The E-Journal of Intercultural Relations, Summer 1998, Vol. 1(3)   Originally Posted 6/30/99   Interviews: On The Past and Future of Intercultural Relations Study

An Interview with Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz Interviewed by Krishna P. Kandath Associate Editor, The Edge (Dr. Leeds-Hurwitz was interviewed via e-mail.)

 

Leeds-Hurwitz: First, a caveat: your umbrella phrase, intercultural relations, does not cover exactly the same ground as what I know. I can see the value in trying to bring together the study of cultural differences within different disciplines, but I do not have equal fluency with all these traditions. Specifically, I know a lot about intercultural communication and its history, quite a bit about cultural anthropology and its history, some about sociology (although more about microsociology and less about the study of cultural differences within sociology), some about multicultural education (particularly in its applied aspects, how to train teachers to cope with intercultural difference in their classrooms), and very little about cross-cultural psychology. Clearly this will influence what I say below, and how adequately it answers your questions. [See What is Intercultural Relations?]
 

THE PAST: WHERE HAVE WE BEEN?

Kandath: How do you see the history of intercultural relations study? When and where did the study of ICR begin? How did it develop from there?

Leeds-Hurwitz: I think each strand you include within your umbrella term ICR has a different origin. Within intercultural communication, the origins were within the Foreign Service Institute in the 1940s and 1950s, as an effort to teach American diplomats how to more adequately cope with cultural differences. There was a later strand in the 1960s more concerned with helping foreign students cope with their experiences in the US, and then in the 1970s and 1980s helping American businesses cope with an increasingly international market. Cultural anthropology in the USA, though there were separate influences in Europe, had its most significant origins in what was termed "salvage" ethnography and linguistics, that is, the attempt to document Native American cultures and languages before they disappeared, mainly through the 1920s and 1930s. Cross-cultural psychology was originally linked to the culture and personality movement in the 1930s and 1940s within anthropology, and had to do with discovering that people in other parts of the world don't generally act or think the same way we do. Multicultural education as practiced today seems to have had its roots in the discovery in the 1960s and 1970s that not all children came to school having been provided the same assumptions about education, and the discovery that teachers needed to be flexible about adapting their material to their audience, and not teach everyone the same way. Within sociology, documenting race and class as influences on interactions seems to have been the critical source, and that goes back quite far, at least to the turn of the century, but I don't know as much of that history and can't point to a specific issue and decade as I can for the other strands.

Kandath: What are the major accomplishments in intercultural relations study in the past?

Leeds-Hurwitz: I think just getting people to recognize that what they take for granted is not always what everyone else takes for granted is a major accomplishment, though obviously not everyone has yet reached this realization. Turning that realization into changed practices on the parts of everyone from diplomats to teachers to business is the second step, again, not fully realized at present. What has been accomplished so far is a reasonable amount of documentation of different cultural practices, usually one country at a time, and some sense of the categories of difference.

Kandath: Who has played an important role? What have been the most influential approaches to the study of ICR?

Leeds-Hurwitz: Each strand has their own grandfathers and grandmothers: within communication, Edward Hall was seminal; within anthropology, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber are the names to conjure with; within education, William Labov may have been the first critical voice, when he demonstrated that what was then called Nonstandard Negro English was a dialect with its own rules, rather than simply an example of bad English as many teachers thought, Dell Hymes and Shirley Brice Heath are two of those who have been influencial in Education more recently, both trained within anthropology and linguistics, but both widely respected for their influence on current practice. Two important early influences in the culture and psychology school that later led to cross-cultural psychology were Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, both anthropologists.

In terms of approaches, I think there have been those who have focused on documenting one culture at a time, and those who have focused on documenting interactions between members of different cultures. That distinction seems to me far more crucial than naming different theoretical approaches, or dividing the world into quantitative versus qualitative. We have learned that we need to understand what occurs within a single culture before we can understand what occurs when members of different cultures interact, and we have done a good job of documenting the former, though we are still working on the latter. We have learned something about training individuals so they will better adapt to cultural differences.

Kandath: What role did the social, political and technological context play in the development of the study of intercultural relations?

Leeds-Hurwitz: Here's the best I can do in a brief answer: Historically, there was a long period in which members of specific cultures could largely ignore others who were not included within their own cultural boundaries. However, as social, political, and technological changes gradually forced members of different cultures to interact, they had to face their differences, rather than simply being able to assume everyone else (strangers) took the same things for granted that they did. Forced interaction of members of different cultures was probably the single most critical factor in the development of a wide variety of strands of intercultural relations.

Kandath: What is your personal story as a scholar in the study of intercultural relations? What attracted you to the field? What is your academic background?

Leeds-Hurwitz: I was probably attracted to the study of intercultural issues by having a mother who was not American (she was German), as well as growing up in the Washington DC area, with a lot friends and peers whose parents were attached to various embassies and other international enterprises.

What attracted me to the field was its immediacy and practicality: once I had learned that culture played a role in interaction, I thought it well worth increasing my understanding, as well as sharing it with others. Frankly, I don't think we have a lot of choice in the modern world: the ostrich approach simply isn't practical at this time.

My academic background includes formal training in cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, and folklore, in addition to more traditional work in communication. All of these take culture as a major variable in research.

Kandath: Where do you see the study of ICR going?

Leeds-Hurwitz: I think we need to pay far more attention to interactions between members of different cultures, rather than performing additional comparative analyses of how members of different cultures do things. It is far easier to do the latter, and it is one necessary step in gathering information, but we have done a lot of that now. It is time to return to the central issue, which is the intercultural interaction itself. I think this requires a clear focus on observing actual behavior rather than asking people what they would do, or what they did do when they lived somewhere other than "here".

 

THE FUTURE: WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Kandath: What new social, political or technological contexts will be influencing our study of ICR? Do you see the Internet playing any role?

Leeds-Hurwitz: Too large a question; the short answer: Anything that increases the connections between members of different cultures by definition must have an impact on ICR, the Internet included. Any time problems are due to misunderstanding one another due to having different cultural assumptions, experiences, or beliefs, then ICR is an issue.

Kandath: Does the study of ICR have applied goals? What should the goals be? What are some of the important issues we have to deal with?

Leeds-Hurwitz: ICR began, in most of its variants, with clearly applied goals, and that influence remains strong today. Presumably any time people of different cultural backgrounds meet, which is virtually all the time in this day and age, there is an opportunity to apply intercultural knowledge and understanding. One of the major issues concerns the discrepancy between the way specific theoretical concepts (such as race and ethnicity) are used by academics versus the ways they are used by those outside academia. We need to share our assumptions about the impact of culture in ways non-academics can understand. For example, when the American Anthropological Association issues a position paper stating that race is a cultural construction, and that notion is accepted by the majority of the anthropologists who study the issue, but that notion never reaches most of the population who retain a definition of race as purely physical characteristics, the goal of sharing, and thus applying, information is not being met.

Kandath: From your vantage point, what advice do you have for ICR scholars? Any special advice for those young scholars just beginning their careers?