‘High-context’ small cultures everywhere

The concept of ‘high-context cultures’ has been dominant in intercultural communication studies and training since the 1960s with the work of E.T. Hall. They are framed as ‘outside the West’, where powerful tradition is thought to diminish the need to be explicit, resulting in ‘indirect’ communication. They are associated with the also influential ‘collectivist cultures’ concept, where group-orientation its believed to diminish self-directed decision-making and critical thinking.

That this labelling is ideologically driven by Edward Said’s proposed Western Orientalist imagination of the East as indolent is evidenced in its opposition to the positive characterisation of so-labelled ‘Western cultures’ as ‘low-context’ and ‘individualist’, where people ‘think for themselves, are critical and “direct” in how they express their choices and decisions’.

Note my use of inverted commas and ‘so-labelled’ to remind me to problematise what is commonly and easily thought.

This differentiation is nevertheless complex. Rather than completely discounting these definitions, there have been accusations that this in effect Centre emphasis on low-context individualism – ‘methodological individualism’ – represents an attack on the deCentred relationality inherent in the cultures of the Global South.

My own attempt at deCentring is in trying to follow Stuart Hall’s advice about beginning with the small – looking around at what is actually going on, to bypass Centre definitions. I then begin to see relational and high-context behaviour everywhere I look – not in this or that national or civilisational culture.

However, this is also not straightforward. I initially think I see high-context behaviour in people I encounter who seem so absorbed in the group they belong to and its subcultural styles that they appear not to respond to the wider society. 

I am then jolted out of this impression when a member of such a group – I think I recognise by their dress, body imagery, demeanour and so on – perhaps standing nearby in a bus queue – unexpectedly speaks or behaves in a way that shows very strongly that they are by no means confined by this stereotype. 

I then realise that I too was allowing myself to sink into the same sort of Othering of ‘other cultures’, albeit ‘small’, that I’m critiquing. In reality, depending on all sorts of factors that affect all of us, ‘they’, just like ‘we’, can be many things at the same time – sometimes more relational and high-context, sometimes not. 

I then begin to realise that high-context relationality is indeed something that we all take part in or experience at least some of the time. This could be in work meetings, with friends in restaurants, in family events, or wherever we are with a group of people where there are norms of behaviour which have become routinised to the extent of being unspoken.

In such cases, we can be silenced or pushed to conform by ‘indirect’ looks, body language, tones of voice, types of humour and banter. Here, the high-context element is itself embedded in established discourses and narratives – of which outspoken claims that ‘we are individualist and direct’ are themselves examples. 

Imagine, therefore, finding oneself as a newcomer in a British university tutorial where you don’t yet know the rules about what can be said and not said. There seems to be an outspoken – ‘direct’ – invitation to be friendly and informal, even using given names, when in fact there’s a deep, tacit, unspoken, ‘indirect’, highly formal and hierarchical régime of assessment taking place.

Also imagine dealing with a group of so-labelled ‘Western’ business people, diplomats or politicians. They make a big show of being ‘direct’ – ‘able to make individualist, independent decisions’. But in fact there is a huge amount of high-context power-play going on out of sight and between the lines, much of which they have little personal control of. This is what is satirised in British and American TV dramas such as Yes Minister and Veep.

These are cases where knowing about high-context small cultures becomes important – not in labelling and Othering whole national or civilisational cultures.

A conclusion may therefore be that the methodological individualism associated with the West or Global North are more to do with Orientalist ideological flag-waving than with the actual nature of social life in their so-labelled ‘cultures’.