats, simply entitled “How to Understand Foreign People.”

US diplomats had long received lessons in topics such as ethnocentrism—the judgment of another culture based on one’s own cultural values—and linguistic relativity—the theory that one’s perspective is formed by one’s language. Yet no academic, or trainer, had put these two ideas together into a single concept. And American diplomats seemed particularly challenged in the communication that most people would view as necessary to do their jobs.

The Cold War was a time when US foreign service officers, in their effort to contain Soviet power, were desperately seeking to influence decision makers abroad. However, in the 1950s, the vast majority of US diplomats didn’t speak the languages of the countries where they were posted, according to numerous reports. In contrast, 90 percent of all Russian diplomatic staff, including “officials, secretaries, and chauffeurs,” spoke the language of their country of assignment.3

From Theory to Practice

Hall and his colleagues initially tried to teach American diplomats the finer academic points of anthropological theory. How do you think that went? The foreign service students rebelled, telling Hall that studying the rituals and trade among Navajo Tribes was not much use to them.4 The diplomats wanted to understand the people whom they were actually going to meet. So along with the linguist George L. Trager, Hall authored a foreign service guide that addressed topics such as subconscious nonverbal signaling. He presented a matrix for the analysis of cultures. He also provided concrete simulations that allowed the diplomats to practice their skills, something that was uncommon in academic circles at the time.

The foreign service guide became the basis of Hall’s The Silent Language, an accidental bible of intercultural communications. The Silent Language led to a burgeoning of academic research on the use of time, movement, and social distance in communication, or respectively, chronemics, kinesics, and proxemics. And the book, written for the public, was also a bestseller! Hall was even interviewed by Playboy magazine. He did write about how different cultures view proximity and sexuality, so that’s perhaps no surprise. The book also contained provocative passages, which today we would likely object to as promoting stereotypes.

In Iran, Hall wrote, “Iranian men read poetry; they are sensitive and have well developed intuition and in many cases are not expected to be too logical. They are often seen embracing and holding hands. Women, on the other hand, are considered to be coldly practical. They exhibit many of the characteristics we associate with men in the United States. A very perceptive Foreign Service officer who had spent a number of years in Iran once observed, ‘If you will think of the emotional and intellectual sex roles as reversed from ours, you will do much better out here.’”

Hall never saw himself as the pioneer of a new field, but that’s how it turned out. Although it wasn’t until the 1960s that intercultural studies really took off as an academic pursuit in university communications departments. Starting in the 1970s, with increased globalization, intercultural communication became an acute business need for American firms expanding to overseas markets as we will discuss in future topics.

Interculturalism Today

You might be wondering why we have not yet clearly defined intercultural communication. There are varying academic definitions. But first, the author wants you, the student, to guess a little and extrapolate from your own experiences. If you are taking this course, you have already studied various theories in communication. What makes the use of the term communication special in the field we are studying is that much of it is unintentional. That is, the communicator and the communicatee are often unaware of the messages they are transmitting or even why they are transmitting them.

Intercultural refers to across or between different cultures. If we consider culture “is the total shared, learned behavior of a society or a subgroup,”5 as the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead defined it, then it’s probably clear to you that there are an exponential number of opportunities for intercultural confusion, misunderstanding, and even hostility. Or as Mead put it, anthropologists have “the urgent need to devise better methods of co-operation between national groups and within national groups which are torn by regional, class, or ideological conflicts.”6 In this course, we will explore how some of these conflicts arise and what strategies we can employ to foster successful intercultural exchanges.

Toward a New Paradigm

Research on intercultural communication was long made on the assumption that within a national culture, there is little significant variation. But if someone tells you Americans are warm, open, and friendly, do they mean all Americans or do they distinguish between regions or even states? And there lies perhaps the greatest challenge for today’s students of intercultural communication as employees, managers, travelers, and diplomats: there has never been a more pressing need to understand subcultures within national groups. We will address this in our subtopic on changing demographics. Subcultures will also feature prominently in our discussion of why intercultural competence—the ability to communicate clearly and impactfully across cultures—is of such great value in today’s business marketplace.

Another issue that you may have noticed in the previous section about Hall is the propensity of interculturalism to rely on exactly what it is trying to extinguish: stereotypes. How can there be discussions of national character, ethnic behavior, and gender without falling into the traps of bias? That is perhaps a rhetorical question for you to consider throughout this course, and one you can hopefully feel more qualified to answer after intense study.

There are some scholars today who believe intercultural communications has focused too much on negative outcomes, with insufficient focus on commonalities. Throughout this course, we will also try to keep in mind what Mai Nguyen-Phuong-Mai, an associate professor at Amsterdam School of International Business, argues that interculturalists today should take the following as their approach: “Identifying mutual concerns, objectives, backgrounds, values, practices and interests should be the first and foremost essential skill when communicating across cultural borders.”7