Despite the bone-dry textbook style of “The History of the Study of IC," Martin and Nakayama put forth some definitions that could benefit me, and certainly our class discussions, in a big way. I appreciated the section where they explained the three approaches to intercultural communication: social science, interpretive, and critical. I had never seen them spelled out quite this plainly, and was especially interested in the critical approach’s focus on macrocontexts (14). I guess it gave me a name for the disturbing distance that I notice in academic research between “expert” and “subject.”
While I tend to view social issues on a systemic level, I also believe that the up-close-and-personal human interactions tell us far more than what we are capable of learning from our office in the sky. For a year, I worked as the director of a homeless lunch program in Seattle, and there’s something profound and invaluable to me about my ability to vividly remember the voices, sights, and smells of that particular “contact zone.” While I was aware of the broader societal causes at play, it was the close-quarters, in-your-face reality of it all that led me to deeper, more compassionate understandings of what it means to be homeless.
I must admit that Martin and Nakayama lost a little credibility when I laid eyes on the contrived photo of an overly eager woman interviewing a member of the Brethren Order. Remember the one? The caption read: “One way to study and learn about cultural patterns is to interview other people” (12). Wait a minute… do they mean I should actually communicate with people I’m curious about or studying? What a concept.
As for Holliday, Hyde, and Kullman… I’m fascinated by this concept of our multi-dimensionality. We are complex, vast, and varied, and the more we try to essentialize one another, the more we bust out of those constructions. They suggest that we see ourselves as “members of several communities,” (58) and are, therefore, much more adaptable than we let ourselves believe. We are living contradictions and mergers, which can be a beautiful thing. If I were asked to describe my father, I’d say he is a veterinarian and a hunter, an animated story-teller and an anti-social stoic, a singer of harmonies and a believer in all things masculine. And that’s just one human.
The “real Indian” argument in Wieder and Pratt kinda made me wanna ralph. How’s that for an intellectual analysis? Honestly, I felt like I couldn’t absorb the substantive info (if there was any) because I couldn’t get past the objective, cold, presumptuous tone. It felt like it came from a "push to publish" place rather than from the writers' natural curiosity. A gigantic contrast to this was "Concerted Cultivation," which I found to be humble, thoughtful, and up-close.
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I'm a sucker for that chart in Martin&Nakayam, too (and I really like the three readings of DisneyParis, didn't you?)--but as I read this time, I was trying to position the most recent--and best--work these days in contact-zone rhetorics, and I have to say that it falls somewhere between the interpretive and critical modes. Notice that M&N say that one of the limitations of the critical framework is that it only deals with texts, not people. Rhetorics (plural) research does work with texts, but also with people.
I'd say that your work with the homeless also illustrates this "new" critical framework approach.
As for the W&P piece, it was part of Pratt's dissertation, I believe. It occurs to me that the impenetrable theory part was probably the W's contribution--the white guy's... with the lighter/almost self-deprecating pieces were Pratt's, the Osage Indian's, worldview peeking through...
In any case, the discursive shift is so remarkable in that piece that you gotta wonder about the nuts-n-bolts of that collaboration. It feels like a "white" kinda of collaboration, rather than an "Indian" kind of consensal collaboration.
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