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    Grammar of Culture - Intro Intro

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    Felix Gonzalez
    The document provides a brief description of Adrian Holliday's "grammar of culture" which maps how culture is negotiated. [1] It outlines domains such as particular social/political structures, cultural resources, personal trajectories, underlying universal cultural processes, particular cultural products, and statements about culture. [2] These domains interact and individuals can introduce their own cultural realities while also being influenced by existing structures. [3] The grammar is meant as an imaginary map to help read intercultural events, not define culture which is too complex.

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    Grammar of Culture - Intro Intro

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    Felix Gonzalez
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    The document provides a brief description of Adrian Holliday's "grammar of culture" which maps how culture is negotiated. [1] It outlines domains such as particular social/political structures, cultural resources, personal trajectories, underlying universal cultural processes, particular cultural products, and statements about culture. [2] These domains interact and individuals can introduce their own cultural realities while also being influenced by existing structures. [3] The grammar is meant as an imaginary map to help read intercultural events, not define culture which is too complex.

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    The document provides a brief description of Adrian Holliday's "grammar of culture" which maps how culture is negotiated. [1] It outlines domains such as particular social/political structures, cultural resources, personal trajectories, underlying universal cultural processes, particular cultural products, and statements about culture. [2] These domains interact and individuals can introduce their own cultural realities while also being influenced by existing structures. [3] The grammar is meant as an imaginary map to help read intercultural events, not define culture which is too complex.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    18 views3 pages

    Grammar of Culture - Intro Intro

    Uploaded by

    Felix Gonzalez
    The document provides a brief description of Adrian Holliday's "grammar of culture" which maps how culture is negotiated. [1] It outlines domains such as particular social/political structures, cultural resources, personal trajectories, underlying universal cultural processes, particular cultural products, and statements about culture. [2] These domains interact and individuals can introduce their own cultural realities while also being influenced by existing structures. [3] The grammar is meant as an imaginary map to help read intercultural events, not define culture which is too complex.

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    grammar24

    A grammar of culture: a brief description

    Adrian Holliday, Department of English & Language Studies,


    Canterbury Christ Church University
    Posted at http://adrianholliday.com/articles/, February 2014

    My grammar of culture is introduced in Holliday (2011a: 131), and its workings in everyday
    life are developed in detail in Holliday (2013). It also grows from my concept of small cultures
    (Holliday 1999, 2011b). It is an imaginary map which can help us cautiously to read intercultural
    events, and must never be mistaken for the real terrain, which is too complex and deep to be
    mapped too accurately. The intention is not to over-define or to pin anything down. The gram-
    mar is characterised by loose relationships which represent a conversation between different
    domains, each of which I shall describe briefly below. The diagram is a simplified version.

    Action inhibited by structures Particular cultural


    Particular social & products
    political structures
    Underlying universal Artefacts: Art,
    Cultural resources: Personal cultural processes literature etc., cultural
    Education, language, trajectories: practices
    religion, tradition etc. Family, ancestry, Small culture formation:
    peers, Constructing and Statements about
    Global position & profession, etc. engaging with social culture: Discourses of
    politics: Constructing rules and relationships and about ‘culture’,
    Self & Other ideology, prejudice,
    outward expression of
    Self & Other
    Negotiating action

    Particular social and political structures

    On the left of the grammar, these are structures which in many ways form us and make us
    different from each other. They include nation, religion, language and the economic system.
    These structures may in particular circumstances map precisely onto each other, for example
    were a nation state corresponds largely with one religious group, one language and one econom-
    ic system, but in most cases they will not.
    The first of the domains in this part of the grammar, cultural resources, is the influence on
    our daily lives of the society where we were born and brought up. It relates to what many of us
    refer to as ‘our culture’, or national culture. The way we were educated, our national institu-
    tions, the manner of our government, our media, our economy, and so on are different from
    nation to nation and will undoubtedly impact in the way we are as people. These are resources
    in the sense that we draw on them, but they do not confine everything we do and think.
    Next, global position and politics concern how we are also influenced by the way we posi-
    tion ourselves and our society with regard to the rest of the world. This positioning may well be
    influenced by cultural resources. Examples of this are how people in the West view non-
    1 Holliday CCCU 15/02/14
    grammar24

    Western countries, how people outside the West view the West, at a more local level, how Brit-
    ain and continental Europe view each other, how Middle Eastern nations view each other and the
    concept of the Arab World, and so on. This is a key area which is often ignored in intercultural
    studies texts and is very hard to see around because of the degree to which we are all inscribed
    by long-standing constructions of who we are in relationship to others – Self and Other – in our
    histories, education, institutions, upbringing and media representations, and that these are
    rooted profoundly in a world which is not politically or economically equal.
    Moving into the centre of the grammar, personal trajectories comprise the individual’s per-
    sonal travel through society, bringing histories from their ancestors and origins. Through these
    trajectories they are able to step out from and dialogue with the particular social and political
    structures that surround them and even cross into new and foreign domains. This domain thus
    crosses the subtle boundary with underlying universal cultural processes.

    Underlying universal cultural processes

    In the centre of the grammar, these processes are shared by all of us. They are common
    across national boundaries. They involve skills and strategies through which everyone regardless
    of background participates in and negotiates their position within the cultural landscapes to
    which they belong. This is the basis upon which we are able to read culture.
    Small culture formation is the major area where they come into operation. Small cultures
    are cultural environments which are located in proximity to the people concerned. There are
    thus small social groupings or activities, wherever there is cohesive behaviour, such as families,
    leisure and work groups, where people form rules for how to behave which will bind them to-
    gether. Small cultures are the basic cultural entities from which all other cultural realities grow.
    Wherever we go we automatically either take part in or begin to build small cultures. In this
    sense, small culture formation happens all the time and is a basic essence of being human. We
    might even think of small culture formation on the go – every day, everywhere, whoever we
    meet or even think about we are always in the process of constructing and dealing with cultural
    realities.

    Particular cultural products

    On the right of the grammar, these are the outcome of cultural activity. The first domain,
    artefacts, includes the ‘big-C’ cultural artefacts such as literature and the arts. They also in-
    clude cultural practices, which are the day-to-day things we do which can seem strange for
    people coming from foreign cultural backgrounds – how we eat, wash, greet, show respect, or-
    ganise our environment, and so on. These are the things which are most commonly associated
    with ‘our culture’ or national culture; but they also differ between small groups within a partic-
    ular society.
    The second domain, statements about culture, is perhaps the hardest of all the domains in
    the grammar to make sense of. It is to do with how we present ourselves and what we choose to
    call ‘my culture’. For example, ‘In my culture we are always on time’, ‘… we don’t make deci-
    sions without consulting the group’, ‘… we respect our parents’ or ‘… we value the individual’.
    However, there is a deep and tacit politics here which means that what we choose to say and
    project may not actually represent how things are, but rather our dreams and aspirations about
    how we would like them to be, or the spin we place upon them to create the impact we wish to

    2 Holliday CCCU 15/02/14


    grammar24

    have on others. This is not to do with lying or deceiving, but with a genuine presentation of Self
    which involves a sophisticated manipulation of reality.
    These statements can represent powerful discourses of and about culture – ways of talking
    which structure the way we think about culture, very often without being aware. Further discus-
    sion of discourses of culture can be found in chapter 7 of Holliday (2013); and there is also a
    short article at http://adrianholliday.com/articles/.

    Cultural negotiation

    The arrows across the top and the bottom of the grammar indicate that throughout the
    grammar is a dialogue between the power of underlying universal cultural processes possessed
    by the individual and the influences of the particular cultural realities which derive from nation-
    al structures. Moving from left to right, at the bottom of the grammar, personal trajectories
    and underlying universal cultural processes enable individuals or groups of individuals to intro-
    duce their personal cultural realities into existing structures. Moving from right to left, at the
    top of the grammar, the degree to which this can be successful will depend on how far existing
    structures are confirmed or resisted. Here I am particularly interested in the potential for new-
    comers to be cultural innovators.

    References

    Holliday, A. R. (1999). Small cultures. Applied Linguistics 20/2: 237-64.


    --- (2011a). Intercultural communication & ideology. London: Sage.
    --- (2011b). Small cultures. In Zhu, H. (Ed.), The language and intercultural communication
    reader. London: Routledge: 196-218.
    --- (2013). Understanding intercultural communication: negotiating a grammar of culture.
    London: Routledge.

    3 Holliday CCCU 15/02/14

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