Cross Cultural RhetoricArriving in Stockholm
The plane begins to descend towards the capital of Sweden. I am filled with excitement to meet my colleague and friend, Eva Magnusson, at the University of Orebro. I just need to navigate the train system and find my way two hours north of Stockholm.
Everyone I have met along the way has voiced great interest in our cross-cultural rhetoric project. As I sit on the plane and exchange answers to the standard question, “Where are you headed and why?” I realize just how important and exciting this opportunity is – for two universities to collaborate together on a curriculum across a nine hour time difference, for students from across the world to share their ideas with each other and receive warm but rigorous collegial responses as if we were all in the same physical classroom community, for all of us to test out first hand and in an immediately practical way our theories of intercultural communication.
On the way from San Francisco to New York (a six hour flight), I composed twelve pages of notes on our project, on the process of our collaboration, the lessons we’ve learned so far even as we have just begun, and on key moments from our October 2 webcast. My thoughts are with my colleague Chris Alfano as she meets with our Tech Team Bob Smith and Dan Gilbert to prepare for Monday’s upcoming webcast, our October 9 experiment when we place students in globally distributed teams. My thoughts are also with the students on both sides, as they prepare to present again to each other and exchange their rhetorical perspectives – not on cultural identity this time but on their cross-cultural research projects, those potentially significant contributions to an emerging field.
As we departed New York for Stockholm (an eight hour flight), I read through several of the essays in the book Rhetoric in Intercultural Contexts, edited by Alberto Gonzalez and Dolores V. Tanno (International and Intercultural Communication Annual Vol XXII 1999). The text is required for Orebro students; we should similarly require it for our Winter Stanford course. The rich theoretical framework informing the field of intercultural studies merits closer study; it might even give us ground to change our terminology from “cross-cultural” rhetoric to “intercultural rhetoric” and question the supposed “cross” of ostensibly distinct and self-contained cultural entities.
Robert Shuter’s essay on “The Cultures of Rhetoric” itself offers a compelling intercultural comparison of rhetorical traditions, the Confucius and the Aristotelian, one that our students would appreciate and that should inform our pedagogy. His claim that the Western bias for logic has caused the obfuscation of Eastern rhetorical traditions makes me pause – my fear of western cultural imperialism, and more specifically, of America-centric bias, has been the very impetus for this trip to Sweden. We must resist the perhaps unintentional privileging of American culture over Swedish practices in the development of our intercultural rhetoric curriculum.
After discussing the work of Eastern and Indian rhetoric scholars Shuter writes, “Clearly, Aristotle’s rhetorical framework is not culturally compatible with non-Western rhetorics. For that matter, all rhetorical critics, their criticism, and the analytical framework they use are reflections of the cultures that produced them” (13). While in his essay Shuter will go on to explore feminist criticism and “cocultural rhetoric,” it is my hope that with this trip I will go on to explore and learn much from the Swedish rhetorical tradition and cocultural rhetoric at the intersection of Scandinavia, Europe, and the European Union.
These have been my thoughts and reflections as the plane has coasted through a soft red sunset, heading up the coast past New York, Boston, over the Atlantic to Scotland and now beginning to make our arrival twenty minutes early into Stockholm. There’s a light cloud layer covering the earth below, hiding the day from us, but the sun is rising showing a gentle yellow light, and I look forward to this new beginning with great anticipation and an open mind.
10.7.06
Alyssa
