Essentialist And Non Essentialist 475m73

Culture as constraint or resource: essentialist versus non-essentialist views Adrian Holliday Canterbury Christ Church University College This article is reprinted with the author’s permission from Iatefl Language and Cultural Studies SIG Newsletter Issue 18 pp38-40 There are two significant views of ‘culture’. The social science literature is divided between an essentialist and a non-essentialist camp. The essentialist view may be characterised as positivist, and the non-essential as interpretive; and as has always been the case in science, the positivist, with its image of a more concrete reality, tends to be dominant, with the interpretive relatively unknown and struggling for recognition. The discussion below is summarised from Holliday (1999). The essentialist view This says that ‘culture’ is a concrete social phenomenon which represents the essential character of a particular nation. Hofstede (1991) is probably the most popular protagonist of the essentialist view. Although he says we should be wary of national stereotyping, he bases much of his work on the characteristics which differentiate national cultures. He presents geographical maps which present a world divided into cultural bubbles From this view comes the notion that ‘cultures’ are physical entities, which can be seen, touched and experienced by others. Thus one can hear travellers say ‘it is so fulfilling to visit new cultures’. Within the essentialist national culture there is also a complex of sub-cultures which vary according to the features of smaller groups, but maintain the major national characteristics. Hence, we have the ‘onion skin’, or ‘Russian doll’, structuralist model, in which subcultures, although having a tremendous variety, are somehow caught within the larger national cultures. The essentialist view is dominant in applied linguistics and language education, where national culture is closely associated with national language, and language learning therefore involves culture learning. The non-essentialist view This says that ‘culture’ is a movable concept used by different people at different times to suit purposes of identity, politics and science. A significant contribution to this view is Baumann’s (1996) ethnography o f the Southall suburb of London. His research illustrates how people from different origins use ‘culture’ and ‘community’ to refer to different things at different times, depending on who and what they are talking about. The hip of the cultural groups to which they refer changes depending on whether they are talking about music, community events, where they shop, where they live; and the meanings of ‘community’ shift. Within this argument, the essentialist notion of ‘national culture’ is seen as socially constructed by nationalism, within Europe in the nineteenth century, and now in the developing world, where governments, intent on the building of national unity, promote the notion of national culture through education and the media. This notion

of national culture is also welcomed by people for whom it provides a sense of national security, and enables them to say things like In the Indonesian context teachers do X. A similar process of reification takes place within multicultural societies, where the idea of ethnic cultures is socially constructed by the discourses of ethno-politics produced by the government, the media and popular stereotyping. It is these discourses of ‘culture’ which define minorities and by which minorities can define themselves when they choose to play the culture card for political survival. Baumann (1996) describes how minority groups are both manipulated by and manipulate this dominant essentialist discourse of ‘culture’. Another way in which ‘culture’ is device rather than fact is where sociology uses ‘culture’ as a methodological device to enable ethnography. Within this paradigm, when ethnographers study a particular grouping of people, they treat it as a culture. By seeing a drinks machine queue or a class group as a culture, it is possible to analyse the relationships between the people involved according to universal principles of group cohesion. Thus, the non-essentialist view allows for a more flexible view of ‘culture’, in which the social world is made up of a seamless melange of human groupings, any of which, (families, classrooms, teachers, students, schools, drinks queues) may be characterised and understood as small cultures. Constraint or resource? In brief evaluation, the essentialist view reduces and otherises. It is the basis of what has come to be known as Orientalism, through which ‘we’ see ‘them’ as less complex than they really are, and tend to explain all their actions as being caused by a simplistic national culture. A national group who are currently perceived in this way in English language education are the Japanese. What Japanese students are able to do in the classroom is constrained by their ‘national culture’, which makes them ive and non-participant (see Holliday 1997). The essentialist view is thus constructed in similar ways to sexism and racism, attempting to fit the behaviour of people into pre-conceived, constraining structures. It can therefore be said to be culturist. In the same way as a sexist statement explains a woman’s behaviour solely and reductively in of her femaleness, a culturist statement explains a Japanese person’s behaviour solely and reductively in of her ‘Japanese culture’. Because the essentialist view sees national culture as a concrete structure within which the behaviour of a particular group is placed, the behaviour of a Japanese person is seen as totally confined by the constraints of a national culture. Non-stereotypical behaviour can thus only be explained as a departure from Japanese national culture, and is seen as anomalous, neither ‘real’ Japanese, nor ‘Westernised’. If one takes the example of investigating classroom conflict between teacher and student expectations, an essentialist approach would be to begin with the notion that the teacher comes from one national culture and the students from another. This discourse of essential cultural difference would lead the investigation and colour it. It would begin with constructing teachers and students according to national cultural characteristics, such as individualism and collectivism, and perhaps end with a conformation of these categories,

Very differently, the non-essentialist view liberates culture as a resource for investigating and understanding social behaviour, but is careful not to allow preconceptions about national cultural characteristics to constrain the investigation. Because it is free form national pre-definitions, a non-essentialist approach can help us to unlock any form of social behaviour by helping us to see how it operates as culture per se. If one takes the same example of classroom conflict between teacher and student expectations, a non-essentialist approach would not begin with the notion that the teacher comes from one national culture and the students from another. Instead, one would look at the classroom as a small culture and explore how the dynamics of its culture lead to conflict. That the teacher and student interactants of this small culture themselves come from different orientations would be something to be discovered in what amounts to an ethnographic analysis. It may be that these different orientations are connected with different national scenarios, with experience of other types of classroom, educational or political cultures. But this also would be discovered by ethnography rather than pre-defined. Another important factor, revealed through analysis of the workings of the classroom culture itself, would be the interaction between these imported orientations and the other elements of the classroom culture which they confront, which would produce behaviour more indicative of the classroom culture than of pre-defined national cultures (see Holliday 1998). A final, very significant factor to be considered in such an analysis, is that statements about culture are themselves artefacts of how people see themselves and others, and how they wish to be seen. Thus, students or teachers who claim national cultural underpinning for their behaviour are actually doing so to meet the requirements of the small culture context within which they find themselves. The non-essentialist view of culture therefore allows social behaviour to speak for itself. It provides the resource of an overall understanding of how culture per se works, which provides a framework for analysis of behaviour, but it does not impose pre-definitions of the essential characteristics of specific national cultures. It thus avoids cultures by prohibiting reductive statements such as Japanese students behave like this because this is how the Japanese are. At the same time it recognises that culture is used by people as their own resource for self-presentation References Baumann G. 1996. Contesting Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hofstede G. 1991. Cultures and Organisations: software of the mind. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Holliday A R. 1997. The politics of participation in international English language education. System 25/3 Holliday A R 1998. Japanese fragments. Unpublished paper, Canterbury Christ Church University College Holliday A R. 1999 Small cultures Applied Linguistics 20/2

This article was published in The Japanese Learner (Issue 20: March 2000)