Transcript Culture in Intercultural Communication

Culture in Intercultural
Communication -II
CONTEXTS OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION:
CASE STUDY OF RUSSIAN-WESTERN INTERACTION
Mira B. Bergelson
Helsinki, January 31, 2006
Russian cultural values
Russian Cultural Values Basic world attitudes
Collectivism
 Emotional
 Not-having-control
 Irrational
 Judgemental
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Compare Russian Cultural
Models to Utilitarian Discourse
What is “Good’
 What is Progress
 Individual is the basis of society
 Humans are rational
 Technology is the source of wealth
 What individuals are most valuable
 Quantitative objective approaches
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Communication Style
Communication style not targeted at
reaching consensus
 Addressee’s responsibility for
information receiving
 Potential mistrust of ‘objective truths’
 Wrong or no answers to your questions
 Lack of negative politeness
 Parallel processing of information
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Russian VS American Politeness
Strategies
Rs value positive politeness more than
negative;
 As pay more attention to negative
politeness;
 Rs express more emotive data than As
 As are more conventionally indirect in
requests than Rs
 Rs invest more effort into supporting
their requests by justifications than As;
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As preface corrections with positive
remarks more than Rs;
 for Rs directness with familiars is
associated with sincerity;
 for As directness with familiars is
associated with imposition on their
freedom;
 there is a huge amount of linguistic
means in Russian, specifically used to
show warmth and inoffensive
closeness with familiars and intimates,
thus amplifying positive politeness;
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being translated into English, they will render
into expressing patronizing attitude, thus
becoming extremely offensive to the negative
face;
friends normally are considered ‘intimates’ to
Rs, but ‘familiars’ to As;
As express more politeness to ‘strangers’ than
Rs do;
for As apologizing means taking responsibility
for the offence;
for Rs apologizing is more of expressing
compassion.
Is ‘National Character’ out of
Context?
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Accompanying characteristics of Russian
culture
– receptive, not aggressive, or donor-like culture
– inconsistency of seemingly contradictory patterns;
– unevenness of socially determined distribution of
cultural values;
– giant, unevenly populated, multiethnic and
multiconfessional country.
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Two most ‘uncontextualized’ contexts:
– Interpersonal and social communication