UC Berkeley

Intercultural communication is often discussed with reference to the participants' culturally different knowledge, its impact upon their conversational styles and the accompanying effect on success or failure in communicating across cultures. Contemporary intercultural encounters, however, are more complicated and dynamic in nature since people live in multiple and shifting spaces with accompanying identities while national, cultural, and ideological boundaries are obscured due to the rapid globalization of economy, the accompanying global migration and the recent innovations in global information/communication technologies. Re-conceptualizing the notion of context as conditions for discourse occurrences, this dissertation research aims to explore the social, cultural, ideological and historical dimensions of conversational discourse between participants with multiple and changing identities in an intercultural global context. An ethnographic research was conducted during 2006-2007 in an American non-profit organization founded 50 years ago to foster social and cultural exchanges among female foreign visitors at a prestigious American university in New England, USA. Building on Deborah Tannen's famous Thanksgiving dinner (Tannen 1983), a 30 minute conversation among a Russian, a German and two Japanese speakers, who participated in the Thanksgiving Program, was tape-recorded and analyzed together with playback interviews and participants' journals. The study disclosed that participants not only brought ideological and historical elements in the given intercultural communicative context but also started viewing themselves in the mirror of the "Other" and ultimately constructed their "Self" in "Other" with reference to their cultural memories of WWII and their postwar histories. The following contrastive study of three German and three Japanese subjects' journals and the transcriptions of their interviews with the researcher further confirmed history's impacts upon intercultural communication research. The result shows the benefits of triangulating the relationship between Japan and Germany with the U.S. from inclusion of a third participant and/or a third perspective in the studied context. Accordingly, it suggests the need for a post-structuralist approach to discourse analysis in our globalized world (Blommaert 2005). Conversational style in intercultural encounters needs to be researched from an ecological perspective that takes into account the ideological and historical dimensions of speaking subjects.