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364 Editors’ introduction

through Yunus’ efforts to overcome inbuilt ethnocentricity in Western economic
theory. Finally, Thielmann also discusses the interconnection of language
politics and the cultural apparatus taking, as an example, the Shuar in the Ecua-
dorian Amazon region.
Spreckels and Kotthoff discuss identity in chapter 20, and argue that the core
elements of our identity – national and ethnic identity, gender and body iden-
tity – have lost their quasi-‘natural’ quality as guarantors. Concepts from soci-
ology, anthropology and social psychology show identity as a construction of
“us and others.” Accordingly, representations of self and other are embedded in
processes of social categorization, as developed in ethnomethodology, position-
ing theory and discursive psychology. Although categorization processes are
unavoidable in our everyday interactions, this can lead to stereotyping. The
authors go into semiotic details that fashion a cultural habitus. In many contexts
categorization works with flexible demarcation lines, such as East-West. The
space in which normalities go unchallenged can range from a close ‘community
of practice’ to diffuse communities with comparable consumption habits, life-
styles, attitudes and values. Spreckels and Kotthoff carefully examine various
constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ for example, women’s headscarves as a non-
verbal formation of a multi-vocal cultural boundary marker.
A fundamental question for all intercultural research is how cultural groups
can be defined and identified. In chapter 21, Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyer-
hoff explore the notion of a community of practice as a cultural group. Drawing
especially on the work of Lave and Wenger (1991), they discuss the criterial fea-
tures of a community of practice, and then compare it to related concepts such as
speech community and social network. They demonstrate how communities of
practice each have their own sets of practices and shared repertoires (cf. the
chapters in section 2 of this Handbook) and hence can be regarded as cultural
groups. Through fine-grained interactional analyses, they illustrate how power
and subordination in the workplace are created linguistically, through speakers’
knowledge or lack of knowledge of the shared repertoire and locally shared his-
tory in the community of practice they are participating in. Nevertheless, the
authors warn against using the concept of community of practice too loosely,
and being too lenient in applying the criterial features.