Page 213 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Ritual and style across cultures 191

derful neighbour and a very good person. We love and value Mr. Giorgi greatly!”
In Georgia such exclamations are completely normal, not only at the table.
In toasts, values are expressed that can be understood against the back-
ground of a specific cultural history. These values are not always shared – and
even among Georgians a variety of opinions about them can be found. There are
also Georgians who find the rigid toasts too long-winded and who object, above
all, to the resulting ample consumption of alcohol.
The positive politeness of the Georgian table culture has a networking char-
acter. In contrast to Western cultures, it is oriented to a sphere of contact larger
than the individual. It brings esteem to the network in which the vis-à-vis stands,
including deceased relatives. To this extent, Georgian politeness has a strong
network oriented and even religious component not found in the West.

6. Handling cultural differences in ritual and style

An often cited dimension of intercultural contact is that the outsider usually in-
terprets foreign behavior, at least at the outset, in the framework of his or her
own cultural system (Knapp 2004). In the intercultural situation, the presumed
common knowledge about behavioural patterns is problematic (Günthner and
Luckmann 2002). In terms of intercultural understanding, misjudgements of
culturally differing pragmatic conventions have far greater consequences in
their emotional significance than grammatical or lexical mistakes, since they are
often ascribed to personality attributes of the speaker, not merely to his or her
linguistic knowledge. A further difficulty is that in the realm of politeness it is
seldom possible to inquire about how an utterance was meant (Holmes 1995). A
possible misinterpretation cannot be clarified on the spot because the rules of
politeness forbid going into the unexplicit levels of meaning.
Listening to toasts, differences in values and in the associated structures of
social relevance within cultures become visible. These can be brought together
under the well-known dichotomy: esteem for interdependence or independence.
This does not mean, however, that individuals are forced to choose between the
two; in fact, many today are able to move comfortably in both cultural frame-
works.
We have seen that, in Georgia and other countries of the former Soviet
Union, toasts play a much larger role in communicating honor and respect than
they do in western Europe. The toast honors not only the person toasted but his
or her entire social network, including deceased relatives. A shared meal thus
has an implicit religious dimension in Georgia, which on my view, is a consider-
able difference to the West. In other countries of the former USSR, as well, a pa-
thetic style that Westeners often smile about is practiced within the genre (as was
the case at the conference dinner in Alma Ata). However, for Georgians it was