Developing intercultural communicative skills

The Grammar of Culture
The grammar of culture provides a structure which enables us to read cultural events. However, it is also an invention – a map which can guide is. This map must never be mistaken for the real terrain, which is too complex and deep to be mapped too accurately. The grammar is in the form of the first of two pull-outs for ease of reference throughout the book. Then, throughout, when-ever mentioned the items of the grammar are in bold.

The Grammar of culture

Negotiating individual vs social structure
Particular social, political structures	Underlying universal cultural processes	Particular cultural products

Cultural resources, nation, education, language, government, relegion			Artifacts Cultural practices, art, literature, the media, architecture and etc
Global position and politics Affluence, power, economies, juxtaposition with others	Personal trajectories Family, ancestry, peers, profession	Small culture formation Reading and making culture Constructing rules and meaning, imagining self and other	Statement about culture Discourse of and about culture, prejudice, cultural acts, outward expression of self and other

On the left of the figure, these are structures which in many ways form us and make us dif-ferent from each other. They include nation, religion, language and economic system. These structures may in some circumstances map precisely onto each other, for example were a nation state corresponds largely with one religious group, one language and one economic system. Examples of these might be isolated communities which have been relatively un-touched by global affairs. It may well be however that they are more imagined than actual, residing in our exotic idealisation of the ‘tribe’, or the lost civilisations of travellers’ tales, or, as more scientific constructs, the ancient discoveries of archaeology. In these cases it is easy to think of a single ‘culture’, where all the members really do share things that no one else does.

In most cases, however, the relationships will be more complex than this; and religions and languages will transcend nations or be minorities within them, and economic systems, even though nationalist statements may say otherwise. Degrees of economic system may well be able to be controlled by the nation state; but the variations of the other domains may well mediate the extent to which these can be culturally defining.
The first of the domains in this part of the figure, cultural resources, is the influence on our daily lives of the