Fred, Seth, and Crash

So my friends Fred & Seth are from Ghana. They worked with the stock market in Tokyo when I lived there and were deacons in an international church. There is a lot of racial prejudice in Japan, as there is in the U.S. My Ghanaian friends experienced a lot of hateful treatment while they were there. All of our experiences color our schema and our Pragmatic Expectancy Grammar (Oller 1979)-- when we encounter a sign that looks like one we know, we automatically attribute the meaning that we know to that sign--normalizing in the direction of known schema as Bartlett (1932) says.

There has to be a certain amount of everyday information that has become part of our assumptions so that we don't have to check every chair, for example, to make sure it will hold us, check behind doors to make sure they're real doors and don't just open up to a brick wall, respond to a wave with a wave instead of interpreting it as someone's malicious desire to erase you. :) So we can't dispose with assumptions altogether. But if we had enough schema to anticipate likely or possible divergences from our own, we could recalibrate at potential hot spots and have more control over our interactions and over executing our interactional goals.

The gesture that beckons someone to you in Asia looks kind of like a Western wave, but a lot more like a "shoo, get out of here" gesture with the arm extended the hand facing down and all four fingers moving towards the user and away repetitively. In Ghana it is used only for shooing animals away. So when they approached a little old Japanese lady at her newstand on the street she beckoned to them with this gesture, inviting them to come over, but of course not having schema yet for this gesture, they thought they were being 'shooed' away, like animals.

It's exactly the kind of situation that drives the movie Crash. Misunderstandings caused by years of bad experiences and schema that miscues to the individual that this situation is yet another example of what we have come to expect from 'those people' in this context. And these misunderstandings keep accruing, building more and more ill will. If somehow we could become aware of these hot spots in current inter-group interaction, developing schema for the schema of others, we could start tearing down some of the walls which may have once been the product of true ill will among people before us, but so much of which are now the product of only imagined messages.

Pragmatic Homonymy and Polysemy: Bedrock of 307

Basically this whole class and all of communication hinges on the problem of making sure that the signs you are using are being received by your addressee in the way that you intended them. When this is successful, you have achieved a high degree of intersubjectivity.

The beauty of the arbitrary nature of language is also the bane of communication-- any sign can represent any meaning. Unfortunately (?), it can only do so through the process of a convention--the agreement of two or more people that a given sign refers to the same meaning (thing, idea, verb, whatever).

The arbitrary nature of semiotics (all modalities of human communication, the system of symbols) means that a given sign (word, gesture, intonational contour, etc) can have an infinite number of different meanings applied to it by people across the world and centuries.

When a sign has two (or more) meanings it is pragmatically homonymous. When you and your hearer share schema for said sign, you can anticipate that it will be understood as you intended it. The problem is that schema is invisible and you can't stop at every word or utterance to ask, Do you know what I mean by 'ho'? Do you realize I am using the word 'bitch' to indicate that you are one of my best friends?? Moreover, any semiotic/utterance etc can have more than one meaning SIMULTANEOUSLY. In the example from Out of Africa, the word baroness served several functions at the same time. That is the polysemy of language.

There is not world enough or time to spell out every single thing you mean (defining each word for your hearer as you go). Most of the time you have to speak out in faith that the other person shares the required schema for understanding you rightly. This is also why we tend to spend most of our time with people who do share most of our schema--we are comfortable with them and don't have to be on our guard all the time for misunderstandings. They will still happen, but they will be far less frequent. It is a good argument for staying in your hometown all your life.

It takes a lot of energy to move to a new place and learn a new set of semiotics, a whole new schema for communication norms in that community, be it another region in the U.S. or a whole nuther country and language. :) If you have schema for schema and for the universals of positive and negative face needs, you will do a thousand times better than if you keep trying to just translate every word and action you normally would use in English into that other language. There are many things you say in English that no one would Ever say in that Other culture. This takes us to Pete Becker's notion of exuberances and deficiencies-- any translation of a word will simultaneously say a little more and a little less than the word you are translating. You have to stay on your toes to make sure this doesn't result in a troublesome misunderstanding.

About the uninvited guests

Points from the example of me inviting Asian students to my home for dinner-

• My negative face was violated when more people than I had invited showed up and no one called me to see if it was ok first. They were more concerned about the positive faces of their friends who would have to stay behind in the dorm.
  
• 
  
• One student asked for seconds. Normally we wait until we are offered seconds. I was especially irritated because I didn't have enough food for everyone now that the group was so much larger. My negative face violated again. He was undoubtedly appealing to positive face, solidarity in demonstrating his enthusiasm for the food.
• 
  
• My cherry pie was rejected as too sweet. My positive face was violated. I should have acquired more schema about that given the number of years I'd interacted with Asians in Japan and Chicago. I violated their negative faces by presenting them with a food they would not enjoy and putting them in the position of rejecting it.
• 
  
• Considering how little money I had at the time but had sacrificed in order to host them only to then have them bring uninvited guests that I couldn't provide for, I was livid when, after they had finished eating, someone said, Let's order pizza! Now they were saying from an American perspective, Your offering was insufficient. A huge slap in my negative face. As my Korean roommate later explained, however, it could be seen as a solidarity move that said, We're enjoying our time together and you have spent time and money for us and we want to continue enjoying time together and now we will help with the expense and not requiring anymore cooking from you.
• 
  
• Fortunately I didn't yell at them or anything and felt much better about the whole affair when my insightful roommate/informant helped to 'translate' their behavior for me.
• 
  
• MORAL OF THE STORY: It is always safest to assume the other person is being polite according to the rules they know, until you can verify through other native speakers of that language/culture, that in fact, even in their own culture that behavior is rude.

presentations of diagnostics

Kudos to Liz's group for bravely going where no group had gone before and helping me to improve the specs.

1) Bring a handout for everyone! (the final write up that you turn in on CD is not your presentation)

2) Don't put too many words on a powerpoint slide because it's impossible/very difficult to process and/or stay focused

3) Only use interview video snippets if

• they're going to say something you really need to say
• they're easy to understand
• they're really concise and to the point
• you provide subtitles
  

4) Tell us at the beginning what you did for your diagnostic. Without this we have no schema for understanding/appreciating the rest of your presentation. What were you looking for, who did you include in your study, etc.

5) When you do your individual lines about what you liked best etc., BE CONCRETE. That would be the whole point of the class! If you just say something like, They value family more than we do, I will become violent. That doesn't tell us anything! What concrete behaviors are you talking about or concrete contexts for behaviors with concrete interactional functions that you can prove are not the norm in the U.S. ???? Touching the mother in law's feet is an excellent example of a concrete statement.

6) It would be better for you to have a video snippit of each member saying their sentences aloud than to have them printed out word for word on the screen. You could have it in subtitles though, accompanying the video snippit, which would probably enhance clarity.

7) When you finish, tell us what you think your diagnostic demonstrated--what did you conclude? You don't need extensive statistics, but it would be very helpful if you would point out something like 25 out of 30 Americans thought the people in the scene were being appropriately respectful to the appropriate other participants. Don't go crazy but a chart or something would be very helpful here.

And I remind you: Each beautiful sentence should be a work of art (and heart, hopefully).

Structuring Your (Final) Diagnostic Presentations

Provide a bulleted handout and either a powerpoint or a video or some combination of thereof.

1) Begin by reminding us what your target culture is and who your informant is (basic age, gender, occupation, etc.) 2 sentences total!

2) What aspect of their culture did you find the most different/foreign from your own? Each member, 1-2 sentences!

3) What aspect was your favorite and/or you wish you could get Americans to adopt? 1 sentence per member

4) What aspect emerged in your interviews that you think would be the most difficult for Americans to adjust to? 1 sentence per member!

5) What aspect did you problematize in developing your diagnostic? In other words, what was it that you felt you needed to know more about in order to better understand the underlying system of the culture in this aspect. 3-5 sentences total!

6) How did you design and implement your diagnostic? Meaning, what did you do in order find out what you needed to about the problematic aspect of both cultures--show photos, video clips, sound clips, Garfinkeling, etc. 3-5 sentences total!

7) Show us whatever you showed your subject/informants. 2-3 sentences per member, tops!

8) Tell us what you learned about the Americans. 2-3 sentences per member, tops!

9) Tell us what you learned about the Americans. 2-3 sentences per member, tops!

10) Give us recommendations about contextualization cues, frames, scripts, adjacency pairs, etc. that are key to understanding the system for Americans wanting to communicate smoothly in your target culture as 'beautiful Americans.' 2-3 sentences per member, tops!

You should be be able to do this in 10 minutes, tops. Each beautiful sentence should be a work of art (and heart, hopefully).

Focusing Diagnostic Goals

Keep in mind your goals and the incorporation of the course material in your work.

You have set out to identify important principles in your target culture that will help you and others to understand the underlying system regarding this aspect of their culture as differentiated from your own culture.

1) How are various forms being used differently by your culture and theirs? (Pragmatic homonymy and polysemy ala Tannen)

2) What contextualization cues seem to be miscuing Americans in the target culture for a different definition of the situation that trigger scripts from their own culture that don't 'translate' and vice versa (how is the informant miscued by American behavior in the U.S.)?

3) What are/would be the social consequences of erroneously acting out your own culture's script for that situation? Are we talking about vague confusion or discomfort, or about deal-breaking, game changing consequences? Discomfort or disaster? You might think about such cultural gaffs in terms of how 'expensive' they are in relationship to the individual's interactional goals.

Diagnostic Clarification

you do realize yours doesn't have to be about angry, right?
you decide what you want to focus on.you can take anything from your do's and don'ts and make some kind of test/diagnostic to get at the underlying system.

and i'm leaving the design up to your creative genius. i know you each have enough brain power in your groups to do this well. i anticipate being amazed. (:

some comments about today's presentations (:

hey, you guys did a nice job. i was proud on the whole. sorry the a/v equipment was a pia-welcome to my world (but i wish i could have prevented it for your sakes.)

For equatorial guinea, affection between men was a good point we should talk about more for all the cultures and our own. smiling too much as an indication of insincerity i thought was a wonderful insight and one i want to learn more about. also the provocative 'bird fluttering' hug. . . now we need some evidence.(: since EG is so isolated and has such a motley history, i'd really like to hear how you came by this informant and how he got here and why. it seems so mysterious and interesting--i've Never met anyone from there before. which i can't say about most countries! and what was the undrunk glass of wine about???? you have got to enlighten us! i loved how polished your presentation 'speeches' (for lack of a better word) were for each of your group members-that's the advantage of the preparing the CD ahead of time and you really used it well. you also really packed your information in to the specified time restrictions and that was excellent as well.

For Bangladesh, you seem to have a mature and knowledgeable informant. and your technology as far as the video was really nice too. (: i had a terrible time understanding his accent through the sound system of the room though, so it would be helpful to have more of that in writing (or recapped by one of you in speaking on your final presentation cd). i liked his observation/admonition about calling your friend's mother "Auntie" rather than using her name. that's a really nice way to deal with the respect/intimacy dimension in relationships like that and i can see how Americans could be really abrasive by not recognizing and adopting that behavior. i wondered as he answered questions if he wasn't suffering from so much exposure to western culture that he doesn't see the differences as sharply as he might have earlier in his life. of course the influence of the British in his country too would have a great impact on his perspective which in some ways might actually distort his perspective, but i have to think some more about this. next time i'd like to see a lot more of your group members and less of your informant (just pithy poignant quotes, possible with closed captions included (: ). On the whole though, you did a great job!


Malaysia, several very helpful insights. pretend that sex does not exist. (: we've all probably got family members somewhere on the family tree who act like that. i also can't say i'm wholy opposed to the placing of the teacher right under parents and God in the food chain. :) the significance of not leaving food on your plate was really counterintuitive to me,and is the kind of thing you'd really need someone to point out to you if you're American. it was a very nice touch doing the soundbites in the powerpoint. head touching was an interesting point and might be a good one for your diagnostic. how often do we actually touch other people's heads? in what contexts? clips from TV and film might be helpful. someone you are very very close to you might touch to pull something out of their hair or brush a loose strand away, much more acceptable among girls than guys, and it would be interesting to look into how often it is done between girls and guys who are not dating and how everyone feels about that. the fact that she had to make the point about head touching means there must be stuff we do that is not coming to my mind but which has obviously emerged often enough for it to be reportable. i'll talk about what framing is and isn't in a separate posting. on the whole, fine work. (:

Zambia, your informant seems great--really astute and articulate. i'm guessing that his youth helps him to have the contrasts still fairly clear in his mind. i think the older your informant is, if their age is proportionate to their experience outside their own culture, the harder it gets to recall the time when the new customs really struck you as 'foreign' and inscrutable. i liked that you were visible in the interview video too, not just the informant.
--i was also very interested in his point about how the wealthiest brother takes care of everyone else. i had several encounters with people from other parts of Africa that seemed to be operating under this rule too and i'd like to know more about it. remind me in class and i'll tell you some of the stories. also i have a zambian outfit i should remember to wear one day. that has a good story too. i was also interested by your/his point about sarcasm and (was it Angela?) how some of us can't imagine communicating without it! but we could use more information on this. what constitutes sarcasm? is there really Never a place for it? i can't really imagine a culture that doesn't use it at all. . . there must be domains and relationships where it is normative. this might be good for your delving-deeper-diagnostic (:

Guidelines for Developing Your Own Diagnostic

In debriefing your interviews as a group, you need to come up with an aspect of that culture that you want to do some kind of empirical diagnostic for, which will involve some American guinea pigs, and then your informant in your second interview.

For example, your literature and/or informant may have said, don’t display anger. Well, displays of anger can be extremely relative to the culture and to the individual.

1) So you could find 5 or 10 still photos or video clips that display what you would interpret as displays of anger (and some you wouldn’t ) and
2) Show them to about 5 people (per each group member) and ask them what emotion/affective stance you think the figures in the photos/videos are expressing. If you can find samples from members of your target culture to include in your diagnostic that would be more excellent. (Lebanese people looking mad to you, etc)
3) After asking what emotion they think is being displayed, ask them what concrete clues in the photo (etc) they judged to be evidence of the affective stance they attributed to the nonverbal behavior.
4) Then take that same diagnostic to your informant in your second interview and ask them to do the same rating task (obviously without first telling them what the Americans you surveyed concluded).
5) Write up what you've been able to determine about the system of the target culture based on your findings
6) Include this in your final presentation

Critiquing the Do’s and Don’ts

Analyze each cultural suggestion in your do’s and don’ts and point out what details are missing that you need in order to figure out the underlying system of the culture as I have done with some of the examples I posted on the blog.

These criticisms should lead you to an area that you’d like to probe further into by developing some kind of diagnostic that would help you determine what contextualization cues help members of your target culture to determine what choice of form for a given function they will choose in various contexts with various other participants.

Interview Questions for Your Informants

(first posted 10/2/08 7:017)

Everyone in your group needs to contribute at least 5 or 6 good questions for your group to use with your informant
[ ] Identify which questions were yours. [ ] If you e-mail them to me before your interview I will try to give you some feedback in advance, but that’s totally optional.

You are designing questions that will help you to figure out the ‘grammar’ of their culture by targeting the components of interaction that we have covered in class so far. The list of terms I’m giving you for review, the stuff on the blog, the stuff in the readings are all good fodder for your questions and should be well represented. You obviously can't ask questions about every term or interactional function we've looked at, but make sure all of your questions are substantive and in include as much as you can in your 5 or 6 questions each.

Following are some examples of stuff you may want to ask about:


Don’t waste any of your questions on random stuff like how spicy their food is, etc—talks about cuisine will eat up your time and add little or nothing to your project. If you talk about eating what you want to know is interactional- who sits where? Where is the seat of honor? Who eats first? Who serves whom? Do you pray or say something before you all start eating? Can you talk at the table? Can you leave the table when you want? Can you talk with your mouthful? Clink your silverware? Smack? Burp? Praise the cook, criticize the food, leave food on your plate or eat every grain of rice (a grain of rice, the Japanese will remind you, takes a whole year to grow!) How do invitations to dinner work, how do you know when someone else is treating, who should treat-in some cases the older person is supposed to treat everyone else, etc.
You want to find out what kinds of actions and semiotics are viewed as respectful, friendly, kind, humble, offputting, etc—the positive and negative face strategies and face threatening acts that an American would not be prepared for.

Greetings. Introductions, e.g, when are you obligated to introduce someone and when should you NOT? In Asia an introduction comes with an obligation on the part of the people you are introducing. In some cases it is polite not to make an introduction so as not to impose such obligations on people.
Address terms for various people inside and outside of one’s family (Mr. Johnson, Todd, Professor, Dad, Grandpa)
Pronouns of power and solidarity- do you have different words for you and I the way Spanish and Japanese do? (tu/usted, boku/watashi/ore, etc.)
Compliments-what should you never compliment? When is a compliment rude?
Complaints, apologies, challenges, arguments, invitations, praise, explanations. . .
What is a lie? Have you ever felt lied to by an American? Has an American ever accused you of lying to them when the same behavior in your culture would not be considered a lie or a transgression of trust?
Expletives? What are the worst words or most taboo topics of conversation?

What do you think is the rudest thing you have seen Americans say or do?

The meaning of various colors. Are there colors men should not wear? Women? Children/adults? Weddings, funerals, religious ceremonies? Cars? Americans love red cars-Asians love White cars! And the always say it represents ‘purity’ but I still don’t really understand what they mean by that because it is clearly not what Americans often mean by that word which tends to be honesty and chastity

The meaning of various animals—Calling someone a pig means they are selfish or dirty in our culture, it might mean something very different in another culture. Calling someone a chicken here means they are cowardly, but in China it sometimes means someone is a prostitute, I have heard. Dragons are villains in Western literature by heroes in Asian lore.

Most of all, how does an American choose from the various forms and functions available to achieve her/his interactional goals in a given encounter with specific individuals in specific contexts. What are the elements of interaction that serve as cues/determiners for the right level and type of politeness? What are the relative values of each component? E.g., is age more important than length of acquaintance relative to the same relationship in U.S. culture? What would make members of this culture love and admire an American interacting with them?

Independence Strategies (Negative Face)

Some Common Linguistic Strategies of Involvement/Intimacy/Interest:

1) Make minimal assumptions about H’s wants
2) Give H the option not to do the act:
3) Minimize threat
4) Apologize
5) Be pessimistic
6) Dissociate S, H from the discourse
7) State a general rule
8) Use family names and titles
9) Be taciturn (i.e. talk very little)
10) Use own language or dialect

Involvement Strategies (Positive Face)

Some Common Linguistic Strategies of Involvement/Intimacy/Interest:

1) Notice or attend to H
2) Exaggerate (interest, approval, sympathy with H)
3) Claim in-group membership with H
4) Claim common point of view, opinions, attitudes, knowledge, empathy
5) Be optimistic
6) Indicate S knows H’s wants and is taking them into account
7) Assume or assert reciprocity
8) Use given names and nicknames
9) Be voluble (i.e., talk a lot)
10) Use H’s language or dialect

Stuff to Review from Class Lectures (I may add to this)

Semiotics (and a grammar thereof), (Saussure)
Prescriptive vs. descriptive rules (Saussure)
Structural components of language
Multifunctionality (multiple forms for one function, and vice versa)
Power & Solidarity Axis (also Dominance/Affiliation, Distance/Intimacy) (Tannen, Lakoff, etc)
Three power/politeness relationships:
Lakoff: Distance, Deference and Camaraderie
Polite Fictions about “unmarked face relations”
Face, The Double Bind, (Bateson)
Positive and Negative Face Needs (Goffman)
Positive and Negative Politeness, Involvement strategies, Independence strategies (Brown & Levinson)
FTA, FTA Management Strategies, On (including bald) and Off Record FTA mitigation strategies
Repair strategies
Conversational Style, pragmatic homonymy and synonymy (Tannen)
Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Grice’s Maxims
Lakoff’s Rules of Politeness

Rules of Alternation and Co-Occurrence (Ervin-Tripp)

Communicative Competence: (Canale & Swaine)
1. Grammatical Competence
2. Discourse Competence
3. Sociolinguistic Competence
4. Strategic Competence
Pragmatic Expectancy Grammar (John Oller 1979)
How language and culture are mutually constitutive

The role and value of chunks and formulaicity (Bolinger)
Metalanguage, Metadiscourse, Contextualization cues (Gumperz, Bateson)
Turn Taking cues: gaze, falling intonation, audible intake, leaning in, anacrusis, creaky voice, syntactic completion
Pause Inspection (Sacks)
Rhythm (Erickson), batoning (Birdwhistle)
Keigo in Japanese
Back channels (Garfinkel) also called attention signals (Kendon?)
Breaching experiments (Garfinkel)
Turn Sharks
Adjacency Pairs, First and Second pair parts


Tu/Vous Distinctions (ie, pronouns of power and solidarity)
Terms of Address and Reference, (Brown & Ford)
Frame, Footing, Schema, Script

Applying the first section of Phillips to your project

what implications does your section have for your informant project?
give us a list of 5-10 points

if a term is introduced, be sure it is defined and in your list

if ideas are numbered in the text, that is a good indication that you should zoom in on that and include it in your summation

if a scholar is cited for an idea that is a good indication that the idea is significant

What to tell your informant

1) We would like to learn about your culture.

2) We would like to get a look at American culture through your eyes.

3) The dates when you will need them to be available to interview

4) The need for at least two interviews

5) The need to record the interviews (extra credit for video taping)

Obviously you need to have your informant’s permission to record-no secret taping!

Peru Do's

Learn to pronounce names correctly. Good.
Attempt to learn Spanish. Ok.
Work hard without complaint. Context? and without technically makes this a don't rather than a do.
Put family and personal relationships first. Probably critical, but what does that mean? We need something concrete. Give us examples. Give us contexts. What is putting them first?
Maintain control of emotions (especially men). This is interesting to me since we Americans (tech. estado unidenzos, Peru is part of the Americas after all) tend to think of Latinos as being fiery and effusive in their emotion. Which emotions, which contexts, which relationships? What constitutes control? Is a tear a tresspass? Watery eyes? Dancing for glee?
Show generous hospitality. Ok, what is general hospitality? And where did you get these do's?

Do's for Malaysia

Dress modestly. See entry for Zambia below. You have to define modest culture by culture.
Use the thumb or whole hand to indicate something (wave down a taxi).
To indicate something? Like it's A-Ok, I approve, or to point out an item on a menu, as well as flag down a taxi? We really need more specificity here.
Learn to distinguish between Western handshake and Malay salams (a simple palm-to-palm touch).
Bargain when shopping. See Zambia entry.
Be extra careful about punctuality, as it is highly valued.
Use indirect eye contact. Grammars of gaze are very complex. Ask your informant to demonstrate this for you. Try a little role play or see if they can show you some Malay film or TV that demonstrates this norm. And/or show them a clip of American film etc. and ask them to critique the gaze behavior according to Malay standards.

Hold your hands close to your sides in crowded areas. As opposed to what? We need some visual assistance here.
Make excuses instead of direct refusal. Ok. What kinds of excuses are acceptable and how should they be made? We need to know about paralinguistics and extralinguistics here. Facial expressions? Is there an authenticity test?
Keep criticism private. We need to know what is considered criticism. This is very relative, even in our own culture. Try to get some anecdotes or demonstrations to help us understand this better. I'm sure a whole book could be written about norms for criticizing in Malaysia (as in any culture).

Some Do's for Cote d'Ivoire, Africa

Show proper respect for people older and those in authority.
What constitutes proper respect? We need a script. How do you determine who is "older" enough to be treated differently? How do you know who is in authority and what kind of script would help you fulfill this expectation to everyone's satisfaction?
Dress modestly. Women should at least cover their knees. The image of soccer knee pads comes to mind. We need more specifics. Refer to the entry below for Zambia. Pictures might be very helpful.
Accept invitations to visit and dine at someone's house. Eat what is put before you, no questions asked. I'm assuming that if you have allergies or keep kosher you have informed everyone ahead of time.

Bring a present to give the host/ess. What kind of present? Wine? Chocolate? A chicken? Flowers? T-shirts from America? (That's often extremely welcome). What is the norm?

Arrive punctually for all social occasions. What is punctual?? 5 minutes before the stated time, 5 minutes after, 30 minutes after, exactly on the minute? Punctual is a relative term.

Ask people for permission before you take their picture! In some cultures people may feel that their soul is being sucked out of them when their picture is taken, find out if that is so for your target culture. Others might just be having bad hair days. How would you feel about a stranger taking your picture without asking? Here in the U.S., I mean. Would it be weird?

Speak French, or at least bring a basic phrase book. I'm assuming you don't mean just so you can wave it around inf ront of people but you really do make an effort to speak in a language your host culture is comfortable with, obviously French in this case.

Shank hands when you meet/greet someone. Is there anything different about their handshake? Firmer, lighter? Do they hold your hand for five minutes? If so, what do you do while they are holding your hand hostage? Is there any difference with gender? Do you shake the women's hands too? Can men shake women's hands or only other women? Since they are French speakers, is there no perfunctory double kiss on the cheek (but really into the air)?

Drink the coffee (they're the fifth largest producer in the world).

A Good Rule of Thumb

If it doesn't have anything to do with positive and negative face needs, it probably doesn't belong in your group project.

Some Do's for Chinese Culture from Class Submissions

So here's a list of some of the do's for China that one of the groups submitted last semester. I'll put some selected points in gold, and then in italics I'll add my comments (in the default color I can't remember).

When invited to someone's house, explain at length if you cannot go.
This is a very useful guideline, but now we could use some guidance about what 'at length' means and what kinds of explanations are acceptable.

Always take your shoes off when entering a Chinese home.
Good. Now we need to know what kinds of little micro-ettiquette is involved here. Must you wear socks? What if your feet stink? Are slippers provided? If so, is it rude to decline the guest slippers? How do you get out of your shoes and what do you do with them? In Japan there is a step up from the doorway, called the genkan. You can slip out of your shoes (and this is why it is not a good idea to wear laced shoes pretty much anywhere ever) and leave them pointing in and then the host/ess will later point them out for you so they're easy to get back into. I'm getting a little rusty on this, but the point is that there are details you need to know about. Is it ok to put your bare feet on their floor?

Always use an acquaintance's title and surname until invited to do otherwise.
Several questions. How do you know when an invitation is authentic and when it is a test? This makes me sound more cynical than I am (maybe) but new acquaintances from another culture are going to be trying to figure you out by your interactions. If they invite you to use first name and you just jump on that invitation without any reservation, you may be demonstrating that you do not understand the subtle and indirect nuances that are probably very important to them.

If the Chinese are trying to be polite to you by deferring to your custom of using first name, and you take that at face value (ironic pun acknowledged), you are demonstrating that you are willing to have them accommodate you without accommodating them in return. You may not get far in that relationship. You'll gain trust and respect if you defer, in most cases, to the other's culture as long and as often as possible. Better relationships, better business. But you need to have your informant consider these things very carefully and give his opinion of declining an offer to circumvent a Chinese interactional norm. Basically, given the general arrogance of Americans at large, every little bit that you offer in the way of acknowledging the preferences and the values of your Chinese interactants will be greatly appreciated and you'll get on swimmingly. (: You probably cannot go overboard in trying to accommodate their customs rather than assuming they will accommodate yours. Even if you're a jerk and don't care about respecting the other person, you should do this for the sake of good business.

When meeting the Chinese, greet the eldest person first as a sign of respect.
1) How do you know who is the eldest? 2) What if the eldest is a woman? 3) What kind of greeting are we talking about? Is there a bow? A formulaic phrase? Eye contact norms? 4) Do you then need to go around the room and greet each of the other participants in order of their age? I'm not trying to be goofy here, this is a real possibility.

Beckon someone or summon attention by turning your palm down and waving your fingers towards yourself. Excellent and very important.

Some Do's for Zambia

Small talk is very important. Visitors who greet Zambians with a handshake and a how-do-you-do are considered extremely polite.
What constitutes small talk in Zambia? Can you talk about the weather? In some African countries the weather rarely changes and is not the stock conversation filler that it is in the U.S. Can you ask about family members? What kinds of inquiries are standard and what might be offensive? How long should small talk go on? Who initiates? Who brings it to a close?

Women should avoid wearing shorts or mini-skirts, as showing one's thighs can be considered extremely provocative (I wonder how many American women consider their thighs provocative, but I digress). What is a mini skirt? Anything above the ankle? We need to know. Pictures would help. If you showed your informant a series of pictures of women dressed in different ways and got them to respond and say how each woman would likely be viewed if dressed like that, you'd probably get something really useful for us. (: What is a low cut shirt? We need specifics-go after them.
Bartering with vendors and taxi drivers is an accepted (and often expected) part of the culture.
Ok, so you DO barter. How and when? Everywhere? In an air conditioned department store? See if you can get a script for this. How does the bartering begin? What's your first line? What's a reasonable alternate offer in the local currency? Is there a preference for paying in USD?
Visitors should never refuse gifts offered by Zambians, but (and) should accept the gift with both hands. This is interesting because most of Asia has the same custom, accepting with both hands. Africa is often considered part of the Orient and you will find lots of similarities in many customs.
What if you feel the offerer cannot afford the gift? Do you simply make sure that you give them a heftier gift later? How do you discern if a gift is a bribe? Is this not a problem? If it is, how would you respond? What exactly do you say when you receive a gift (Thank you, you shouldn't have. Oh, I couldn't. . . )

Harvey Sacks was a student of Garfinkel's

Harvey Sacks, the founding father of Conversation Analysis, of the school of ethnomethodology within Sociology, was only 31 when he died, but left a huge impact on our understanding of face-to-face interaction and methodologies for investigating it.

Garfinkel and Goffman were both on Harvey Sacks' dissertation committee, but it is my understanding that Goffman could not agree on some parts and Sacks finally had to get someone else to replace Goffman on the committee. Harvey Sacks brought you the adjacency pair, which we'll talk about in more detail later in the semester.

He also wrote an article called, Everyone Has to Lie, and we talked about the variability and subjectivity of what is considered dishonest in social relations and what is just a required form that shouldn't be viewed at the surface level (how are you as a probing question about the details of your well being) but at the metamessage level (I'm greeting you because we are still on good terms, or whatever terms the tone of my greeting suggests, and not because we are so close that I think it would be appropriate for us to just let our hair down and tell each other all the gory details of our lives).

Harold Garfinkel

Garfinkel, ethnomethodologist from UCLA, who brought you the back channel, phatic communion, and the breaching experiment.

Phatic Communion refers to the kind of communication that does not involve the actual exchange of information, at least propositional information. We talk about the weather because it is a way of showing our goodwill to the other person. You know, you're in the elevator, and you're kind of saying, I'm not planning to stab you or anything so thank you for not stabbing me either. The critical information that is being exchanged is about interactional goals and social intention (is that totally redundant? maybe). We are thus also debunking the mythical assumption that the purpose of language is to convey information, at least propositional information. We are using it to convey critical social information.

Garfinkel was always doing breaching experiments and getting his students to do them, whereby they would set out to find out whether a social norm was really a norm or not by breaking it. This is where the expression "the exception proves the rule" is very literally borne out. For example, he apparently went to work one day and determined that he would not say anything at all that was not about the business that needed to be done (in his office). Please do this, etc. It is reported that he had pretty much started WWIII by the end of the day. Phatic communion is really a vehicle for communicating to the other person: everything is ok with us.

"Back channels" is what Garfinkel calls the sounds we make to show that we are listening to someone. Uh huh. I see. Shut up! She did not! right, yeah, mm hm. . .

After thoughts (and aforethoughts) 9-2-08

We talked about schema today and its role in figuring out how best to accommodate another person in interaction, esp. when that person comes from another culture with a very different PEG, Pragmatic Expectancy Grammar, which comes from John Oller (1979). If a Korean asks you if you have eaten, an American is likely to think they are suggesting that you go together to eat. In fact they just want to know if you've eaten. (: It is a way of saying that you are healthy and taken care of. Japanese often translate 'genki desuka' directly in English: are you fine? Sometimes I use that wording in English with a twist of humor, but sometimes I think I really forget that it's not a normal greeting in the U.S.

When a Japanese person offers you a refreshment at their home, you should generally decline the first two times and accept the third time. This provides a buffer, because just like in the U.S., sometimes you offer someone something because you feel obligated to but you'd really rather they didn't take you up on it. Eventually the social consequences of accepting an offer can be overwhelming to the adjusting westerner and she may no longer know What she wants! And when she comes back to the states and politely declines an offer, she is just out of luck if she really did want the drink, etc. So the assumption about how honest to be about what you want is a sliding scale with different norms for different situations in different cultures. And the returning American is likely to be hungry and thirsty for most of the first year back. (:

We also talked about the polite fiction in Japanese culture that the other person is higher on the food chain than we are until proven otherwise (in contrast to the pretense that you and I are equals in the U.S.). This gives rise to the significance of the business card, the meishi, which informs the other what your company and position are thus establishing your social status. You then need to worry about bowing lower and perhaps a little longer than the person who is more statusful (a challenge for your peripheral vision I assure you)
(:

Keigo, as you wrote down, is the whole set of language used for extra politeness in Japanese. It's extensive and fairly complicated and quite a memory load for the western student. However, because of the positively evaluated role of formulaicity in Japanese, once you learn the system the decision about exactly what to say in various contexts will be very straightforward. You'll know exactly what each other's relative status is and exactly what corresponding language and behavior are called for. When Japanese learn English and find there are no translations for this huge body of Japanese and there are no grammatical endings that acknowledge relative status of speaker and hearer in English, they understandably often conclude, English is not a polite language, therefore it clearly does not matter how I say whatever I need to say. Which is of course a really dangerous conclusion to make and wholey inaccurate.

The American system of politeness is far more subtle and graduated. The combinations of linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic cues that are drawn upon for the perfect balance of friendliness and respect in a given situation require far more individual stress and scrutiny than does the Japanese system. Consequently a lot more people, I believe, are a lot poorer in their social skills and therefore their integration to their larger communities in the U.S. than in Japanese culture. So the stress for learning polite Japanese occurs at the study/ preparation stage, but for English at the execution in the specific situation that must be assessed and addressed.