Being Mindful of the Habitus of Culture (Essay‪)‬

In a previous essay (Cargile, 2005), I encouraged intercultural communication scholars to view culture dialectically. Although dialectical metatheory has much to suggest regarding our appreciation of culture, one area where it proves most valuable is in understanding the relationship resulting between a culture and its members. In contrast to a structural-functional view of the relationship, one in which people follow some unspecified combination of universal-, cultural-, and individual-level scripts (e.g., Hofstede, 1980), a dialectical perspective suggests instead that people enact agency within a field of culturally prefigured patterns. Like a well-worn path through the woods, individuals often follow the markers, but may sometimes find it more suitable to blaze their own trail. This dialectic between cultural determinism and individual agency is at the heart of intercultural communication study. To study culture is know the structural constraints within which Others operate, but it is not to know how they will act in any given situation. Consider, for example, the case of the woman who climbed up the house. As reported in the book Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner,&Cain, 1998), a local woman arrived at a house in Nepal to be interviewed by the authors. As one author went downstairs to greet her, the woman "somehow crawled up the vertical outside wall, made her way around the balcony to an opening in the railing, came through the opening, and sat down" (p. 10). The question, of course, becomes why did this woman climb up the wall when such entry was unprecedented in the community and when the woman had no reputation for unusual behavior? Clearly, no cultural- or individual- level script for this conduct existed. However, that is not to say that culture was irrelevant to her actions.