Cross-cultural Communication
Melvin Schnapper
A
A Peace Corps staff member is hurriedly called to a town in Ethiopia to deal with reports that
one of the volunteers is treating Ethiopians like dogs. What could the volunteer be doing to
communicate that?
Another foreign volunteer in Nigeria has great trouble getting any discipline in his class, and
it is known that the students have no respect for him because he has shown no self-respect.
How has he shown that?
Neither of these volunteers offended his hosts with words. But both of them were unaware
of what they had communicated through their non-verbal behaviour.
In the first case, the volunteer working at a health centre would go into the waiting room and
call for the next patient. She did this as she would in America - by pointing with her finger to the
next patient and beckoning him to come. Acceptable in the States, but in Ethiopia her pointing
gesture is for children and her beckoning signal is for dogs. In Ethiopia one points to a person
by extending the arm and hand and beckons by holding the hand out, palm down, and closing
it repeatedly.
In the second case, the volunteer insisted that students look him in the eye to show
attentiveness, in a country where prolonged eye contact is considered disrespectful.
B
While the most innocent American-English gesture may have insulting, embarrassing, or at least
confusing connotations in another Culture, the converse is also true. If foreign visitors were to bang
on the table and hiss at the waiter for service in a New York restaurant, they would be fortunate if
they were only thrown out. Americans might find foreign students overly polite if they bow.
C
It seems easier to accept the arbitrariness of language - that dog is
chien in French or
aja in
Yoruba - than the differences in the emotionally laden behaviour of non-verbal communication,
which in many ways is just as arbitrary as language.
Secondly, we assume that our way of talking and gesturing is 'natural' and that those who
do things differently are somehow playing with nature. This assumption leads to a blindness
about intercultural behaviour. And individuals are likely to remain blind and unaware of what
they are communicating non-verbally, because the hosts will seldom tell them that they have
committed a social blunder. It is rude to tell people they are rude; thus the hosts grant visitors
a 'foreigner's licence', allowing them to make mistakes of social etiquette, and they never know
until too late which ones prove disastrous.
An additional handicap is that the visitors.have not entered the new setting as free agents,
able to detect and adopt new ways of communicating without words. They are prisoners
of their own culture and interact within their own framework. Yet the fact remains that for
maximum understanding the visitor using the words of another language also must learn to use
the tools of non-verbal communication of that culture.
D
Non-verbal communication - teaching it and measuring effect - is more difficult than formal
language instruction. But now that language has achieved its proper recognition as being
essential for success, the area of non-verbal behaviour should be taught to people who will live
in another country in a systematic way, giving them actual experiences, awareness, sensitivity.
Indeed, it is the rise in linguistic fluency that now makes non-verbal fluency even more critical.
A linguistically fluent visitor may tend to offend even more than those who don't speak as well
if that visitor shows ignorance about interface etiquette; the national may perceive this disparity
between linguistic and non-linguistic performance as a disregard for the more subtle aspects of
intercultural communication. Because non-verbal cues reflect emotional states, both visitor and
host national might not be able to articulate what's going on.
E
While it would be difficult to map out all the non-verbal details for every language that the
Peace Corps teaches, one can hope to make visitors aware of the existence and emotional
importance of non-verbal channels. I have identified five such channels:
kinesic, proxemic,
chronemic, oculesic, and
haptic ...
These five channels of non-verbal communication exist in every culture. The patterns and forms
are completely arbitrary, and it is arguable as to what is universal and what is culturally defined.
Of course, there is no guarantee that heightened awareness will change behaviour. Indeed,
there may be situations where visitors should not alter their behaviour, depending on the status,
personalities, and values in the social context. But the approach seeks to make people aware
of an area of interpersonal activity that for too long has been left to chance or the assumption
that visitors to other countries will be sensitive to it because they are surrounded by it.
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