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THE MA in intercultural communication offered by the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), provides an alternative to traditional master's programs in foreign languages that have tended to focus on language and literature. Through its interdisciplinary character and various concentrations, the MA in intercultural communication brings together students and faculty members from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, as well as North America in intercultural study and research in such a way that participation in the program provides a significant intercultural experience. This MA is an unusual combination of a traditional avenue of study, foreign languages, and a new one, intercultural communication. As such, it strives to prepare students to analyze and deal effectively with the complex intercultural dynamics of globalization.
An Interdisciplinary History
The Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at UMBC has had an interdisciplinary focus since the mid-1970s when a Latin American historian joined a group of primarily literary scholars. Dedicated to the exploration of the communication process and the cultural products that emerge from it, the department at this time began to develop an interdisciplinary core that would place intercultural communication and second-language learning into rich cognitive and social contexts for our undergraduate majors. The historian was followed by several linguists, and the department is now composed of specialists in linguistics, social sciences, second-language pedagogy, bilingual education, and literature. Pairs of instructors drawn from this interdisciplinary mix teach the three core courses that all department majors (in French, German, Spanish, Russian, language and cultural studies, and applied linguistics) study as part of their undergraduate program. The first of these core courses treats language structure and language acquisition as defining human traits and compares language with other forms of communication. The second puts language problems into a broader context of social and political issues. The third presents students with the complexities of real communicative events, from advertising and poetry to music, painting, and film. All graduates receive a BA in modern languages and linguistics with a concentration in a specific language and culture.
The department's decision to develop an MA in intercultural communication as an alternative to the traditional foreign language master's programs was consistent with its history and philosophy as well as its interdisciplinary core. Initiated in 1985, this MA program has responded to, and been crucially shaped by, the economic, political, social, and cultural complexities of the 1980s and 1990s.
Description of the Program
The program focuses on the modes of interaction across cultures. More specifically, we analyze intercultural communication as those ways in which social structuring, social assumptions, and language use--verbal and nonverbal--bear on communication among members of different cultures. Culture, of course, has various meanings; we investigate culture as a way of life, culture as myth-symbol complex, and culture as production and consumption of certain kinds of goods. In general, we accept Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of culture/group and his differentiation between culture as a set of defining characteristics of a specific group (usage 1) and culture as a vehicle for defining hierarchies within those specific groups (usage 2). In other words, we study culture as differences among groups (e.g., different national and ethnic cultures) and as a determining factor and a manifestation of hierarchies within groups (e.g., the practices and tastes of different social classes within a national culture). We deal with, to use Pierre Bourdieu's term, the two meanings of distinction: differentiation and hierarchy. That is, culture involves both distinction as difference and distinction as preeminence and the relation between the two.1 Our program examines primarily the relations among individuals and the groups to which they belong, taking into consideration such factors as gender, race, ethnicity, nation, social class, and the international order.2
There are four concentrations in the program: French studies, Germanic studies, Hispanic studies, and United States culture (for nonnative speakers of English). Since the program is housed in a language department, our students study intercultural communication and a target language and culture at the same time. All students take four core courses, which are taught in English and focus on the theory and practice of intercultural communication. These core courses constitute twelve of the thirty required credits in the program. The remaining credits are divided among electives in the target language and culture, in related areas, and an internship. There are thesis and nonthesis options.
Within this framework all students work in at least two languages and are involved in analyzing issues of cultural comparisons. Work in two languages and cultures is extremely beneficial in the study of the difficulties and embarrassments of communicating across linguistic and cultural barriers, an experience all students and faculty members share. We believe every student has to have that experience, with its psychological shocks and necessary linguistic and behavioral adjustments (familiar to foreign language educators), to become an effective learner, researcher, and practitioner of intercultural communication. Moreover, the framework of studying in two languages and cultures and of being in classes with students from each of the four concentrations provides participants with a diverse and rich source of cultural knowledge and practices. Our students (including several Fulbright scholars) and faculty members have come from Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, China, Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Venezuela, Chile, and Ecuador. Among the students from the United States are many African Americans and Latinos. All students attend class and do research together in the core courses, and participation in the program is a continual intercultural practice on a broad scale (beyond a single target language and culture) whose benefits (and friends) are important long-term resources. At the same time, the international students make excellent teaching assistants in their native languages and provide an enhanced intercultural atmosphere for our undergraduate program.
The Core Courses
The program's four required courses deal with the diverse factors that condition communicative events and with the ways in which cultures are produced and reproduced. Students are introduced to the theoretical basis of the program as well as to ways of handling diverse intercultural situations with flexibility and to methods of training others to do the same. The courses are:
Language, Discourse, Society. This course examines the linguistic and semiotic underpinnings of human discourse. We are concerned with the sorts of structuring that communicative codes like language and gesture impose on interaction and with the varied uses that human communities make of these codes. The human context and the social constraints within which all communication takes place are central to our examination of the complexities of discourse. The course is taught by a sociolinguist and a specialist in literature and semiotics.
The Ethnography of Communication. Positioned at the intersection of linguistics and anthropology, this course has as its goal an understanding of the patterning of communicative behavior within culture. We discuss what it means to "talk" in different cultural contexts, the functions of literacy in the United States and elsewhere, the symbolic organization of the world in writing and speaking, language attitudes and social prestige, how languages and cultures are acquired and reproduced. Readings include case studies drawn from work on various cultures. The course is taught by an anthropologist and a sociolinguist.
The Political Economy of Culture. In this course we analyze the economic, social, and political forces that condition cultural production and reproduction. The theoretical framework is established by focusing on how social class, race, gender, nation, and the international order contribute to the formation of culture. These theoretical concepts are then applied to specific cases in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. The course is taught by specialists in popular culture and in ideology and literature.
Intercultural and Cross-Cultural Communication. This course explores the concept of culture and ways of studying culture, such as through family structure, social organizations, values, and communication. Possible sources of intercultural and cross-cultural understandings are investigated. Various cultures are contrasted with the "American" culture. Applications and techniques for using this cultural information in training situations are presented and analyzed. The course is taught by a specialist in bilingual education and intercultural communication. (For a sampling of readings for the core courses, see appendix.)
Students are urged to develop ideas for their final research projects throughout the program so that theoretical concepts from the required courses can be appropriately applied to research topics in the chosen area of concentration. For example, one student did her thesis by testing hypotheses from feminist and reader-response theories on the reactions of a group of students in our undergraduate core course Textual Analysis. Her research on reading and students' interaction in class drew on a number of topics that she studied in the master's core courses. From The Political Economy of Culture she used an ideological perspective emphasizing the concepts of gender, race, and class. Language, Discourse, Society provided her with tools for carrying out a pragmatic analysis of the class interaction as a communicative event. In The Ethnography of Communication she developed a methodology to frame her study as part of an interdisciplinary field that studies language as a cultural resource and speaking and reading as cultural practices.
Postmodernity, Postmodernism, Globalization
The conditions of postmodernity, postmodernism, and globalization have had decisive impacts on the program. Of particular importance have been
Our program was designed in the early 1980s when the postmodern was a popular topic of academic debate and many of the forces of what is now referred to as globalization were beginning to shape political and cultural relations and were manifest, for example, in the Latin American debt crisis. As the program has grown, the power of those forces has increased mightily, multiplying to an unprecedented extent the quantity and variety of communication across cultures. Finally, because of the social focus of the program and the cultural diversity of the faculty and student body, we are prepared to study at least some of the manifestations and consequences of these phenomena. We would probably share Henry Giroux's (utopian?) urge to articulate the modern "faith in reason and emancipation" with the postmodern emphasis on difference, contingency, and the need to "cross borders" in informed, intelligent, and sensitive ways (133).
The program is rooted in part in issues of the postmodern, postmodernity, and postmodernism. Although this is not the place to enter into a discussion of these now well-worn terms, I elaborate briefly on the concepts that are particularly relevant to this discussion.
The Postmodern. Unlike other isms that suggest a new and different phenomenon (for example, realism, expressionism, feminism, socialism), the postmodern openly declares its affiliation with the modern; it is beyond and after the modern, but it continues to be rooted in the modern. Thus discussions of the postmodern necessarily also involve reflections on the modern.
Postmodernity. The word refers to the socioeconomic-political-cultural characteristics of a specific historical period in the late twentieth century. David Harvey notes in The Condition of Postmodernity that this period has its roots in the rebellions associated with the year 1968 and, especially, in the first generalized economic recession experienced by the post-World War II West in 1973. Out of these situations emerged a growing tendency in the international capitalist system to replace the Fordism found in developed industrial countries and marked by large-scale, assembly-line production; centralized control of production; big factories; stable, unionized workforces in large industry; state intervention in the economy, etc.) with flexible accumulation (characterized by "downsizing," subcontracting, flexibility in labor processes and markets, increased use of part-time and temporary workers, greater variety of products and patterns of consumption, decreasing weight of the industrial sector, shrinking and less-powerful trade unions, less government regulation of the economy, and reduced governmental support of social programs). This growing economic and social fragmentation has been accompanied by the increasing cultural fragmentation manifest in postmodernism.
One of Harvey's most useful concepts is time-space compression: "the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space" (147). Written some ten years ago, these words are by now an understatement of the possibilities available to those with the means and knowledge to use computers, to access the wealth of information on the Internet, to use e-mail, to move billions of dollars at the touch of a button, or to publish communiqués to the entire world from the jungles of Chiapas. (Indeed, the combination of miserable social conditions and centuries-old indigenous traditions and concerns [e.g., the land] with modern technology may characterize the Zapatistas as the first postmodern guerrilla movement.)
Harvey begins his analysis of modern Western thought with a quote from Baudelaire: "Modernity [. . .] is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable" (10). He explores a history of the Enlightenment model, tracing the increasing importance of the contingent at the expense of the immutable. Eventually, he reaches the point at which the postmodern virtually swims in the contingent, in the ephemeral.
Postmodernism. The term designates a cultural movement manifest in various artistic arenas and extensively debated among United States intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the term enjoys a long history, its current common usage indicates the relations among this cultural movement and the increasing fragmentation and epistemological uncertainties of postmodernity. Postmodernism is at once a rupture and continuation of the modernist emphasis on the abstract and the aesthetic (Jencks 23-24) and of modernism's combination of faith and skepticism in the power of reason. Postmodern texts are characterized by a double or multiple coding of styles and discourses, as in, for example, the double coding of postmodern architecture.3
Postmodern cultural production emphasizes the "margins," the prominence of cultural workers (artists, theorists, critics) who are neither white nor male, and the questioning of master narratives (the Enlightenment tradition, the canon, etc.). Postmodernism is both impelled by and receptive to new voices and alternative cultural strategies. It insists on a greater diversity than has previously existed and on a deconstruction of canons.
Thus in the economy and in culture the concept of double or multiple inscription is a predominant phenomenon and is crucial to our MA in intercultural communication. This double inscription, of tradition and innovation, is in keeping with the traditions of foreign language programs that have been training "border crossers" since long before the term was adopted by postmodern educators (e.g., Giroux). As foreign language educators we have always sought to have students become fluent in a second language to the point of being "near-native" speakers (a term that appears in many announcements in the MLA Job List) and of becoming knowledgeable and comfortable in the target culture, another form of near-native competence. Through this process students should not only learn a second language but also come to see the world through other eyes (through the difference, say, of the interpretations of the history of the Americas from the two sides of the Mexican-United States border) and to understand their own language and culture in new ways. The innovative aspects of our program involve an incorporation of concepts from linguistics and the social sciences to study the processes and difficulties of communication across cultures, the importance of social hierarchies in manifestations of cultural differences (e.g., the two meanings of distinction), and current directions in social change. Furthermore, the diverse composition of the student body and the faculty makes participation in the program a significant intercultural experience, and that experience, a kind of microcosm of the interculturality of public universities in the United States in the 1990s, is itself an object of study.
Globalization
While the program was still very young, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the United States led a group of allies to a swift and decisive victory in the Gulf War. The 1990s and globalization were with us.4 Globalization has been characterized by a dramatic increase in the dynamics of time-space compression, an unprecedented variety of consumer goods, a further shrinking of the public welfare state in national economies, a diminished role of the state in the international economy, and a polarization of rich and poor people within countries and poor and rich nations in the world economic system. It has also been characterized by a unipolar political universe dominated by the United States. It is a process that is moving so fast that no one, including the leading international bankers and economic experts, seems to have a clear analysis of it. At least that is what the latest economic turmoil--from Asia to Russia to Latin America--would suggest. Indeed, it is in the area of international finance that globalization is most marked: the international financial market now operates twenty-four hours a day and knows no borders; a computer and a modem allow anyone to trade at any time of day in whatever market in the world is open at that time.
Thus for our purposes the categories of postmodernity and postmodernism continue to be valid in the age of globalization. Those categories (time-space compression, double coding, fragmentation, weakening of master narratives, etc.) delineate significant connections among culture, politics, and economics. Moreover, they embody the sense of doubleness that continues to be extremely useful for cultural analysis. Those categories are necessary to analyze the realities of globalization, to understand how an increase in cultural diversity and in the flexibility of international finance, commerce, and labor is accompanied by a tremendous concentration of wealth and power. Although it may be true that there exists a global village in which investors, producers, consumers, and Internet chatterers may practically avoid the nation-state, in which previously marginalized groups (for example, rural craft workers in underdeveloped countries) may gain entry to international markets, and in which participants in local struggles may quickly link to international networks (the Zapatistas' use of the Internet is a striking example), those who do not have a place in cyberspace or the export sectors of the economy are by and large relegated to the increasingly impoverished village outskirts and to the economics and politics of survival. Globalization is marked by a combination of cultural diversity on the one hand and a concentration of wealth and power on the other, both to an unprecedented extent. Thus, whose globalization and globalization for whom are questions that urgently need new answers. These are the kinds of issues related to cultural differences and hierarchies that we explore in our intercultural communications classes.
SIETAR
The organization dedicated to intercultural communication is the International Society for Intercultural Education, Training, and Research (SIETAR), founded in 1975. It has United States offices in Vermont,5 and it holds an annual conference, publishes the newsletter Communiqué, and defines itself as "an international professional association composed of professionals from a wide range of disciplines who share a common concern for international and intercultural relations." The nearly three thousand members of SIETAR and its partners and affiliates come primarily from four areas: business, nongovernmental organizations, private consultants and trainers, and education. Since intercultural communication is a new and growing field, SIETAR is still in the process of defining its role.6
Employment
Our interdisciplinary and intercultural focus has not miraculously solved the difficulties that foreign language and other liberal arts graduates encounter in the job market. According to a survey conducted in July 1997, 54% of our graduates are employed in education, 14% in business, and 9.5% in the health field; 75% of them view their degree as closely related to their jobs, and 23% judge the two to be unrelated. Although we would like to provide our graduates with more alternatives to the traditional educational focus, we are constrained on the one hand by a shortage of appropriate courses on our relatively small campus, with graduate programs concentrated in the sciences, and on the other by a lack of sufficient preparation of our students in appropriate related fields (e.g., business or health). We do, however, expect to see an increase in the numbers of graduates in areas related to health and immigration (as the growth of those areas within SIETAR would suggest), and several of our international students have succeeded in pursuing employment in alternative fields (e.g., Chinese students with good backgrounds in business). One indication of the promise of our approach in the educational field--with its increasingly diverse linguistic and cultural population--has been the remarkable number (30) and quality of the persons applying to our new interdisciplinary PhD program in language, literacy, and culture before the program was even announced publicly.
Because of the traditions of monolinguism and ethnocentricity that have marked this nation of immigrants, foreign language education will probably never be popular in the United States. Nevertheless, postmodernity, globalization, and movements in favor of greater cultural diversity offer new avenues for expanding and enriching our field. The MA in intercultural communication at UMBC represents an effort to respond to these forces and opportunities. In many ways it is a self-reflexive program in which the study of a target language and culture is simultaneously subjected to the scrutiny of diverse perspectives through which the meaning of that study is analyzed. That is, what are the most appropriate ways and what are the functions of engaging in the study of target languages and cultures in a world characterized by increasing cultural diversity and a growing concentration of wealth and power? We will certainly not find any definitive answers to those questions, but we will engage students and faculty members (who have found new lines of research through the program) in an interdisciplinary dialogue that should produce informed and flexible approaches to the personal, political, social, and professional decisions of the new century.
The author is Professor of Spanish and Director, MA in Intercultural Communication at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
My thanks to Angela Moorjani, Thomas Field, Omar Ka, Ronald Schwartz, Edward Larkey, Isabel Moreno, and María Goicoechea for their assistance in preparing this article. A version of this paper was presented at the tenth national meeting of professors of foreign languages, "La comunicación intercultural: riqueza y complejidad," at Centro de Enseñanza para Extranjeros, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 12-14 August 1998.
1"Let us thus designate culture (usage I) the set of characteristics which distinguish one group from another, and as culture (usage II) some set of phenomena which are different from (and 'higher' than) some other set of phenomena within any one group" (Wallerstein 33).
2This is not to say we ignore the crucial psychological aspects of intercultural communication, especially in the areas of pragmatic performativity and the cultural unconscious. It simply is not our principal focus.
3According to Jencks, "Modern architecture is the overpowering faith in industrial progressivism and its translation into the pure, white International Style (or at least the Modern Aesthetic) with the goal of transforming society both in its sensibility and social make-up" (23).
4Of course the international capitalist system has been "global" since the incorporation of the Americas in the sixteenth century. In that sense, the term Globalization is misleading if it is understood exclusively as a contemporary phenomenon. Here it is used to refer to the unprecedented time-space compression that has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the elimination of the last substantial barriers to a free flow of capital throughout the world.
5SIETAR Intl., Administrative Center, PO Box 467, Putney, VT 05346 (802 387-4785; fax: 802 387-5783; sietar@sover.net).
6In 1997 SIETAR suffered a split when Dan Landis, editor of the International Journal of Intercultural Research, resigned from the organization and launched the Academy for Intercultural Research. See IJIR 22.3 (1997): 291-97 and Communiqué 28.1-2 (1998): 14-15.
Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods." Media, Culture and Society. Ed. Richard Collins. London: Sage, 1986. 131-63.
Giroux, Henry. "Border Pedagogy and the Politics of Postmodernism." Social Text 28 (1991): 51-97.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Jencks, Charles. What Is Post-modernism? 4th ed. London: Academy, 1996.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Modern World-System." Global Culture. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990. 31-55.
A Sampling of the Readings for the Core Courses
Language, Discourse, Society
Blakemore, Diane. Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.
Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1981.
Seligson, Susan. The Bilingual Courtroom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine, 1990.
Yule, George. The Study of Language. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.
The Ethnography of Communication
Bentahila, Abdelali. "Languages, Attitudes and Views of the World." Language Attitudes among Arabic-French Bilinguals in Morocco. Clevedon, Eng.: Multilingual Matters, 1983. 27-49.
Duranti, Alessandro. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Goodwin, Marjorie. He-Said-She-Said. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
Keeler, Ward. Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.
Kulick, Don. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
The Political Economy of Culture
Burgos-Debray, Elizabeth, ed. I, Rigoberta Menchú. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984.
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. Trans. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Fanon, Frantz. "Concerning Violence" and "On National Culture." Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1965. 35-106 and 206-48.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pathfinder, 1970.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, 1929.
General
Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Modern World-System." Global Culture. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990. 31-55.
Class
Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods." Trans. Richard Nice. Media, Culture and Society. Ed. Richard Collins et al. London: Sage, 1986. 131-63.
Mahar, Cheleen, et al. "The Basic Theoretical Position." An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu. Ed. Richard Harker et al. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 1-25.
Race
West, Cornel. Preface, introduction, and "Beyond Affirmative Action." Race Matters. Boston: Beacon, 1993.
Gender
Moi, Toril. "Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture." New Literary History 22 (1991): 1017-19.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Visual and Other Pleasures. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. 14-26.
Nation
García Canclini, Nestor. Hybrid Cultures. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
Smith, Anthony D. Chapters 2, 6, 7. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. New York: Blackwell, 1987.
The Postmodern
D'Souza, Dinesh. "Travels with Rigoberta." The Illiberal Education. New York: Free, 1991. 59-93.
Giroux, Henry. "Border Pedagogy and the Politics of Postmodernism." Social Text 28 (1991): 51-97.
Hartsock, Nancy. "Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory." Cultural Critique 14 (1989-90): 15-34.
Harvey, David. Introduction and chapters 1, 2, 3. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
hooks, bell. "Postmodern Blackness." A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. New York: State U of New York P, 1993. 510-17.
Jameson, Fredric. "World Literature in an Age of Multinational Capitalism." The Current in Criticism. Ed. Clayton Koelb and Virgil Lokke. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1987. 139-58.
West, Cornell. "Black Culture and Postmodernism." A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. New York: State U of New York P, 1993. 390-97.
Globalization
Chomsky, Noam. Chapters 1, 2, 3. Year 501. Boston: South End, 1993.
Huntington, Samuel. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 22-49.
Intercultural and Cross-Cultural Communication
Kohls, Robert L., with H. L. Brussow. Training Know-How for Cross-Cultural and Diversity Trainers. Duncanville: Adult Learning Systems, 1995.
Samovar, L. A., and R. E. Porter, eds. Intercultural Communication: A Reader. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1994.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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