The danger of stereotypical descriptions

Studies and teaching programs that deal with intercultural communication are often based on attempts to understand national cultures; therefore there is a great risk of neglecting the significant differences which exist between activities, groups and individuals on a non-national level. An orientation toward national cultures combined with efforts to find easily conveyed generalizations gives a further risk, namely that of taking over stereotypical notions of a “national character” that have arisen to serve what a certain group sees as its own or national interests. See Tingsten (1936). For example, Swedes may be characterized as envious, Scots as stingy, French as vain, Americans as superficial, etc.

The danger of misleading and biased generalizations is one of the greatest risks in research on intercultural communication, and that danger increases as soon as someone tries to describe the differences between groups from the perspective of a particular group's interests.

Social identity and ethnicity

Two important concepts in this discussion are ethnicity and social identity. I believe that these concepts can be related to culture and national states in the following way. A group is an ethnic group when certain of its cultural characteristics are used to socially and politically organize it and when this organization is allowed to continue for a relatively long period of time. The group’s ethnicity is comprised of those traits which have a politically cohesive power. If the group comprises or strongly aspires to comprise its own politically independent nation, the characteristics are termed nationally ethnic and the desire to emphasize and/or spread them is called nationalism. Depending on the strength of this nationalism or the evaluation of it, it can further be characterized as chauvinism or patriotism.

Social identity can be related to culture in the following way. At a particular point in time, a culture provides a number of properties and relations around which individual persons can organize their lives. People construct their social identity by regarding a part of these properties and relations as decisive for who he/she is. In this way, it is possible for a person to identify him or herself with his/her age, sex, family position, profession, political ideology, religious belief, regional residence or national affiliation, etc. As social organizations are constructed around most of these characteristics, by identifying with them, one often simultaneously comes to belong to a group of people who think alike. Most people have a potential for identifying themselves with several of these characteristics but come gradually to focus on a few as primarily creating his/her identity.

One possibility is that you strongly identify with characteristics that you consider important for your national or ethnic group. You mainly become a Swede, a Finn, a Basque or a Sami. Being a father or a teacher may become less important. For a person of this type, national or ethnic membership is what gives him/her their main identity. But as we have seen, identity can of course be constructed on the basis of other characteristics. Personal preferences and degree of social recognition are among the decisive factors in constructing one’s identity. This probably means that people with high status jobs will be less prone than people with low status jobs to let ethnic membership be the characteristic they mainly identify with. In studying what I here call intercultural communication, it is particularly important to be aware that there are no necessary relationships between identity on the one hand and ethnicity or nationalism on the other. A position taken without reflection can easily lead to hasty assumptions about stereotypical cultural differences.

Culture and activities

One way to escape the danger of stereotypes, at least to a certain extent, is to connect the concept of culture with the concept of activity. A culture, that is a way of thinking behaving, etc., surfaces in the activities which the people in a certain group pursue. An activity here can be anything from arguing to hunting, fishing or farming. Most people participate in a number of activities and can often think and act in substantially different ways in different activities. There is a great difference between being a father, a pastor and a lover but, at least in Sweden, it is completely possible for one person to have each of these roles simultaneously.

By taking into consideration the variation in activities among a group of people, we can begin to get an understanding of the nature of intranational and international cultural similarities and differences. At the same time, the variation in activity must also be supplemented with differences that are e.g. biological or regional.

Intercultural communication

As for the other key concept in intercultural communication – communication – I largely follow the analysis presented in Allwood (1976). In this context, one can briefly characterize communication as the sharing of information between people on different levels of awareness and control. I want especially to emphasize the latter since, in a intercultural context, this can become a problem particularly with features in communication about which people have low degree of awareness and find difficult to control. Examples would include the ways in which we show and interpret feelings and attitudes.

If we use what is said above about “culture” and “communication” as a base, we would now be able to define intercultural communication as the sharing of information on different levels of awareness and control between people with different cultural backgrounds, where different cultural backgrounds include both national cultural differences and differences which are connected with participation in the different activities that exist within a national unit.

(Jens Allwood)

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