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Intercultural communication and communicative genres 127

7. Intercultural communication
and the relevance of cultural specific repertoires
of communicative genres 1

Susanne Günthner

1. Introduction

As studies in Intercultural Communication reveal, ‘otherness’ is not an objec-
tive relationship or a given entity between individuals or groups, but is the result
of interactive accomplishments and interactive processes of attributions
(Schuetz 1944/1972; Hahn 1994). But how is ‘otherness’ constructed and made
relevant in interaction? And what are the situative functions of interactively
constructed ‘otherness’?
In his phenomenological essay The Stranger, Alfred Schuetz (1944/1972)
analyzes the typical situation in which ‘strangers’ find themselves in their at-
tempt to interpret the cultural pattern of a social group which they approach, and
to orient themselves within it. In this situation the so far unquestioned and taken
for granted schemes for interpreting the social world no longer function as a sys-
tem of tested ‘recipes at hand’: The hitherto available recipes and their effi-
ciency, as well as the typical attitudes required by them, are no longer an un-
questioned ‘matter of course’ which give both security and assurance. Instead,
the knowledge that has been taken for granted until now and has provided trust-
worthy recipes for interpreting the social world, becomes unworkable and a
‘crisis’ arises. Strangers find that neither the schemes of interpretation and ex-
pression, brought from their cultural group, nor the underlying basic assump-
tions concerning the ‘thinking as usual’ are any longer valid within the ap-
proached group (Schuetz 1944/1972: 104).
Situations in which we are confronted with the limits of our taken for
granted schemes of interpreting often lead to processes of categorizing into
‘us’ and ‘them’, and thus to the interactive construction of cultural ‘other-
ness’.
As research in Anthropological Linguistics has shown, the proper loci for
the study of culture, cultural identities and differences – and thus, for studying
the construction of cultural ‘otherness’ – are ‘communicative practices’ (Volos-
hinov 1929/1986; Hanks 1996; Günthner 2000a). Within the analysis of ‘com-
municative practices’ the concept of ‘communicative genres’ (Luckmann 1986;
Bergmann and Luckmann 1995; Günthner and Knoblauch 1995; Günthner
2000a) plays a major role.