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Performing "Culture" in Initial Contact Situations?
Introduction
It is a long history, but a short story: as one of the consequences of the
division of work and the disunion of the original collocations of production
and consumption, meeting people for the first time has become a
substantial part of interpersonal communication. Today, with the exception
of small "off-the-beaten-track" communities, it is an everyday experience
to get into contact with persons one does not know. As a result, all cultures
have developed routines for mastering corresponding everyday situations
or professional encounters. But what happens when the routines fail to
work, especially in encounters between US Americans and representatives
of other cultures? Before I begin to illustrate, let me clear my methodological ground. Within the confines of discourse linguistics (see Brinker et
al.), routines of everyday talk are examined with respect to frames (see
Tannen 1993), speech activities (see Gumperz), or communicative genres
(see Luckmann). In a recent study, Günthner (136-37) points out that these
pieces of interaction compose culture-specific households of communicative genres, and that they differ concerning the conventions of
interactional practices. "Jointly doing initial contact" is one element of
these systems submitted to cultural and linguistic change. Therefore,
Agreement on what activity type is being enacted at any given time [. . .] implies
agreement on culturally grounded inferences such as what the likely
communicative outcomes are, what range of topics can be brought up, what
information can be expressed in words, and what interpretations should be
alluded to indirectly by building on shared understanding. (Gumperz and
Gumperz-Cook 16)
These analytic challenges are the main reasons for a riskiness within initial
contacts, despite routines that have emerged by uncounted repetitions and
by today's myriad etiquette trainings and publications on first impression
management. As Gumperz and Gumperz-Cook indicate, the complexity of
communicative conventions increases in intercultural encounters. There,
the cultural backgrounds of the coparticipants from culture C1 and C2 (or
further cultures as well), their specific expectations concerning the
development of a first encounter, and the linguistic conventions to be
applied form parts of culture-specific communicative households—and
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they differ. Therefore, even interactions of people from relatively close,
western cultural backgrounds such as Germany and the USA reveal
unexpected ambiguities: on the one hand, all coparticipants share a
considerable number of values and linguistic skills. On the other, reports on
German-US professional teams put forward a general tendency toward
negative performances (see Schroll-Machl). Furthermore, "culture assimilators" show a wide range of culturally attributed misunderstandings (for
German-US situations, see Stahl et al.; Müller and Thomas; Markowsky
and Thomas).
I will thus take the communicative genre "making conversation in initial
contact situations," with illustrations focusing on the United States, as a
prototype of communicative activities. It is fundamental because of its
salient problematic features and possible results, especially in intercultural
situations. As the coparticipants cannot rely on a set of formerly established
interactional conventions, they have to display more openly, and negotiate
more intensively, the rules they consider to be appropriate. As a linguist, I
would assume that these processes of attentive use and conscious reception
of linguistic and interactional conventions offer general access to crucial
features of talk-in-interaction. A closer look at this prototypical communicative genre may thus lead to new methodological insights for tapping
other genres of a given household. At the same time, in initial contacts,
coparticipants seem to make the cultural part of intercultural communication salient. This occurs on different levels: one is that people tend to
consider their partners as "C2 representatives" and, correspondingly, jump
to conclusions predominantly on general cultural grounds. Additionally,
"culture" is regularly brought in as an explicit topic.
In this regard, I will illustrate ways of "reconstructing the construction
of cultural identities" by analyzing cases of intercultural initial contact.
Methodologically, it is important to realize that the examples serve to
determine specific linguistic conventions, interactional procedures, and
effects on negotiations of meaning; they cannot serve as information on
how Germans and US Americans "typically" behave. My general objective
is to illustrate interactional practices concerning cultural identities which
are intersubjectively accomplished through talk, so that they "can more
sensibly be accounted for in discursive, constructivist terms, than in terms
of objectively identifiable attributes of people" (Meeuwis and Sarangi 310).
We need, then, to reconstruct this process of constructing cultural identities
in everyday and professional conversations. My immediate purpose is to
focus on a few selected instances of everyday constructions of first
impressions in interpersonal contact. This is a topic to which, in general,
psychological research has in recent years been devoting considerable
attention. As an empirical subset of such constructions, and as a test case, I
choose initial encounters of Germans with US Americans previously
unknown to them, in an academic context. For such encounters,
Performing "Culture" in Initial Contact Situations?
365
orientational training handbooks exist, but currently no comprehensive data
corpus. Research on intercultural situations and cultural assimilators
assumes that people explain foreign conduct by forming a subjective
theory, attributing that conduct to their own conventions and thus tending
to systematic misconception. As a remedy, linguistic metaknowledge about
how attributions function may be helpful for enabling more adequate
interpretation of foreign linguistic conduct. Within the present, limited
scope, with a small sample of test cases that handbooks show to be not
unrepresentative, I cannot do justice to a variety of questions that would be
the object of extended research partly going beyond linguistic analysis:
what prefiguring factors are effective in linguistic conduct during initial
encounters—and to what extent do media constructions, for instance, subtly
shape expectations and conduct in real-life encounters? Does it make a
difference whether encounters with previously unknown US Americans
take place in one's home country or in the target country? How do such
encounters differ from genuine first contacts with any US Americans (if no
contacts with any people from that country have occurred previously), in
which no experience from previous contacts is available for transfer? What
variables (ethnic, regional, social, gender, age group, type of institutional
context, and the like) need consideration for both coparticipants? Do
inverse encounters (Americans meeting Germans) explain aspects that
might be pertinent for the present inquiry? What sources of knowledge
regarding encounters are suitable? Do US encounters involving Germans
reveal cultural specifics that one could set against research on encounters
involving other Europeans, let alone Asians or Africans or Latin
Americans? What temporal differences might emerge from a historical
perspective, if we were to study records of initial encounters in our time as
compared to selected previous ages? Awareness of such questions (the list
is not exhaustive) does not automatically ensure their transferability to a
manageable research design: the field is almost endless, and the present
discussion merely a first move.
I. Problem Areas
We can take the "culture assimilators" mentioned above as empirical data.
For research and training purposes, we need to consider them as problem
areas: collections of critical incidents generally summarize the most
frequent communication problems between people from culture C1 and C2,
and may yield a structured learning device. If, in particular, we take the
number of empirically determined and critical US-German cooperation
incidents as indicator for riskiness of communication, we might even be
tempted to question the common grounds of transatlantic cooperation: the
authors of the above-mentioned studies asked more than one hundred
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"cultural experts"—persons with considerable living experience in Germany and the USA—about important differences and personal misunderstandings. These biographical interviews yielded more than one hundred
typical problem situations, which were selected according to criteria such
as frequency, cause, or topic, then reformulated as "episodes," and subsequently grouped according to culture-specific value orientations.
Our focus, of course, is especially on the subcategory of initial contacts.
A re-analysis of the critical incidents in fact shows that about 17% of all
critical episodes are first encounters:
GERMAN-US CRITICAL INCIDENTS
CIS
Müller and Thomas
40
Markowsky and Thomas
26
Stahl and Langeloh
44
Total
110
INITIAL CONTACTS
7
9
4
18
Table 1: German-US critical incidents
The ambiguities of this genre and their multifaceted influences on
intercultural encounters need to be analyzed in more detail. We know that
foreign students in Germany, for example, often seem dissatisfied with
their initial contact partners, accusing their German interlocutors of
regularly turning colloquial conversation into procedural talk and asking
what one might call machine gun questions, as if they were the gatekeepers
(see Roberts and Sarangi 375). But can we generalize this kind of instant
social alienation in a communicative setting which is normally intended to
reduce interpersonal and intercultural distance? One possible linguistic
explanation for initial contacts turning into interrogation is that in some
cultures, people belonging to C1 are expected to take over the genrespecific role of primary speakers, with privileged responsibilities and
initiatives for the development of a conversation. Let us, then, consider a
report from US university contexts (personal communication): foreign
students from Asia for a time blamed US interlocutors for being cold,
unfriendly, and reserved when faced with non-native speakers from China,
Korea, Japan, or Vietnam. Curiously, US students felt the same way, and
reported that Asian students were not interested in getting to know their
American fellow students and tried to remain within separate Asian peer
groups. One resolution to the emerging mutual dissatisfaction was
communication training, helping the Asian students to practice a so-called
Triple-A pattern: If someone asks you a question, single word (e.g., yes/no)
answers are taken as indicators for unwillingness to join the conversation.
You had better give an answer, add a further remark for displaying interest,
and then ask a question in order to keep the conversation going (see Heuer
Performing "Culture" in Initial Contact Situations?
367
68). Applying this pattern, Asian students discovered that their initial
contacts with US students became more fruitful (Heuer 68 gives similar
"double-A" advice for German visitors to Britain).
Initial contact situations thus increase the risks of misunderstanding, and
in general the communicative genre "getting acquainted" tends to result in
cultural stereotyping. In order to describe this process, in the following I
will use a case study method. As there are no empirical studies of this
genre—Casper-Hehne only looks at types of relation constituting communicative genres; Kotthoff focuses on modes of expressing consensus/dissent—I will use three resources for approaching reported misunderstandings:
(a) The Council of Europe's Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters:
some 20 orientation questions have to be answered, guiding students
to "think critically about an intercultural experience" (1).
(b) The Linguistic Awareness of Cultures approach (see Müller-Jacquier
2000): this was established in order to help coparticipants to interpret
C2-influenced conversational conventions as such (linguistic attribution), and not as "deviant" or as expressing personal or cultural
characteristics.
(c) Discourse studies: The hypothesis generating tools (a) and (b) cannot
replace a detailed analysis of genre-specific, co-constructed
communicative exchanges. Therefore, I will also draw analogies from
a conversationalist study of first encounters (see Svennevig, in a
Norwegian context).
The three approaches have in common a strict separation of the aspects
"what was said or nonverbally expressed in the ongoing situation?" and
"what was attributed to what was said/expressed?" Approach (c) goes
beyond the given situation, and in fact seems to be the most fruitful one.
Based upon a strong sociological background, it examines how
coparticipants display understanding to each other, how they produce a
mutually shared social order, and thus make sense of their contexts. While I
use it for my purpose, within the present context I cannot explore its
particulars.
II. Cases
As illustrated in the introductory incidents above, most "cultural experts"
express what they, as receiving persons, attribute as what has happened.
Their reports put forward personal interpretations and C1-based
attributions, excluding access to the authentic verbal/nonverbal expressions
of the coparticipants. It is exactly this bias of psychological and cultural
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misinterpretation concerning the relation of linguistic form and function on
which I will focus. By analogy, I offer the following cases.
Case 1: How wonderfully disastrous!
At some point in initial contact situations, persons start mentioning
personal experiences. Germans (here: C1) often notice that people from the
USA (here: C2 female university students) react overwhelmingly, using
affective expressions like "how wonderful," "fantastic," or "this must have
been an exciting experience for you" if the reported facts are part of a
positive experience. Any hints of negative experiences are commented with
"oh, too bad!," "how disastrous," "I am so sorry for you," or "you had a
hard time then."
Response: this form of reacting to personal experiences can intrigue C1
participants into concluding that C2 interlocutors are merely mirroring
feelings without showing their own.1
Case 2: A Spanish Italian?
At the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), a German
professor met a representative of the International Center. He explained
why he was at UCSB, and where he came from. Understanding that he was
from Germany, the representative pointed out that she was a US citizen but
originally Italian. Her English was marked by a strong accent, though not
of the kind that the German normally associated with Italian speakers. Still,
he proceeded to ask her about Italy, intrigued by her statement about her
"origin," and told her that he had traveled to Rome several times. At this
point, she explained that she had never been to Italy and that her mother
tongue was Spanish, because she was born and raised in Buenos Aires.
Response: how can she claim that she is Italian if she has obviously no
personal living experience of the country or linguistic knowledge? How
can a person claim salience for a cultural heritage with apparently no
corresponding links?
In both cases,2 Germans, and perhaps not only they, may tend to
1
2
Here, I can speak from my own experience: as a reaction to "exaggerated emotions,"
in such a situation I invented—similarly to Harold Garfinkel's breaching experiments—mixtures of positive and negative events in order to provoke "emotional
rollercoasters." The reactions followed exactly the induced "emotional pathway," and
thus seemed to confirm my impression that Americans are often impetuous and avoid
taking personal positions or standpoints to share.
These questions recall another situation: in a discussion on cultural diversity, a US
student presented himself as "Egyptian." His father came to the USA when he was
very young. He then mentioned that he had no knowledge of Arabic languages, and
did not quite understand my polite return question on his competency in "high
Arabic." Finally, it became obvious that he had never been to Egypt or any other
Performing "Culture" in Initial Contact Situations?
369
negatively evaluate their US coparticipants and suspend the process of
reducing interpersonal distance. For them, the "emotional over-reactions"
(Case 1) as well as the putatively "wrong" cultural self-categorization
(Case 2) sound inappropriate, and may lead to an impression that the C2
speaker is trying to hide something like "true" emotion or information. In
the following, I will try to determine genre-related explanations for what
was expressed by the US speakers, using the above-mentioned resources 13 and starting with a critical review of psychological explanations.
II.1 Psychological Approaches
In contextualizing our discussion, it is helpful to be aware that most studies
of initial contact situations have been done in social psychology. After a
long tradition of empirical research on first impressions (see, among others,
Schlenker, Bierhoff, or Back), interest has shifted to cross-cultural studies,
comparing human behavior across different cultures (see Matsumoto et al.).
In the sense of such a cultural turn, Philipp offers a general reason for
problems arising in initial interactions: "In initial contact situations, cultural
differences with regards to politeness explain deviant expectation and
behavior of the communication partners, which can lead to communication
problems" (my trans. from Philipp 49).3
Using concepts like "action pattern," "establishment of interpersonal
relations," or "politeness," Philipp illustrates a psychologist's view of what
are considered to be the moving problems of research on initial contacts.
Yet linguistic studies on politeness show that the forms of expression of
politeness vary considerably. Therefore, with reference to a study by Fraser
and Nolan, Spencer-Oatey stresses that
[. . .] politeness is actually a contextual judgement: 'no sentence is inherently
polite or impolite. We often take certain expressions to be impolite, but it is not
the expressions themselves but the conditions under which they are used that
determine the judgement of politeness.' In other words, sentences or linguistic
constructions are not ipso facto polite or rude; rather, politeness is a social
judgement, and speakers are judged to be polite or rude, depending on what they
say in what context. Politeness, in this sense, is a question of appropriateness. (3)
Politeness is thus not to be understood outside its social context, and there
are many reasons to agree with the proposed dissociation between
linguistic forms and functions. But the question still remains: who is in a
3
country outside the USA, and that he had never learned a foreign language.
"Die kulturellen Unterschiede in bezug auf Höflichkeit in interkulturellen ErstKontakt-Situationen erklären Abweichungen in Erwartungen und Verhalten der
Kommunikationspartner, die Ursachen für Kommunikationsstörungen sein können."
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position to judge "appropriateness," and by using which criteria? In
psychological research paradigms, the determination of (im)polite actions
is often based upon peer evaluations:
If participants in an interaction are independently questioned about their
behavior, without opportunities to discuss their answers, agreement between
them is strong evidence that the behavior in question occurred. Furthermore,
disagreement is clear evidence of the inability [. . .] to observe and report
accurately. (Christensen et al. 129-30)
Similarly to Cases (1) and (2), this manner of evaluating the meaning of
expressions in terms of accuracy is based upon intuition, a bias which is
inherent to all psychological approaches that explain behavior in initial
contacts in terms of
−
−
−
−
personal variables predicting a successful or unsuccessful mastering of
the given tasks (e.g., personal positive self-perception: see Back 1084),
the first-impression mechanisms involved (e.g., emotional attributions: see Bar et al.),
the order of activities for getting acquainted (see below), and
the overall goals of this type of encounter (e.g., reduction of
interpersonal distance: see Langeloh et al.).
Concerning the process of establishing (monocultural) first encounters,
psychological research identifies three main phases:
Initiation phase
Maintenance phase
Termination phase
Greeting
Introduction
Health
Present situation
Reason for presence
Weather
Where live
Hometown
Persons known in common
What do you do?
Education
Occupation
Social relations
Compliments
Interests
Family
Sports
Discuss near-future meeting
Evaluation of encounter
Plan future meeting
Positive evaluation of person
Until later
Reason for terminating
Goodbyes
Table 2: Phases of initial contacts (Kellerman and Lim, see Svennevig 3)
While the three phases and their respective actions, topics, and intentions
4
"[. . .] positiven Beobachter der eigenen Person [. . .]"
Performing "Culture" in Initial Contact Situations?
371
are suited to many initial encounters within US contexts, they may be
avoided, replaced, or expressed in genre-specific forms in others. But since
most social psychologists rely on these kinds of given, "universal" action
categories,5 attributions like "over-emphasizing of emotions" or "showing
off one's cultural roots" in Cases 1 and 2 will not be determined as wrongly
categorized linguistic function,6 and will hence be personalized.
II.2 Discourse Approaches
In discourse studies, the focus of analysis shifts from psychological
categories and attributions to the process of interaction. Correspondingly,
conversation is defined as a "joint activity consisting of participatory
actions predominantly in the form of spoken utterances produced
successively and extemporaneously by different participants in alternating
turns at talk which are locally managed and sequentially organized"
(Svennevig 8).
In "performing participation," coparticipants make use of their extralinguistic knowledge about the world and of standardized communicative
experiences like the above-mentioned genres. One of them is communicating in new situations with foreign coparticipants (see Müller-Jacquier,
2002). Here, coparticipants mutually co-construe identities by reacting to
partner's expressions with comments or evaluations and by more or less
deliberately doing biography-related everyday communication, offering
personal information on cultural or linguistic belonging that may be subject
to misconception.7
5
6
7
There is a general tendency to base research on reported situations, using so-called
"cultural experts." But these non-professionals of communication form their judgements on exactly the insufficient intercultural competence which is to be trained by
critical-incident learning instruments (culture assimilators). The influence of crosscultural psychology on the research so far is strong enough for even specialists in
"communication" to focus their research on "human prerequisites" of communicative
acts rather than on the ongoing co-constructed processes (see among others
Gudykunst et al.).
Svennevig criticizes this kind of reasoning and states: "[. . .] we only learn about
general action patterns of social actors and not the conversational procedures for
realizing such actions. [. . .] Similarly, 'self-disclosure' might be a useful theoretical
construct for describing the establishment of social relations, but it does not seem to
correspond to any recognizable conversational activity" (4).
Battaglia points out that people with appearances or names out of the ordinary are
continuously forced into "saliency interactions" (my trans., 186: "Salienzinteraktionen"), being bombed with questions and remarks like: "But you are not
German?"; "Where does your name come from?"; "Sounds like Italian?!" (my trans.,
185-86: "Das ist aber kein deutscher Name, oder?," "Wo kommt der Name denn
her?," "Hört sich so italienisch an?").
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I will give a short review of conversationalists' research findings in
order to highlight key elements of initial contact situations, focusing on
linguistic patterns which appear to be crucial in Cases 1 and 2.
III. Research Contexts for Initial Contact Situations
For any initial contact situation, Svennevig identifies two crucial phenomena: one is that because coparticipants cannot "exploit mentionables from
previous conversations [. . .] strangers are obliged to begin by introducing
'brand new' topics" (116). Obviously, generating topic is a genre-specific
pattern. The question is how cultural topics are introduced and perhaps
negotiated. Another phenomenon is that coparticipants do everything to
keep a conversation going. Whereas silences are not treated as dispreferred
in other communicative genres, participants in initial contact situations try
to avoid such empty phases by using various communicative tools such as
asking questions, and giving or eliciting personal information. Even if
"non-talk" can be measured, the meaning of silence varies: "The basic issue
[. . .] is that there are cross-cultural differences in expectations about when
a pause becomes a silence, and when interlexical juncture becomes a
pause" (Tannen 1984, 95). If ambiguities during the co-construction of a
conversation emerge and continuation procedures seem to be unclear,
coparticipants may even choose to exit the situation by giving invented
excuses or using other exit techniques.
In general, all components in a communicative genre are linked. This
seems to be true for the phenomena treated above: of course, avoiding
silence is done by asking questions. This activity turns into generating
topics. However, I will illustrate the general communicative tasks
separately before pointing out mutual influences.
III.1 For Case 1: Evaluations as Feedback Signals
In coming to terms with the "emotional mirroring" of Case 1, how can we
use the Linguistic Awareness of Cultures instrument (resource b)? Can we,
linguistically, monitor hypotheses on the way C2 speakers express their
intentions in a conventionalized way?
Hypothesis 1: The reactions of the US speaker could be gender- and/or
region-specific expressions of simple feedback signals such as humm, yes,
oh, ok. What was received as evaluation of reported facts thus could be
meant as simple listening activity, co-contextualizing (and not evaluating)
the generally positive/negative content of received talk. Findings in culturespecific expressions of hearer signals support the idea that coparticipants
use quite different forms for indicating that they are still present (see also
Performing "Culture" in Initial Contact Situations?
373
Bublitz 141-42).
Hypothesis 2: The reactions could be seen as language-specific
expressions of interpersonal involvement. Tannen lists four main categories
filled with sixteen different, conventionalized ways of expressing involvement (1984, 30-31 and 149). Among others, she identifies devices which
could explain the case: paraverbal means such as expressive pronunciation,
marked pitch and amplitude shifts, or marked voice quality are features of
what she calls "high-involvement style." Therefore, the evaluations cannot
simply be read as content-independent display of concern for the other, but
as part of a conversational style of talking, i.e., a conventional means of
expressing a principally supportive involvement.
Hypothesis 3: The reactions are conventional hearers' activities when
engaging cooperatively in a sub-genre of initial contact activities: in
storytelling. Here, they can be considered as "invited." According to Labov,
storytellers use different linguistic means to make others participate in
"sensemaking" procedures by evoking internal, embedded evaluations
(cited in Svennevig 53). Therefore, we can assume that the reactions are
specific to a communicative genre, and that within this specific context the
"deviant" reactions of C2 speakers might have been evoked involuntarily
by linguistic features that C2 speakers use for storytelling, such as
dramatization.
All three hypotheses concern possible linguistic, genre-specific
conventions, viz., the hearers' participatory actions and their role-specific
activities in cooperative sense-making. In allowing this kind of linguistic
explanation, we turn away from immediate culturalizations of unconventional linguistic expressions. Instead, we adopt a strategy which searches
mainly for "double layered conventions" and "mutually established best
practice adaptations." These can serve as possible explanations for actions
which at first glance may easily be taken as "cultural." A coparticipant
highly skilled in cultural interaction might arrive at one if not several of the
hypotheses intuitively, but (as with Case 2 likewise) analytic categorization
goes beyond intuition to create tools for comprehending a variety of
situations. I do not intend to make a specific choice between the hypotheses
at this point, as precise supportive evidence is not quite easy to identify.
Hypothesis 3, at any rate, would invite study relating cases of this kind to
narrative communication patterns in oral interaction.
III.2 For Case 2: Topic Generation and Negotiation
Speaking of one's cultural belonging seems to be a crucial, necessary part
of initial contact situations (see Heinze). According to Table 2, it can be
attributed to the "initiation phase" (presentation) and/or the "maintenance
phase" (where live/hometown). The question is: what can one attribute to
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the use of communal lexicons such as "Italian/German/. . ."? In monocultural situations, it is used for "displaying community membership and
the associated expertise" (Svennevig 60). But this explanation does not fit
Case 2, because the expertise of the C2 speaker with regard to the cultural
category C3 is missing. What other analogies might apply?
The most elaborate study of topic generation in initial contact situations
has been done by Svennevig. He detects five topic areas:
Introduction type
Other-oriented
Self-oriented
We-oriented
Encyclopedic
Setting
Total
Number of
instances
69
40
3
20
15
147
Percentage
47%
27%
2%
14%
10%
100%
Table 3: Types of topic introductions (Svennevig 218)
Cultural categorizations in first encounters cover both other- and selforientation, which together represent almost three quarters of the topic
treatments. The corresponding linguistic moves are found in the initial
phase of the encounter. According to Svennevig's data (100-01), they are
embedded in a sequence in which self-oriented topics follow
"Presentation-eliciting question[s]" (concerning community membership
or biographical information). They are intended to generate minimal or
expanded "Self-presentation[s]", and are closed by "Acknowledgement
token[s]" before "Continuation elicitor[s]" open the option of focusing the
provided information.
This illustrates a salient function of treating the other's origin. But the
information seems to go beyond a topical reference: categorizations such as
"I am Italian/Egyptian/Asian-American/German" are used for drawing inferences about the speaker. With regard to the development of initial
contacts, this has to do with the functions of pre-topical sequences. In an
early study of talks between unacquainted parties, Maynard and Zimmerman conclude that "personal" or "autobiographical" talks have to be
initiated, and that certain pre-topical moves allow a construction of what
the authors call "discourse identities" (see also Svennevig 215-16). Concerning our Case 2, this could partially explain the hints about cultural
belonging: the declared cultural attachment could be meant as
contextualization of a genre-specific identity, and not as an independent
proposal for social categorization.
In an often cited contribution, Harvey Sacks (passim) points to the fact
Performing "Culture" in Initial Contact Situations?
375
that social categorizations are "inference rich." In Svennevig's data, this
kind of inferencing was a conventional cooperative pattern: a student
would use her knowledge about the category Studying Spanish to infer that
her partner had lived and studied in Spain for some time. This kind of
"move from more public, encyclopedic information (student category) to
more personal diary information" (Svennevig 233) illustrates the mechanism of category-bound inferences, so that the interlocutor's cooperative
reaction confirms the adequateness of what in other cultures may be
interpreted as dispreferred private matter.
Therefore, inferences about C2 living experience, knowledge, and L2
skills as mentioned are very likely wrong: patterns such as "I am from . . ."
allow cultural attributions with reference to the actual composition of US
society, not about the other's personal biography. One reason for this might
be that sometimes the focus of self-presentational questions—and the
corresponding reactions—is
personal, but not private or intimate. The categories evoked are publicly
available, and the activities inquired about are exercised in public. This means
that in general the information solicited is not of a private or sensitive character,
but concerns the 'official façade' of the person. (Svennevig 103)
For intercultural communication, this means that a US coparticipant may
use the "I am from . . ." pattern as a means not to provide personal
information but as a ritualized, public self-presentation. To a German or
other speaker from a country without a fairly constitutive immigration
history, this utterance might sound like personal information only because
s/he is not accustomed to making a distinction between public and private
self-presentation referring to cultural roots, and may feel invited to draw
inferences by using a personal-experience category. Therefore, mentioning
culture cannot be seen as a procedure of making salient one's cultural
belongings, but rather as an affiliation within the stratification of the
specific society, conveying sociocultural knowledge that needs further
investigation: how can one exploit this "cultural topic" in drawing
inferences from the category as identified? This is a research field awaiting
exploration in more depth in future studies. Different exploitations of
typified social knowledge are likely to reveal further insights into cultural
specifics.
IV. Conclusion
I have been looking at selected phenomena in intercultural initial contact
situations, specifically focusing on initial encounters of German and USAmerican speakers and on what could be characterized as "culturalizations"
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of discourse conventions. Taking the example of a specific genre, a conversationalist's view of initial contact situations rectifies the overall personand culture-oriented reception of linguistic patterns. By looking at topicgenerating activities and involvement procedures, case analysis and the
proposition of linguistic explanations for interactional problems reveal
general mechanisms of the emergence of "culture," or better, of how in
everyday interaction many "small Americanisms" are co-constructed and
performed from a non-American perspective. Understanding the procedures of interpersonal interaction, in accordance with the sociological
thinking of the theory of communicative genres, is a necessary means for
understanding how images of the other are construed and handled in initial
contact.
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