Intercultural Communication and the Challenges of Migration1

1. This paper was written during a stay as Visiting Researcher at Monash University, Melbourne, at the invitation of the research board of the School for Languages, Cultures and Linguistics (June–September 2004).

Abstract

This paper discusses some basic properties of intercultural communication (treated from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics as fundamentally similar to any other form of communication, and emphasising the need to move radically away from any essentialist substantiation of ‘culture’) against the background of contexts of migration. Three fields of tension are distinguished in the way in which meanings are generated under (predominantly institutional) conditions of asymmetric power relationships: the tension between communicative intentions and inferencing processes; the tension between culture-related assumptions and what is actually said; and the tension between legal frames of interpretation and the intrinsic properties of life stories.

Este artículo versa sobre las propiedades básicas de la comunicación intercultural abordada desde la lingüística pragmática en el contexto migratorio con especial hincapié en la necesidad de un distanciamiento claro de la visión esencialista de la cultura. Tres puntos de tensión son los que detectamos durante el proceso de generación de significados en el marco de las realciones de poder asimétricas (propias sobre todo del ámbito institucional): la tensión entre las intenciones comunicativas y los procesos inferenciales; la tensión entre las suposiciones de tipo cultural y lo que realmente se dice y la tensión entre los marcos de interpretación jurídicos y las propiedades intrínsecas de las historias de vida.

Keywords:

• intercultural communication
• migration
• power relationships

Notes

1. This paper was written during a stay as Visiting Researcher at Monash University, Melbourne, at the invitation of the research board of the School for Languages, Cultures and Linguistics (June–September 2004).

2. This section is based on a paper that the present author prepared in collaboration with Jan Blommaert for presentation at a conference (Whither multiculturalism? Critical perspectives from Canada, Belgium and The Netherlands) held in Leuven, 7–8 October 1999. The data derive entirely from the work of Jan Blommaert (1999).

3. Compare with Silverstein's (1996) ‘culture of monoglot standard’: a culture in which monolingualism in highly developed varieties of a standard(ised) language is seen as a natural feature of modern, developed and cohesive-harmonious societies.