Cultural contextualization
Whatever the problem and its solutions, you will need to recast your thinking is terms of local cultural categories. This is the process of contextualization, and it is one of the more difficult tasks. You will find that it might take considerable time to get it right, so your immediate goal is to iddenfy factors critical to success and get them right.
Here's an interesting example:
What is "work"? The idea of "work" varies hugely, but it governs what people will do and what they value.
In Australia, only physical work was once considered real work. Intellectual pursuits (including study) were not. Now study is generally considered real work, as also are family duties (e.g. child-minding, cooking and cleaning) and voluntary work.
In some countries, only income-producing work is considered real work, even if no exertion is required. If a husband sits in an ofice all day doing nothing, he is considered to be working. Meanwhile, his wife at home is considered to not work even though she starts carting water at 5.00 a.m, cooks all meals, looks after children, grinds her own flour, and tends the family's animals.
We now have the fields of ethno-agriculture and ethno-medicine. For example, what if local people don't believe modern medicine's conception of sickness and treatment and believe that sickness is caused by evil spirits? There are worldview and spiritual issues.
- A patient showed up at the clinic saying that she had two evil spirits. One was chasing the other all over her body, making her feel very sick.
- Locals use cheap local medicine first and use expensive western medicine only as a last resort, perhaps when it is too late to be effective.
- People were quite happy to get modern medicine, and they would hang the bottle of pills over their beds rather than take them. So they found that the medicines didn't help much.
- Thinking that medicine was expensive, people would save money by taking doses that were too small to be effective.
- Through pure weight of probabilities, the witchdoctor might have a 50% cure rate with his time-honored and widely accepted traditional treatments. Modern medicine seldom gets a 100% cure rate. So the witchdoctor could still point to his own successes and say that he could have cured your failures.
- The African chief felt that pills wouldn't be effective because they were tasteless and easy to take. The injection was more painful, so he though it must be do more good.
In many of these cases, medical practitioners felt they had to hospitalize patients or have them come to the clinic daily, just to ensure that patients got the correct treatment.
What is contextualization?
Contextualization is the communication of a message across a cultural barrier to a culture where the message is foreign. Its practical objective is to use deliberate communication strategies to express a message to people in another particular culture or subculture in such a way that they can understand it accurately and feel that it can be accepted. If people in the target culture do not want to accept it, then at least the cause is not miscommunication. For any particular culture, the general idea is that the intercultural worker will identify ways in which the message can speak relevantly to key issues and concerns.
Lots of good work has been based on this approach, and it will be healthy if it continues. It has made intercultural workers more sensitive to finding core cultural issues and has contributed to some effective programs. The idea has generated a healthy body of dissertations and publications.
Is there a theory?
It seems that for all the well-done case studies, there is not yet an adequate theory of contextualization. Below is a too-brief overview of some approaches to contextualization, and proposes that indigenous people, not the intercultural worker, take a dominant role in determining effective contextualized forms.
"Do we need to do better in contextualization?" In many cases, of course, some imperfect communication has been quite successful, and we will always be able to improve. In a few cases, people are extremely receptive. But we could still probably do much better.
Some contextualization has been so imperfect that people have not clearly accepted the message; the communication attempt can muddle people's understanding and make subsequent communication more difficult. The message can also induce resistance if we are unaware that our message is carrying repulsive cultural baggage. In many more cases, however, people clearly accept the message but it takes more work for them to understand accurately.
And in some cases, our ability to find receptivity will depend on having much more effective contextualization. For example, one population seemed overwhelmingly resistant, but new contextualized approaches uncovered huge openness.
Surface culture and symbols
There have been several major views of contextualization, the oldest of which is the use of symbols.
Discussion focused on surface culture issues including clothing, personal appearance (beards, moustaches), housing, language (although some language structures are deep), etiquette, art, use of illustration and examples, and choice of medium of communication.
In this view, it suffices for the communicator to adjust on surface culture matters, because he considers his view to be perfect and easily understood. Intercultural workers are aware of the need for surface level adaptation, but this view is simply naïve about deep culture and has proven inadequate.
Although these issues sometimes still come up, there is now considerable agreement that they are ancilliary and not normally part of the message, and for the most part one can freely use indigenous styles.
Functional equivalence
The functional equivalence view of contextualization is the notion that symbolic events can be replaced with a cultural equivalent.
The equivalent must be devoid of connotations that detract from the message, but it allows people to meet their social and cultural obligations.
This idea has been very helpful but it still deals mainly with surface culture. Functional equivalence has depended on a form-meaning dichotomy, which is difficult when local people instinctively identify a form with a particular meaning. It might mean that the form cannot easily be used for a new meaning. Alternatively, it might mean that the form needs considerable adaptation to be identified as culturally acceptable, but without the traditional meaning.
Dynamic equivalence
Dynamic equivalence, a term commandeered from linguistics, is somewhat similar, and means 'expressing the intent of the original in the idiom of the target culture.' In communication studies, the theorist views the process as the speaker encoding an intent to become a message. The listener also interprets the message, which is the decoding process:
Speaker —> Encode —> Message —> Decode —> Listener
By re-expressing the intent of the original in a way that the hearers could easily understand, one generated a new conceptualisation of the Gospel.
The original was the criterion of authenticity, while the target culture was the criterion of comprehensibility. This conception has been quite significant, but it still has some major weaknesses, especially that the listener is relatively passive.
Key principles
During the transitions, several key principles emerged.
First, each culture needs to be given its own response. There are no formulae or sets of steps or standard ready-to-use solutions that fit every case. In each culture, one must start from the beginning because, to some extent, the results will be unique in some way. While results might be mostly the same between similar cultures, one cannot make that assumption from the beginning.
Learning a culture involves uncovering and examining one’s own assumptions and tentatively comparing results with similar cultures. Inherent in this is the potentially infinitely many significant issues that might arise, not all equally important, but one cannot identify which issues will eventually prove to be most important in a given culture.
Second, both target culture people and the intercultural communicator need to start with new questions and find new answers. Even when answers are fully known, the intercultural communicators cannot simply impose it on their target audience. This is more often a problem when a worker brings the baggage of a fixed set of inflexible, mono-cultural beliefs.
The process of searching and demonstrating is important, because people need to go through the process of discovering and defining basic issues in their own context. People need the chance to digest knowledge and make it their own. The process of contextualization should not cease just because the intercultural worker’s views do not concur with those of the target population. With this "digesting" process, it is normal for the final answers to be different in unforeseeable ways from those anticipated by the intercultural communicator.
A lot of work goes into rethinking the message, thinking through what it is, reconceptualizing it, and developing different conceptualisations for different cultures. In many cases, this involves different versions of the steps that people work through in accepting the message.
Third, the intercultural communicator must take some responsibility for the clarity and acceptability of his message. In the case of an intercultural misunderstanding, the intercultural worker must take it upon himself to improve his understanding. As communication is not just passing on information but also of convincing, the feelings and prejudices of the listener must come into consideration. The message must be easy to accept and expressed in such a way that it appears attractive, logical, or favourable to the listener. Nevertheless, one cannot assume that everyone who understands the message will accept it, because messages often contain an unattractive element.
Fourth, watch the subtext and paramessage. People will re-interpret the changes in their own way because it is often not a simple benefit that you offer, but in community development , you also offer new ideas, for example, leadership structures and skills, wealth of some kind, habits, and preferences. Underneath, you are also seeking to develop new ways of thinking, and change some beliefs and values.
Fifth, identify aspects of long-term culture change, especially if your CD program depends on government policy or funding. For example, what expectations are you creating? This might well last longer than a particular government policy, which might be changed at the next election.
Some aspects will take long-term culture change. For example:
- Consider a person who, like all his family and friends, had lived his whole life in a hut made of rubbish on the edge of a rubbish tip. Living in a basic house won't come naturally. It could easily take a generation for them to become accustomed to living in a house and looking after it.
- Consider a person who, like all his family and friends, had been a debt-laborer. His wages did not cover the interest on his debts to his employer, so he was for most practical purposes a slave. For people in a community like this, it is a very long term goal for them to be able to make decisions, take initiative, get educated, and use money.
The current advice is to put long-term objectives into your strategy, but write your concrete plans in periods of no more than five years. You can't normally plan implementation in generational timeframes, but you'll probably need five years to identify any progress toward generational goals.
Sixth, their local way of doing things may actually be superior to your imported system. For example: modern practices might be environmentally unsound, and modern plant cultivars might produce more food, but they might also have less nutrients, poorer flavor, and fewer beneficial by-products.
Contextualization driven by deep culture
The many facets of deep culture are now more of an issue. One of them is cognitive style, which may roughly be described as cultural styles of logic and epistemology. Another is worldview, which may variously include conceptions of the universe as religious or pseudo-religious, breadth of life-experience, conceptions of society and personhood, value systems, and sets of subconscious assumptions about the nature of reality.
People interpret messages through their epistemology, worldview, and presuppositions (cultural grids). This can result in a set of beliefs that is healthy, creative, and instructive; it stimulates one to say repeatedly, "I never thought of it that way before."
In general, this assumes that the listener is very active and the communicator is quite passive by comparison. But it can also mean that the intercultural worker must adapt to deep culture structures if he wishes to communicate proactively and resonate with them.
As communicators, the contextualization process is a lot more about listening than telling, because it is what the people in the target population think that is important. By relying more on what they think, intercultural workers can avoid innocently using inappropriate terms that can create severe misunderstandings and schisms within the community.