Reading in Intercultural Communication Zygmunt Baumans Humanity on the Move - Book Report/Review Example

Reading in Intercultural Communication The reading selected for the analysis is Zygmunt Bauman’s “Humanity on the Move”, a chapter from the book, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Bauman, 2007). The reason this particular reading is interesting is that it describes a social phenomenon that seems to both explain and contradict some of the other lessons learned from being in the intercultural site of a university with a multi-cultural student population. “Humanity on the Move” makes the grim point that modern capitalism is “choking on its own waste products”, those waste products being millions of ‘unwanted’ people around the world (Bauman, 2007, p. 29). In earlier times, there was always some part of the planet that could be ‘forgotten’. The modern societies were relatively few; rapidly-developing capitalist countries like the United States or Australia could draw on the less-developed parts of the world for human and material resources, and the humans in those developing, modern countries who were not needed or could not keep up with the modern life could be pushed out to empty places. The U.S. and Australia are good examples, because both countries have a native population that was forced out of the places the later settlers wanted. But with globalisation, according to Bauman (pp. 29-31), capitalism and modernity has spread out over the whole world; there is nothing to clearly separate the ‘modern’ from the ‘primitive’ world, and therefore those who would be displaced have no place to be displaced to. “Humanity on the Move” discusses a couple conflicting ideas. First, it acknowledges the growing “multiculturalism” of places that have traditionally had a distinct, identifiable culture; Paris is used as an example (Bauman, 2007, p. 31). This seems to be the natural result of the ‘old’ process of modernisation, where the modern world – which, although Bauman does not say it, we can think of as “the West,” Europe, North America, and Australia – draws on the human resources of the rest of the world for labour and production, and in that way adopts cultural characteristics from many different places. This example is also reflected in the experience on the University campus; it is the “University of South Australia” because that it is where it is located, but its culture is global. Bauman (pp. 35-36) notes, however, that this multiculturalism has moved cultural and social conflicts from being ‘between’ cultures to being ‘within’ them, and cites examples of unwanted Afghan refugees trying, and being refused, to land in Australia, and the sad plight of asylum-seekers in the U.K., who are refused jobs, social assistance, and even decent shelter while their appeals wait for some unknown length of time in the courts. The third and most disturbing point Bauman makes is that the ‘unwanted’, refugee population is becoming a permanent culture (Bauman, 2007, pp. 42-44). He describes their circumstances as, “They are separated from the rest of the host country by an invisible, but all the same thick and impenetrable veil of suspicion and resentment.” (Bauman, 2007, p. 45) The key part of this point is that the “separation” can take two forms; the most visible is the refugee camp which often becomes a permanent home for the unwanted, who have no state and no identity beyond the small camp where they are kept, or the foreigner living in another land where he is resented and considered an invader in the community, such as the young Nepalese farmer he describes as missing teeth, not from violence in his homeland, but from being beaten up in England (Bauman, 2007, p. 43). This last idea from Bauman – of outsiders being both different and apart – is relevant to the site of intercultural exchange the University represents, particularly in Australia, where the attitudes towards cultural diversity are contradictory (Forrest & Dunn, 2010). The site of the University campus is significant because it is a site where cultures interact according to a context which is familiar to most different cultures – an educational setting – but which is exclusive to no cultures. Kramsch (2011) describes identity as being made up of one’s perception of his relationship to symbols such as language and modes of thought. The university setting provides some of those, a kind of framework to which the individual student can apply whatever other cultural symbols he has brought with him from his home culture. Also, it is important to consider that the generation of people who make up the university culture are more intercultural by nature thanks to modern social networking; just as a personal observation, I have Facebook friends from more than 20 different countries, and I suspect I am not at all unusual in this respect. Since communication is learned, ‘learning’ how to communicate with so many different people becomes second-nature, and so when students from many different cultures meet on the university campus, the individual “uniqueness” of their different cultures becomes mixed together into something that becomes a kind of “university culture”. That is a revelation in the context of Bauman’s essay, because that is exactly the sort of separation he describes for the stateless and unwelcome refugees around the world. The reason for this is the odd, contradictory attitude of the Australian culture, which Forrest and Dunn (2010) describe as both supporting cultural diversity and being against it. According to them, Australians appreciate diversity, but have a strong sense of “being Australian,” meaning that, even if they are not aware of it, there is an expectation that foreign cultures should assimilate themselves into whatever it is that defines an Australian. That contradiction leads to a fair bit of tension. Of course there are the small minority of Australians beyond the university grounds who actively resist “being invaded” by foreigners and express hateful, racist attitudes or worst. Most people, however, are aware that they ought to be culturally-sensitive, but cannot let go of the “us and them” cultural symbols that they rely on to define their identity (Kramsch, 2011). These are not the people who go about calling obvious non-Australians “wogs” and “Lebs”, but rather the ones that make others uncomfortable with unintentional slights like the clash between Eastern and Western cultures in business described in Scollon (2001, pp. 124-125). As Scollon (2001, p. 124) explains, the cultural framework for most people is fundamentally deeper than simply knowing ‘how other people communicate’ or what is polite in other cultures. For example, there is a big difference in where the boundary between “the inner person” and the part of the person that interacts with the outside world lies for Eastern and Western cultures (Scollon, 2001, pp. 132-133). When a university student encounters a situation where the cultural differences become uncomfortably obvious, it is because of deeper cultural factors; the student is defined culturally by his own cultural symbols in the context of the university culture, and communicates from that perspective. The well-meaning but unintentionally-offensive Australian does not and cannot have the same contextual definition, but rather his own, and so many times an attempt to be “culturally sensitive” in communications unfortunately fails. More often than not, it seems harmless, and sometimes even funny; for example, a local shopkeeper once greeted several Vietnamese student customers with “Gung Hei Fat Choi” for the Lunar New Year. But even in these apparently harmless situations serve to remind the receiver of that kind of message of the difference between “us and them”. The shopkeeper was trying to be polite, but he was really saying was, “I do not recognise you as a part of my familiar community,” otherwise he would have said “Happy New Year” in English, or more likely, said nothing about it all as the Lunar New Year is not really an “Australian” holiday. The result is the students are reminded that they are most ‘at home’ here in the cultural context of the university, and away from it, a foreigner in a foreign culture. That is certainly not as permanent, hopeless, and dangerous as the sad life of the ‘unwanted’ people Bauman (2007) describes, but the basic circumstances have some similarities. Because we university students have resources and opportunities, it is unlikely we would ever become stateless refugees, but the experience of learning to communicate in a multi-cultural site like the university, and the experiences that confirm its unique character – that is, as a sort of cultural island within a country – means that we are likely to become more like the refugees than whatever we were before coming here. That transition is an example of the process described by Bauman (2007) and Kramsch (2011) in slightly different ways: People who belong more to a culture we define for ourselves as individuals than by the cues of national, ethnic, or language identity, because of the contexts in which we find ourselves. References Bauman, Z 2007, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Forrest, J, and Dunn, K 2010, “Attitudes to Multicultural Values in Diverse Spaces in Australia's Immigrant Cities, Sydney and Melbourne”, Space and Polity, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 81-102. Kramsch, C 2011, ‘The Symbolic Dimensions of the Intercultural’, Language Teaching, vol. 44, iss. 3, pp. 354-367. Scollon, R 2001, Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Read More