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Article Excerpt
During the past few years, intercultural communication scholarship has directed increasing attention to the limits of traditional social science research in the study of race and ethnicity (Martin & Davis, 2000). Much of this attention has focused on different methodological approaches and their capacity to adequately capture the complexities of racial and ethnic difference while providing a consistent foundation upon which knowledge can be developed. In some sectors of intercultural communication scholarship, scholars feel an urgency in the effort to develop research approaches that allow for full engagement with the complexities of racial and ethnic signification in geopolitical contexts and the histories of colonialism and imperialism entailed within them. I share this sense of urgency.
In intercultural communication scholarship, phenomenology has been nominated as a qualitative research methodology that can meet the challenges of fully engaging the complexities of racial and ethnic difference (Kanata, 2003; Kristjansdottir, 2003; Martinez, 2000, 2003; Orbe, 1998, 2000), although one not generally seen as capable of engaging questions of historical context and the trajectories of power that define them. Questions concerning the contemporary geopolitical landscape (as in West-East, North-South relations), including examinations of history (colonialism), economics (capitalism, distribution of wealth), demography, and foreign policy (intercultural relations formalized between nations), are generally considered outside the scope of phenomenological research. [2] I do not share this point of view.
My purpose in the present work is to show how semiotic phenomenology can meet these urgent challenges by fully engaging the complexities of racial, ethnic, and cross-cultural difference. [3] To meet the challenges, semiotic phenomenology must have the capacity to engage a critical effort in exposing the balance of power whereby the "mainstream" of Western cultures continues to set the terms and conditions in which cultural and racialized Others are understood. In this sense, semiotic phenomenology should be understood as an interdisciplinary practice that is as useful for the critical purpose of interrogating the trajectories of power through which systems of domination and oppression among groups of persons are sustained as it is for exploring the complexities of lived experience, voice, and consciousness.
In making these arguments, I focus specifically on Martin and Nakayama's (1999) effort to develop a dialectical perspective in intercultural communication scholarship--a perspective whose potential, I believe, has yet to be fully realized. One reason the dialectical perspective has not realized its full potential lies in the fact that the theoretical and practical terms necessary for its successful implementation have yet to be adequately specified. Absent this specification, the deeply entrenched Western cultural preference for a liberal pluralist approach remains tacitly at work. [4] For the full potential of Martin and Nakayama's dialectical perspective to be realized, this deeply embedded Western cultural sense of liberal pluralism must be overcome. Semiotic phenomenology, particularly as it is informed by the work of C. S. Peirce (1958), specifies the theoretical and practical terms in which the dialectical perspective can be successfully implemented and thus realized in the actual conduct of our scholarly and research efforts. In short, semiotic phenomenology can be shown to provide the technical specifications that allow the dialectical perspective to be fully embodied as practice and therefore make urgently needed contributions to the study of race, ethnicity, and cross-cultural understanding.
Dialectical Perspectives in Intercultural Communication Scholarship
Interrogating the trajectories of power whereby systems of domination and oppression among groups of persons are sustained has been approached largely through work in the humanities, both inside and outside of communication. The work of Foucault (1972) and Said (1978) and the postmodern turn in philosophy generally have led to countless volumes of scholarship interrogating the relationships among power, knowledge, culture, language, history, time, place, and lived experience. Less of this work has permeated into social scientific research. Phenomenology holds a unique position in this regard because it can be claimed by persons on both sides of this artificial divide (see Giorgi, 2002 on the social scientific claim). Martin and Nakayama's (1999) dialectical perspective also seeks to straddle this too often rigidly held separation between the humanities and social sciences. The effort to straddle this all-too-easily replicated separation is a key barrier to the full realization of the dialectical perspective in practice. Transcending this barrier is possible by recognizing that no matter what research paradigm one works within, it is always the case that persons conduct the research. Recognizing this fact requires recognizing that all persons are inextricably located in time, place, and culture. Thus, the research we conduct is also produced in relation to the time, place, and culture of its production. Full realization of the dialectical perspective must take this fact of persons existing inextricably in time, place, and culture as a theoretical and practical problematic from which our work necessarily begins.
I share Martin and Nakayama's (1999) goal for a dialectical approach to the study of intercultural communication to the extent that "it offers us the possibility to see the world in multiple ways and to become better prepared to engage in intercultural interaction" (p. 13). Herein lies the tremendous promise of the dialectical perspective. It requires researchers to step outside of our often rigidly constructed and strongly defended epistemological (and cultural) commitments. It moves us consciously, by requirements of our very commitments, toward what we hope will be a genuinely pluralistic and dialectical mindset that may drastically reduce the domination of our own often unconscious cultural preferences as well as proclivities toward a unitary or singular understanding of anything. [5]
Our actual capacity to achieve this promise of the dialectical perspective, however, remains an open question. It is true that I can consciously choose to shift my perception and see something from a different perspective. But to shift my perception at the level of cultural embodiment--at the level of my habituated patterns of cultural perception and expression--is much more difficult to achieve and even more difficult to account for. The success of a dialectical approach applied to intercultural communication must move beyond the conscious application of multiple perspectives and create a shift in the preconscious and unconscious patterns of perception working at the habituated level of human experience--in short, working at the level of culture. It must also, moreover, competently engage the question as to how we know the difference between assertions that we have seen something from multiple perspectives and the fact that we have actually shifted our culturally embodied modality of perceiving.
I am living and working in the United States of America during this 1st decade of the 21st century. I am a monolingual English speaker who studies work produced primarily in the United States. My discipline, communication, is similarly situated. My subdiscipline, intercultural communication, has a history strongly rooted in the perspective of Westerners working and traveling abroad; its development coincides with the rise of U.S. American world power following the events of World War II (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990; Shome & Hegde, 2002). As a U.S. American, I believe in progress and an open society. I believe in the freedom and inherent value of all persons. I have a strong liberal orientation, not in the sense of U.S. "party politics" but in the sense of believing in liberty--the freedom to think and live outside of force or coercion--as something that must be struggled for and achieved. I am, in many ways, a typical American.
The communication discipline (and education in the United States generally) also has a strongly liberal orientation rooted in these U.S. American cultural preferences. We see this orientation particularly in the effort to "equalize" contributions from major academic "traditions" and bring them all into a holistic mutual appreciation--Martin and Nakayama's dialectical approach is clearly borne of this effort (see also Craig, 1999). The effort is much like the "melting pot" theory of cultural development in the United States, whereby differences are obscured, making it difficult if not impossible to achieve respect across those differences. The commitment to dialogical and dialectical practice as a foundation for our field is certainly a laudable goal. Martin and Nakayama's call for a dialectical approach to intercultural communication scholarship directs researchers to engage in "multiple, but distinct, research paradigms" without becoming "enmeshed into any paradigm" (p. 13). This argument, like the argument that we can "equalize" contributions from major academic "traditions" and bring them all into a holistic mutual appreciation, presumes that the fact that researchers are always already enmeshed in culture, often in ways that we are unconscious of, is irrelevant--or at best can be overcome by the choice to do so. It presumes that the conscious choice...
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