Page 62 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

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40 Vladimir Zegarac

token, a culture cannot exist without some cultural representations being in the
brains/minds of individuals, but it does not follow that the study of culture can
be reduced to the study of individual psychology. Just as infections are in indi-
vidual people’s bodies, mental representations are in their minds/brains. And,
just as the spreading of diseases is explained by investigating the interaction be-
tween strains of micro-organisms with the environment that they live in, the dis-
tribution of cultural representations is explained in terms of communicative, as
well as other types of, interaction between people and their environment. From
this perspective, the boundaries of a given culture are not any sharper than those
of a given epidemic. An epidemic involves a population with many individuals
being afflicted to varying degrees by a particular strain of micro-organisms over
a continuous time span on a territory with fuzzy and unstable boundaries. And a
culture involves a social group (such as a nation, ethnic group, profession, gen-
eration, etc.) defined in terms of similar cultural representations held by a signifi-
cant proportion of the group’s members. In other words, people are said to belong
in the same culture to the extent that the set of their shared cultural represen-
tations is large. This characterization of a culture naturally accommodates the
existence of multicultural nations, professions, etc. It also suggests a straight-
forward characterization of sub-culture, as a set of cultural representations
within a given culture which are shared (mainly) by a subset of its members (e.g.
teenagers, members of particular professions, different social classes within a
national or ethnic cultural group, and so on).
On this view, individual cultures are epiphenomenal, rather than natural,
things which owe their identities to the joint influences of a range of historical,
political, economic, and various other factors. Therefore, intra-cultural com-
munication could be characterized as communication between participants who
share most cultural representations, and inter-cultural communication, as com-
munication between participants who share few cultural representations. This
raises the following questions: how similar does the shared set of cultural rep-
resentations of two individuals need to be, for communication between them to
be considered intra-cultural? And conversely, how small should their shared set
of cultural representations be, for communication between them to be con-
sidered inter-cultural? Plausible answers to these questions can be given in the
context of two observations. First, some cultural representations are intuitively
more important, or central, than others. This intuition seems to be based on two
facts: (a) some cultural representations are more causally efficacious than others
in terms of the extent to which they inform the beliefs and guide the actions of
those who hold them, and (b) some of the beliefs and actions which are in-
formed by cultural representations pertain to a greater number of spheres of so-
cial life than others. Therefore, the centrality of a cultural representation could
be characterized as follows: