Interculturality: Reconceptualising Cultural Memberships and Identities Through Translanguaging Practice

Abstract

Many approaches in intercultural communication are predominantly concerned with providing a cultural account for mis- or non-understanding in interactions. These approaches take cultural memberships, for example, Chinese vs. American, as something given and static and attribute mis- or non-understanding in intercultural communication to differences in value and belief between different cultural groups. In contrast, interculturality, as an emerging research paradigm, represents a line of investigation that departs from these traditions. It problematises the notion of cultural membership and investigates the interplay between language use and socio-cultural identities. In this chapter I first give an overview of Membership Categorisation Device (MCD), a concept central to the interculturality perspective. I then examine some selected interactional data from a Chinese disaporic family to demonstrate how multilingual participants make use of interactional resources available to ‘do’ cultural identities. Among multilingual speakers, translanguaging practice, in which multilingual speakers make use of their multilingual resources and go between and beyond different languages in a dynamic and flexible way, plays a critical role in the (co-) construction of affiliation vs. disaffiliation towards cultural memberships. During the dynamic process, speakers not only make aspects of their multiple and shifting identities relevant, but also develop new social and cultural identities. These examples add to the central arguments of Interculturality by demonstrating that a) cultural membership is neither prescribed nor static, and b) the relevance of one’s cultural membership is contingent on the interplay of self-orientation and ascription-by-others.