4 minute read
Intercultural Communication, or Anchors of Understanding
Aleksandra Niedziewicz
When I was a child, my family went on a holiday and befriended a Jewish family from Israel. Not only had they two daughters, exactly the same age as me and my sister, but also both Polish and Jewish mothers were teachers. We didn’t speak any common language, but that didn’t stop us from partying together in the garden. This led to our parents communicating with a strange mixture of Hebrew and Polish, augmented by a few English words that we all knew. My sister and I played all day in the garden with our new friends, with whom we had a dialogue without words.
One day, as usual, my sister wanted to play in the garden with one of our friends. After breakfast, she excitedly ran out of the house to ask her friend if she had time to meet. She quickly returned, perplexed and puzzled. With fear in her voice, she announced that the whole family couldn’t go out, because they were sitting in silence with a tablecloth over their heads. After a moment, she added that they were probably praying.
My sister’s experience shows some interesting dependency. When my sister saw our Jewish friends, she immediately understood why they couldn’t go out to play. She realized that they were praying thanks to the knowledge from her religion classes. In this case, two cultural codes, Catholic and Jewish, overlapped. She knew what folded hands, bent head and kneeling could mean. What shocked her was the cloth, called a tallit as we later found out, on their heads.
It is particularly interesting that we can find cultural parallels despite linguistic boundaries, which is aided not only by our individual experience but also by being able to refer to the knowledge of other members of our cultural circle. As stated by semiotician Yuri Lotman, culture is a system of signs, just like language. He presented culture as a secondary system of signs, super-structured on top of language. This secondary system is comprehensible to all its native speakers and it creates a sense of community between them. To put it briefly: culture makes it easier to understand others.
Unknowingly following this example, my sister and I managed to understand new religious principles in a very short time. Our mother’s translation was absolutely enough. On the basis of the knowledge she offered, we were able to deduce the meaning of specific terms. Certainly, the similarity of our cultures and our childlike openness to the world, unencumbered by constraints, also played their role. Paradoxically, it was the lack of knowledge that helped us speak the same language and treat each other with openness.
Although one may think our method of communicating is entirely free of conventional usage of language, there are theories that can contradict this statement. The famous Saphir-Whorf hypothesis states that the used language influences the thinking process to some extent. It is true that there are significant syntactic differences between languages that can stand in the way of full understanding. The question is, however, do we need full understanding in everyday communication? Perhaps mere contact with another culture is enriching enough for the individual. It helps develop empathy. Although laughing, crying or praying may be expressed differently according to a culture’s existing pragmatics, some specific gestures are widespread enough across many cultures to serve as a touchstone or an anchor.
The anecdote I started the text with perfectly illustrates that despite the differences between them, we can find certain anchors of understanding between cultures. They help us conceptualize ideas that are specific to a foreign culture. Even if the way of praying or the purpose of it is different from what we may be used to, we are able to understand the activity itself by reference to the system of meaning in our culture. Parallels to other cultures are evident in almost every aspect and level of sociocultural life, from ideas uniting people to word cognates.
When you need to communicate with someone from another culture, it may seem obvious to download a translating app, take up a language course or ask somebody who will act as a translator. The mere thought of trying to understand an unknown culture without this kind of help can be bone-chilling and stressful. Maybe that is why we forget that we have much more potential for apprehension than we think. Language is but one means to an end. Intercultural communication is first and foremost an attempt at understanding.
