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Sorrells, Intercultural Communication, Instructor Resources
Chapter 4
(Dis) Placing Culture and Cultural Space:
Locations of Nonverbal and Verbal Communication
Lecture Notes: Chapter Overview, Objectives and Outline
Chapter Overview
Expanding on Chapter 3, this chapter shifts our attention outward from the body to explore and “read” the cultural and intercultural communication dimensions of place, space and location. Cultures are simultaneously placed and displaced, inevitably located in specific places and yet, dislocated from their sites of origin in the context of globalization. The confluence of forces that shape the terrain of globalization has dramatically accelerated the displacement and re-placement of people, cultures and cultural spaces since the early 1990s. Given this displacement and fragmentation of cultures, we investigate how human beings use communicative practices to construct, maintain, negotiate, reconstruct and hybridize cultural spaces. Understanding globalization as a legacy of colonization allows us to recognize how cultural spaces experienced today—segregated, contested and hybrid cultural spaces—sustain historically forged relations of unequal power. The concept of glocalization is introduced to focus attention on how specific places are impacted by globalizing and localizing forces. The notion of bifocal vision or the ability to attend to the linkages between “here” and “there” as well as the connections between the present and past is offered to understand the complex, layered and contested dimensions of places, cultural spaces and locations today.
Building on the case study introduced in the previous chapter, hip hop culture is used to illustrate the cultural and intercultural dimensions of place, space, and location in the context of globalization. With the globalization of hip hop culture, paradoxical forces emerge shaping intercultural communication. While hip hop culture (culture as a resource) can enable economic mobility and a vehicle of communication for marginalized voices, its counter-hegemonic messages of resistance and struggle are often defused through processes of commodification.
Chapter Objectives
To understand the relationships among culture, place, cultural space, and identity in the context of globalization.
To understand how people use communicative practices to construct, maintain, negotiate, and hybridize cultural spaces
To explore how cultures are simultaneously placed and displaced in the global context leading to segregated, contested and hybrid cultural spaces.
To introduce the notion of bifocal vision to highlight the linkages between “here” and “there” as well as the connections between present and past.
Key Terms *indicated in bold and italicized letters below
Cultural space Location of enunciation
(Dis) placed cultural spaces De-industrialization
Time-space compression Polysemic
“In-hereness AND out-thereness” Appropriation
Glocalization Segregated cultural space
Avowed identity Contested cultural space
Ascribed identity Hybrid cultural space
Hybrid cultural space as site of intercultural negotiation
Hybrid cultural space as site of resistance
Hybrid cultural space as site of transformation
Introduction
We now move outward from the body (chapter 3) to explore and “read” the cultural and intercultural communication dimensions of place, space and location.
In this chapter, we examine the dynamic process of placing and displacing cultural space in the context of globalization.
We investigate how human beings use communicative practices to construct, maintain, negotiate, reconstruct and hybridize cultural spaces.
We look at how segregated, contested, and hybrid cultural spaces are both shaped by the legacy of colonialism and in the context of globalization.
Hip hop culture is used to illustrate the cultural and intercultural dimensions of place, space, and location in the context of globalization.
Textbox: Communicative Practices: Space and Cultural Differences
The textbox provides a narrative example of cultural differences in how people use and interact with private space.
A South Korean international student visits her professor’s house and is given a house tour. She is confused about how American people show the entire house to their guests.
Placing Culture and Cultural Space
Historically, notions of culture have been closely bound to place, geographic location, and the creation of collective and shared cultural spaces.
The traditional anthropological definition of culture implies culture as grounded and bounded in place.
A reciprocal relationship exists between culture and place.
In the context of globalization, culture and cultural spaces have been de-territorialized, removed from their original locations and re-territorialized or re-situated in new locations.
Cultural Space
Cultural space: The communicative practices that construct meanings in, through and about particular places.
Cultural space shapes verbal and nonverbal communicative practices.
i.e. Classrooms, club, library.
Cultural spaces are constructed through the communicative practices developed and lived by people in particular places.
Communicative practices include:
The languages, accents, slang, dress, artifacts, architectural design, the behaviors and patterns of interaction, the stories, the discourses and histories.
Places and the cultural spaces that are constructed in particular locations also give rise to collective and individual identities.
Place, Cultural Space and Identity
Stereotypes, assumptions, and judgments are associated with cities, towns, and neighborhoods.
People use cultural space to create avowed and ascribed identities.
Avowed Identity: The way we see, label and make meaning about ourselves.
Ascribed Identity: The way others may view, name and describe us and our group.
Geographical locations intersect with social locations (i.e. race, class, gender) to create locations of enunciation.
Locations of enunciation: Sites or positions from which to speak. A platform from which to voice a perspective and be heard and/or silenced.
Questions to consider:
How are differences in terms of race and class mapped onto geographic locations?
How do these mappings shape locations of enunciation?
How are cultural spaces gendered and how does gender impact locations of enunciation?
Textbox: Cultural Identity: Views on “Home” and Identity
The textbox provides contrasting narratives of two young women who negotiate their identities and senses of home across places.
As a Japanese American woman, Monica struggles with how people perceive her as a foreigner.
As a Japanese woman, Sayaka struggles with how American people reduce her into a representative of all things Japanese.
Displacing Culture and Cultural Space
In the context of globalization, culture travels across places and are re-placed in new environments.
(Dis) placed culture and cultural space: A notion that captures the complex, contradictory and contested nature of cultural space and the relationship between culture and place that has emerged in the context of globalization.
Time-space Compression: A characteristic of globalization that brings seemingly disparate cultures into closer proximity, intersection and juxtaposition with each other (Havey, 1990).
Glocalization: “In here-ness” AND “Out there-ness”
“In-hereness AND out-thereness”: A characteristic of globalization in which a particular “here” is linked to “there,” and how this linkage of places reveals colonial histories and postcolonial realities.
We need to investigate how this particular “here” is linked to “there” and how this linkage of places reveals colonial histories and postcolonial realities.
Glocalization: The dual and simultaneous forces of globalization and localization.
First introduced in 1980s to describe Japanese business practices
Later popularized by sociologist Roland Robertson (1991).
The concept allows us to think about how globalizing forces always operate in relationship to localizing forces.
In order to understand the intercultural dynamics occurring in cultural spaces around us, we need to examine the histories of interaction that literally and figuratively shape and construct meanings about the ground upon which we stand today.
Example: Los Angeles has a mixture of ethnic communities today. The land was first occupied by indigenous American Indians, which was invaded by the Spanish, inhabited by Mexicans, and taken over by White Americans and other racial groups.
“We are here because you were there.”
Case Study: Hip Hop Culture
South Bronx
Hip Hop culture emerged out of the harsh, burned-out, poverty-stricken, gang dominated urban spaces of the South Bronx.
Black and Puerto Rican youth took what was available to them—their bodies, their cultural forms of expression and their innovation—to reclaim their “place.”
Through creative forms of cultural expression with deep ancestral ties such as breakdancing, graffiti, and rap music, the South Bronx was transformed into a site of pleasure and protest.
The youth of the South Bronx used the streets, parks, subways, abandoned buildings, and trains as locations for creating, writing and voicing their own “texts” about their struggles.
De-industrialization: A process of economic globalization in which manufacturing jobs are lost to cheaper and less regulated labor conditions outside of the U.S.
New York City was affected by de-industrialization in the 1970s, causing joblessness, slum landlords, economic divestment and de-population.
Out of these conditions, hip hop culture rose as a vibrant, expressive, and oppositional urban youth culture.
Back in the Day
From the beginning, the communicative practices of hip hop culture developed in relationship to particular places, an identification with and defense of territory and an awareness of socio-political locations.
Examples: “Tagging”—the marking of either your own territory to signify authority and dominance or the marking of others’ territory to provoke—morphed into graffiti “writing,” where individual and group “writers” used the city as their canvas.
Going Commercial
As hip hop commercialized and “went national” in the late 1980, the regional place-based split between the East and West Coasts gained prominence.
The rise of hip hop culture on the West Coast was “an attempt to figure Los Angeles on the map of hip hop” in a direct communicative “reply to the construction of the South Bronx/Queensbridge nexus in New York” (Cross, 1992, p. 37).
The commercial success of rap has led to artist-owned businesses and independent labels providing employment and economic viability for many African Americans.
Hip hop is a highly contested cultural space. Mainstream middle and upper class Whites and Blacks decry the corrosive moral effects of hip hop culture.
The vibrant lyrics of rap and the locations of enunciation pictured and voiced in music videos capture the attention of youth across the U.S. and the globe.
Fascinated and lured by narratives of rebellion, oppositional identities and locations on the margin, youth of all ethnic racial backgrounds and particularly White Americans are the primary consumers.
Global Hip Hop Culture
Today, hip hop cultural spaces are materializing around the globe.
In urban, suburban and rural settings in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, hip hop culture has been de-territorialized from the urban centers of the U.S. and re-territorialized in new locations creating hybrid cultural spaces that illustrate processes of glocalization.
While the communicative practices of hip hop cultures around the world are clearly linked to the African diasporic colonial experience, they also re-work the qualities of flow, layering and rupture in their place-based specificity as global forces converge with local forces.
Example: Hip hop culture and styles developed in France and Italy provide spaces to address local issues of racism and concerns over police brutality.
In Sweden, the hip hop scene among ethnic minorities focuses on constructing a collective oppositional identity to resist the White skin-head youth culture.
For Maoris in New Zealand, rap music groups speak out for the rights of indigenous groups around the world.
Hip hop in Japan is often used as a means of identity distinction by youth who want to mark themselves as different from the mainstream culture.
Appropriation: “Borrowing,” “mishandling,” and/or “stealing.”
It raises questions about authenticity, ownership and relations of power.
Is hip hop essentially a Black thing? Is appropriation of hip hop culture by other cultures problematic?
“Black” culture becomes global culture as hip hop is de-territorialized and re-territorialized around the globe and the music and styles mesh with and call forth local responses.
Hip hop culture has paradoxical forces in shaping intercultural communication.
It enables economic mobility and provides a platform for speaking.
It also promotes stereotypes about communities of color and valorizes danger, violence, misogyny and homophobia.
It provides communication vehicles for the marginalized.
It also promotes commodification of culture and benefits those who control the music industries, primarily White Americans.
Cultural Space, Power and Communication
Throughout history and today, space has been used to establish, exert and maintain power and control.
Power is signified, constructed and regulated through size, shape, access, containment and segregation of space.
The use of space communicates.
Example: In the Middle Ages in Europe, churches were the tallest buildings and occupied central locations in cities signifying the importance of religious authority.
Example: In the Ottoman Empire, no building was built higher than the minarets of mosques.
Example: European colonizers erected churches on top of local religious sites from the Americas to India and Africa to materially and symbolically impose colonial rule.
Today, the signs of power in metropolises around the world are the financial buildings—the towering, glitzy, eye-catching economic centers of transnational capitalism.
Edward T. Hall (1966) elaborated in his book The Hidden Dimension, the way cultures use space communicates.
Segregated Cultural Space
Segregated space based on socio-economic, racial, ethnic, sexual, political and religious differences, both voluntary and imposed.
Minority cultural groups may choose to live in communities in close proximity as a way to reinforce and maintain cultural spaces and to buffer themselves from real or perceived hostile forces around them.
These cultural spaces often provide and reinforce a sense of belonging, identification and empowerment.
Yet, many historical and contemporary examples illustrate how spatial segregation has been imposed and is used to establish and maintain the hegemony of the dominant group and to restrict and control access of non-dominant groups to power and resources.
Example” The word “ghetto,” used primarily today to refer to ethnic or racial neighborhoods of urban poverty, originally referred to an area in Venice, Italy where Jews were segregated and required to live in the 1500s.
Example: The reservation system imposed on Native Americans, the Jim Crow laws (1865-1960s) that segregated Blacks and the isolation of Japanese Americans during WWII are examples of forced segregation that maintained the hegemony of European Americans and limited access for non-dominant groups in the U.S.
Example: Sundown towns or “whites only” towns, named for their threats of violence aimed at Blacks after the sun sets, are places that have deliberately excluded Blacks for decades and which, today, increasingly exclude Latinos.
Example: Schools today are re-segregated to the same level as in 1970s according to a clear racial and class line.
Example: In Hurricane Katrina, while all people living in New Orleans and the Gulf area were impacted by the natural disaster, low-income, working class neighborhoods were hit the hardest.
Segregation of cultural spaces structure and reinforce different power positions within socio-economic, political and cultural hierarchies.
Segregation, whether it is class, race, gender-based or an intersection of all three is a powerful means to control, limit and contain non-dominant groups.
Contested Cultural Space
Geographic locations where conflicts engage people with unequal control and access to resources in oppositional and confrontational strategies of resistance.
Example: Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. to work from the 1850s onward were forced to live in isolated ethnic enclaves known as Chinatowns in large cities such as San Francisco and New York.
This is where the stereotypical image of Chinese restaurants and laundry shops, Japanese gardeners and produce stands, and Korean grocery stores began.
These (occupations) did not begin out of any natural or instinctual desire on the part of Asian workers, but as a response to prejudice, exclusion, and institutional discrimination— a situation that still continues in many respects today.
Example: After the devastating 1906 earthquake and fires in San Francisco, White city leaders and landlords wanted to re-locate Chinatown to the outskirts of town claiming that it was an “eyesore and health hazard.
A political battle ensued with the Chinese community leaders strongly protesting the forced displacement. Finally, they were able to convince the White civic leaders that Chinatown could be re-built in a “traditional Oriental” style to attract tourists and contribute to the city’s revenue and appeal.
Polysemic: A condition in which multiple meanings are constructed about certain place, people and phenomena.
Chinatown is a polysemic space with multiple meanings.
Chinatown was originally a place of ethnic exclusion, a home to Asian immigrants, and then it became cultural resource, and a tourist attraction and commodity.
Example: In the early 2000s, in Hudson, New York, a small town of 7,000 just 100 miles north of New York City, residents joined together in what has been described as a lopsided power battle between David and Goliath.
The largest cement company in the world, Swiss-owned Holderbank, planned to build a massive, coal-fired cement manufacturing factory nearby Hudson on the banks of the river.
Competing concerns and interests—the lure of job opportunities, detrimental environmental effects and political affiliations—divided residents across lines of race, gender and sexual orientation.
“Spaces are contested precisely because they concretize the fundamental and recurring, but otherwise unexamined, ideological and social frameworks that structure practice” (Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003, p. 18).
Contested cultural spaces like hip hop culture expose how socially constructed ideological frameworks such as race, class and gender function to divide, segregate and exclude.
Hybrid Cultural Spaces
The intersection of intercultural communication practices that construct meanings in, through and about particular places within a context of relations of power.
The following three examples of hybrid cultural spaces help us understand the power dynamics that structure the terms and conditions of mixing in hybrid cultural spaces.
Example: Imagine you are sitting in a McDonald’s in Moscow, Russia. You might expect to find a situation similar to what you experience here in the U.S.—a fast, inexpensive, (fat) filling meal in a familiar and standardized space (each one is pretty much like the next one) where you either sit down, eat your meal and leave or take the drive-through option.
You might assume you will have an experience of “American” culture in Russia. Yet, when Shannon Peters Talbot (as cited in Nederveen Pieterse, 2004, p. 50) conducted an ethnographic study of McDonald’s in Moscow, Russia, she found something quite different.
Moscowites came to McDonald’s to enjoy the atmosphere often hanging out for more than an hour.
They pay more than one third of the average Russian daily wage for a meal and are drawn to this cultural space for its uniqueness and difference.
Instead of “one size fits all” management practices that are generally applied in the U.S., McDonald’s in Moscow offers a variety of incentive options for employees
The proliferation of multinational entities around the globe suggests a corporatization and homogenization of cultural spaces.
This McDonaldization of the world (think 16,000 Starbucks in 50 countries, 8,500 Wal-Mart stores in 15 countries outside the U.S., 31,000 McDonald’s in 119 countries, etc.) is the result of unequal power relations, which manifests in an asymmetrical global flow of cultural products.
Undoubtedly, this is an example of cultural imperialism or the domination of one culture over others through cultural forms such as pop culture, media, and cultural products.
Without erasing the asymmetrical power relations and the dominance of U.S and Western cultural forms, it is important to note the hybrid nature of the cultural space—the mixing of cultural influences, the altered way the space is used, and the new meanings that are produced about the space—in this re-territorialized McDonald’s
Hybrid cultural space as site of intercultural negotiation
Hybrid cultural spaces as innovative and creative spaces where people constantly adapt to, negotiate with and improvise between multiple cultural frameworks.
Communication scholar Radha Hegde (2002) describes the hybrid cultural space in an Asian Indian immigrant home. Multiple cultural practices—food, music, scent, sports, and languages—shape the cultural space of immigrants.
Hegde argues that the hybrid cultural space described above is constructed by Asian Indian immigrants as a response to what Salome Rushdie (1991) calls the triple dislocation: a disruption of historical roots, language and social conventions.
This triple dislocation penetrates to the very core of migrants’ experiences of identity, social connections and culture.
The construction of hybrid cultural spaces, then, is an active and creative effort to maintain and sustain one’s culture in the context of global displacement and re-placement.
Hybrid cultural space as site of resistance
Hybrid cultural spaces where people challenge stable, territorial, and static definitions of culture, cultural spaces and cultural identities.
Constructed in the context of differential power relations, hybrid cultural spaces are forms of resistance to full assimilation into the dominant culture.
Hybrid cultural spaces are both highly innovative, improvisational and creative and “also cultures that develop and survive as a form of collective resistance” (Hegde, 2002, p. 261).
Hybridity—hybrid cultures, spaces and identities—challenge stable, territorial, and static definitions of culture, cultural spaces and cultural identities.
Example: Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) describes the fluid, contradictory and creative experience of living in the hybrid cultural space she calls the “Borderlands/borderlands.”
Amidst the pain, hardship and alienation, Anzaldúa expresses “exhilaration” at living in, speaking from, and continually constructing hybrid cultural spaces—the Borderlands.
In the on-going confrontation with and negotiation of “hegemonic structures that constantly ‘marginalize’ the mixtures they create” (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 146), Anzaldúa experiences and constructs a location of enunciation, a position, and a cultural space (both a literal and figurative space) from which to speak and claim an oppositional identity.
Nederveen Pieterse (2004) states “…it’s important to note the ways in which hegemony is not merely reproduced but reconfigured in the process of hybridization (p. 74).
Hybrid cultural spaces as sites of transformation
Hybrid cultural spaces where hegemonic structures are negotiated and reconfigured through hybridization of culture, cultural space, and identity.
We have explored segregated, contested and hybrid cultural space through historical and contemporary examples.
The discussion of cultural spaces and the excavation of underlying power dynamics here provide a foundation for investigating the intercultural dynamics of border crossing, identity construction, and relationship building in later chapters.
Summary
Placing Culture and Cultural Space
Place, Cultural Space, and Identity
Displacing Culture and Cultural Space
Case Study: Hip Hop culture
Segregated, Contested, and Hybrid cultural space
