William J. Starosta's "On Intercultural Rhetoric"

Some of the next few posts will be based on summaries I'm doing for my lit. review part.

I'm having a little trouble with the following article for several reasons, one being that I can't figure out if it has been cited much. According to Google Scholar it hasn't. I wonder if that means it hasn't been considered "important" to the field... If any of my reader(s) has heard of it, let me know!

Starosta, William J. "On Intercultural Rhetoric." Methods for Intercultural Communication Research. Ed. William B. Gudykunst and Young Yun Kim. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1984. 229-238. Rpt. in Intercultural Communication: A Global Reader. Ed. Fred E. Jandt. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2004. 307-314.

Starosta's essay is a theoretical look at the idea of intercultural rhetoric. By "rhetoric," Starosta seems to be referring to (he doesn't specifically define "rhetoric") attempts by someone(s) from one culture to persuade someone(s) from another culture. Actually, he does define "'rhetorical' intercultural discourse" as

that interaction that initially places cultural interactants into set sender and receive roles as a result of programmatic expectation, colonial relationship, or an active notion of cultural hierarchy. (308)

[That seems to me to be an odd/old notion of rhetoric--the old sender-receiver roles... It seems to put the "receiver" in a much more passive position than most contemporary views of audience would accept.]

Starosta calls intercultural rhetoric "extractionist" (by attempting to "'extract' the native" from his or her cultural perspective [310]) and exploitative (311). He argues that it

breeds cultural disharmony. When one psychologically, physically, or existentially removes a native from her or his cultural setting in order to modify the preference of that native, the result is the alienation of that person from the native setting. Successful inculcation of external ideas requires the disparagement of historically "correct" solutions. (311, emphasis in original)

[To be honest, I have to say at this point that he seems to have a pretty static view of culture, but I might be wrong about that... But I can think of some examples of how, for instance, some Chinese during the May Fourth era were psychologically and existentially (if not physically) removed from their cultural setting and alienated from their culture. Wen-Hsin Yeh's book about higher education in Republican China is even titled The Alienated Academy, which seems to support Starosta's view here.]

And now he gets to history:

Intercultural rhetoric stresses the here-and-now. Intercultural rhetoric broadens the range of abstractions at the command of the receiver. It telescopes centuries of tradition into a word such as "tribalism" or "paganism," and dismisses age-old practices with a glib dyslogism. Intercultural rhetoric, more than any intracultural force, champions frustrations and raises expectations. Soon the fruits of change, the promises of rhetoric become the expected reward for the "faithful" and the neoorthodox, and constraints to achievement of these rewards become viewed as part of a conspiracy of "traditionalists." Present circumstance is too bitter a reality to taste, and too disappointing to accept. It must be viewed as "becoming," if not yet "arrived," with apology being offered for the persistence of present form and circumstance. (312, emphasis in original)

[Now what the heck does this last sentence mean?]

Starosta admits that his

reasoning carries [him] from a view of culture that is fairly stable and immune to outside influence, through a stage where a few persons listen to outside voices, through a further stage where these individuals constitute a channel to reach others, to an end stage where change is routine, and mechanical voices call the tune. The irony of this process is that, by definition, the "answers" from the outside forces cannot be truly suited to needs. (313)

So his view of culture here is as something that is stable. Earlier he suggests that cultures "are self-promoting" "because they succeed in allowing their adherents to survive in a difficult world" (307).

Perhaps instead of calling this essay theoretical, I should call it a manifesto of sorts. Starosta notes toward the end that some of the things he says "are offered without apparent substantiation" (313), which I agree appears to be the case. It's hard to get a clear sense of what specific examples he might have in mind. On the other hand, there is some extent to which I can see how his depiction of "intercultural" rhetors almost forcing their views on "natives" might apply to the situation in China. However, I can't but think that what actually happened is more complicated than the process he describes, mainly because I don't see the "natives"--the audience of the intercultural rhetor--as being as passive as he seems to think.

[intercultural communication] [rhetoric] [William J. Starosta]