Page 443 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Communicating Identity in Intercultural Communication 421

Often it makes a difference whether it is a matter of a self- or strangers’ cat-
egorization. The category greenie (Öko), which is often named in the group
communication of the girls in Spreckels’s study (2006), is more of a strangers’
categorization. Even if a dictionary merely refers to this short word as a ‘humor-
ous’ term for a ‘supporter of the ecology movement’, the particular designation
is often used in a derogatory sense. Members of the category would therefore
probably not categorize themselves as greenies. The politically incorrect word
‘nigger’, if used by a white, is an expression of racism, while the same word, if
used by a black, is a playful adaptation of the racist expression and a conscious
profession of his ethnic origin (see chapter 18 by Reisigl in this volume). A
jocular adoption of a strangers’ attribution observed from outside was also
studied by Schwitalla & Streeck (1989: 249) in a group of working-class youth
who are viewed by adults as bothersome and unpleasant. By identifying with
this strangers’ attribution (“mir falle iwwerall uff” – “we stand out every-
where”) they are performing an inversion of values. Categories can thus be used
for discrimination, but they can also be played with.

1.4. Social categories versus social groups
It is important to differentiate between the two concepts of ‘social category’ and
‘social group’, which are sometimes used as synonymous. Sacks himself em-
phasizes this difference (1979: 13).

We’re dealing […] with a category. They’re not groups. Most of the categories
(women, old people, Negroes, Jews, teenagers, etc.) are not groups in any sense that
you normally talk about groups, and yet what we have is a mass of knowledge known
about every category, any member is seen as a representative of each of those cat-
egories; any person who is a case of a category is seen as a member of the category,
and what’s known about the category is known about them […].

Besides Sacks, other researchers point to the important distinction between
groups and categories. Thus, e.g., Turner writes (1982: 169): “In general … [a]
group has been conceptualized as some (usually) small collection of individuals
in face-to-face relations of interaction, attraction and influence […]” and de-
marcates from it social categories that he, drawing on Tajfel, refers to as the re-
sult of “discontinuous divisions of the social world into distinct classes” (Turner
1982: 17).
Often it cannot be determined to what extent categories coincide with real-
ity, for in a certain sense we only create reality through categorization (Kessel-
heim 2003: 72). But this is exactly where we confront the danger of social cat-
egories. Kesselheim (p. 72) points out that categories are not completely
arbitrary just because they are “created,” “for they must prove themselves in so-
cietal action.”