Patterns of Intercultural Communication: A Case Study of Caţa Rural District

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov
Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies • Vol. 9 (58) No. 1 – 2016
Patterns of intercultural communication: a case study
of Caţa rural district
Adrian LESENCIUC1 , Elena BUJA2
This paper studies the patterns of communication among the ethnic groups living in the
Transylvanian rural district of Caţa, aiming at identifying the people’s willingness to
communicate and the non-conflictual nature of the dialogue in this rural area. The
framework employed in the analysis is Dell Hymes’s (1974) interactional S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G
schema. The study is based on data collected by the first author during two periods (August –
September, 2012 and January, 2013), using two instruments: the direct, participant
observation and the interview. The participants are representatives of four ethnic groups,
namely Romanians, Hungarians, Germans and Roma people. The findings of the analysis
show that the inter-ethnic communication in Caţa is non-conflictual and non-exclusive due to
the people’s openness to adapt to the others and that the limitations of the intercultural
dialogue are rather suggested by the administrative authorities and the national ethnic
organizations.
Key-words: intercultural communication, ethnography of communication, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G
1. Introduction: intercultural communication and the ethnography of
communication
As “intercultural communication is a matter of highest importance if humankind and
society are to survive” (Samovar & Porter 2003, viii), its study is a multidisciplinary
endeavor. Researchers have approached this field from the vantage point of
linguistic anthropology (Gumperz 1978, 1982), of ethnography of communication
(Gumperz and Hymes, 1972; Hymes, 1974), or of psychology (Gudykunst, 1988;
Kim, 2001; Tajfel, 1979), in an attempt to offer a clear and encompassing
perspective on this complex issue. Due to our aim to study orchestrated
communication, the approach that seemed more appropriate to our need was the
ethnography of communication, as it enabled us to focus on interactional models
viewed as ‘clusters’ of convictions, values and methods in the intercultural relations
within the Romanian rural area. The ‘orchestra’ metaphor, according to which the
1 ‘Henri Coandă’ Air Force Academy, Braşov, Romania, [e-mail]
2 Transilvania University of Braşov, Romania, [e-mail]

Adrian LESENCIUC, Elena BUJA30
foreign elements are inserted naturally in the process of communication among the
members of some Romanian rural area, makes one think of ‘tuning’ in time and of
communicational harmony:
“Members of a culture participate in communication just the way in which
musicians play in the orchestra; but the communication orchestra does not
have a conductor and the musicians do not have scores. Their concerts are
more or less harmonious because as they play, they conduct each other. The
aria they interpret constitutes for them an assembly of structural
interrelations” (Winkin 2001, 153).
The orchestra model of communication can best explain the organic functionality of
the Romanian rural community, where agreement, co-participation, and communion
occur naturally, the communication process being an integrated social phenomenon,
which can be appropriately described in terms of the ethnography of
communication. This approach, derived from anthropology, focuses “on how
language functions in actual ethnographically documented speech events, rather than
on relations between community wide cultural norms and linguistic structures
abstracted from talk. Begun in the 1960s, the ethnography of communication
provided the insight that culture was essentially a communicative phenomenon,
constituted through talk” (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 2007, 15). The contribution
of anthropology to intercultural communication is the insight that language
differences that affect interpretation in everyday life are not just matters of grammar
and semantics. Speaking and understanding depend greatly on the social context in
which verbal exchanges take place (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 2007; Saville-
Troike, 2003).
For anthropologists, the ethnography of communication presupposes the
extension of the cultural systems to the linguistic field, proving very useful in
studying language/speech in relationship with the social organization, people’s
social roles, their values and beliefs, as well as in relationship with patterns of
behavior transmitted from generation onto generation in the process of socialization
or enculturation. The ethnography of communication presupposes an encompassing
study of the communicative and cultural behavior in a social and linguistic context.
From the vantage point of this approach, the process of communication within the
multiethnic village in Romania cannot be studied independent of the network of
interethnic interactions and of cultural patterns. The study of interethnic
communication imposes an internal perspective, a description of the internal
structure of the community as a whole (not as a sum of the ethnic groups that it is
formed of).

Patterns of intercultural communication: a case study of Caţa rural district 31
2. Research methodology
2.1. Data collection
In order to identify the roles that the cultural communicative behavior may play
within the rural area, as well as the interaction between culture and communication,
we needed to collect consistent data and to use an analytical framework suitable for
their interpretation. The largest body of data was collected in situ, from the local
people, during two periods (August – September, 2012 and January, 2013. Apart
from that, we have also made recourse to the statistical data available.
2.2. Analytical framework
The analytical framework employed in describing the intercultural communication
patterns within the rural area of Caţa is represented by Hymes’s (1974) S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G
schema, which proved very useful in the study of communication as interaction,
focusing on a larger set of elements pertaining to the communication process. These
elements, united under the acronym S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, are: setting and scene –
participants – ends – act sequence – key – instrumentalities – norms – genre. Each
of them enables a complex analysis, which, in the long run, creates an extended
analytical framework. As our analysis of the intercultural communication patterns
will proceed along these eight elements, we shall briefly present them in what
follows.
a. Setting and scene comprises two parts, a physical and a psychic one. Thus,
in the case of the setting we need to consider physical elements such as the time, the
place, the movement of the participants in the act of communication, the noise, etc.
The scene, on the other hand, relates to the cultural dimension of atmosphere, but it
also includes characteristics such as the degree of formality of the dialogue. As
Hymes himself put it, “the key to understanding language in context consists in not
starting with the language, but with the context” (1972, xix). In our paper, the setting
corresponds to the natural landscape present in Romanian studies, while the scene,
understood as a structure that derives certain social phenomena from other social
phenomena, includes, to a certain extent, the historical background, too.
b. The participants in the act of communication are not only those persons
who exchange messages, but all the people present, who take part actively or
passively in the communication process. Within interpersonal communication, the
message does not pendulate between the sender and the receiver. The co-
participants, part of the communication setting, play various social roles and
interfere verbally and non-verbally in the message exchange. All participants act
with themselves of with the others according to the meaning, by appealing to a
social conduct imposed by certain norms and also according to a creative conduct,
respectively, by negotiating meaning and interpreting symbols.

Adrian LESENCIUC, Elena BUJA32
c. The ends cover the immediate and the long-term communication objectives,
taking sometimes the form of either purposes-outcomes, which are explicit,
established and agreed with by the communication partners, or of purposes-goals,
which are situated at a deeper level of intentionality.
d. The act sequence refers to the ‘form and content of utterances’, as well as
to “what is uttered and what is meant by the way in which something is uttered”
(Kramsch 2004, 37); in other words, it covers the message content in terms of
intention of the sender and interpretation of the receiver, as well as the form taken
by the message. Within the adopted framework, the message content is perceived as
being in a dynamic interaction, constructing its own physical depth, and contributing
to the changing of the norm according to which we interpret the world.
e. The key covers the tone or manner in which the communication act is
performed (serious, ironical, jokingly, etc.) and refers both to the verbal and the non-
verbal (paralanguage) forms. Our focus was more on the oral exchanges between
participants, on their interaction, reversibility of roles, freedom in selecting the
means to transmit the information, on causing various effects on the interlocutor by
having the possibility to reformulate the message. Moreover, the non-verbal aspects
of communication are also of importance, especially when they contribute to the
verbal exchanges. The non-verbal elements can be prosodic (intonation, word-stress)
or paralinguistic (tone, volume, accent, slips of the tongue, speech speed, etc.)
(Argyle 1975/1988, 139-152). Variations in tonality or rhythm provide additional
information regarding the key, being easily identified and contributing to the
creation/maintaining of a certain communication atmosphere and to the prevalence
of humor, irony or gravity of conversation.
f. The instrumentalities cover two important categories of communication
elements: channels and means of communication, on the one hand, and codes, on the
other hand. The channels are defined as the fixed elements by means of which the
signals are transmitted between the sender and the receiver, while the means refer to
the physical supports that convert the messages into signals in order to be
transmitted via the channels. The codes, understood as a system of signs and
systems of norms/conventions of combining them, are specific to each culture or
social group.
g. The interactional mechanisms and the mechanisms of message
interpretation in conversation are subsumed to Hymes’s norms of communication,
such as greeting, leave taking, or apologizing, to mention just a few. The study of
these norms is imperative in intercultural communication. Due to the differences
between the representative of one culture (the performer) and the member of another
culture who interacts with him/her, it is necessary to identify, explain, and account
for the existing interactional patterns. These interactional norms cover the need not
to interrupt a conversation, to listen, to have tolerance for the communication act, to
respect the rights of the other, to actively participate in the conversation by
clarifying ambiguities and by bringing arguments in support of various points of