Cultural Diversity and the Empowerment of Minorities: Perspectives from Israel and Germany 9781782382126

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Figures and Tables
Preface
Introduction: Education, Multiculturalism, and Empowerment of Minorities – An Overview
Part I. General Overview
1. Stories of Struggle: Transnational Advocacy and Democracy Education
2. What’s Going on between Members of Majorities and Minorities? Contributions from Social Psychology
3. Talking at Cross-purposes: Misunderstanding in Intercultural Communication
Part II. The Israeli Case
4. A Curriculum between Conflict and Peace: The Teaching of History in Jewish and Arab Schools in Israel
5. The Evolving Arab Reception of the Holocaust and Palestinian Textbooks: A Contribution to Democracy and Peace Education?
6. Police–minority Relations in a Multicultural Society: The Israeli Case
7. On the Central Role of “Threat Perception” in Mediating the Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on Xenophobic Attitudes
8. A Multimedia Lexicon as a Tool for Increasing Societal Tolerance
9. When Gender Differences Surpass Cultural Differences in Personal Satisfaction with Body Shape in Israeli College Students
10. Postcolonial Feminism, the Politics of Identification, and the Liberal Bargain
Part III. The German Case
11. Acculturation Attitudes and Bilingual Classrooms in Germany. The Portuguese–German Example
12. “Not Always Proud to be American”: The Reconstruction of National Identity by Americans Residing in Germany
13. Oral Mistake Corrections in Second-language Classrooms
14. Intercultural Competence in Management Consultancies in Germany: Does It Exist?
Notes on Contributors
Index of Names
Index of Subjects

Citation preview

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Cultural Diversity and the Empowerment of Minorities

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CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND THE EMPOWERMENT OF MINORITIES

Edited by Majid Al-Haj and Rosemarie Mielke In Association with Inke Du Bois, Nina Smidt and Sivan Spitzer Shohat

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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First published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2007 Majid Al-Haj and Rosemarie Mielke All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of Berghahn Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-195-0 (hardback)

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Preface

xi

Introduction: Education, Multiculturalism, and Empowerment of Minorities – An Overview Majid Al-Haj and Rosemarie Mielke

1

Part I. General Overview 1. Stories of Struggle: Transnational Advocacy and Democracy Education Gordon Mitchell

11

2. What’s Going on between Members of Majorities and Minorities? Contributions from Social Psychology Rosemarie Mielke

25

3. Talking at Cross-purposes: Misunderstanding in Intercultural Communication Juliane House

41

Part II. The Israeli Case 4. A Curriculum between Conflict and Peace: The Teaching of History in Jewish and Arab Schools in Israel Majid Al-Haj

61

5. The Evolving Arab Reception of the Holocaust and Palestinian Textbooks: A Contribution to Democracy and Peace Education? Schirin Fathi

77

6. Police–minority Relations in a Multicultural Society: The Israeli Case 87 Badi Hasisi

Contents

7. On the Central Role of “Threat Perception” in Mediating the Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on Xenophobic Attitudes Eran Halperin, Daphna Canetti-Nisim, and Ami Pedahzur

121

8. A Multimedia Lexicon as a Tool for Increasing Societal Tolerance Oz Almog and Tami Almog

139

9. When Gender Differences Surpass Cultural Differences in Personal Satisfaction with Body Shape in Israeli College Students Marilyn P. Safir, Shimrit Flaisher-Kellner, and Amir Rosenmann 10. Postcolonial Feminism, the Politics of Identification, and the Liberal Bargain Amalia Sa’ar

157

173

Part III. The German Case 11. Acculturation Attitudes and Bilingual Classrooms in Germany. The Portuguese–German Example Joana Duarte

197

12. “Not Always Proud to be American”: The Reconstruction of National Identity by Americans Residing in Germany Inke Du Bois

207

13. Oral Mistake Corrections in Second-language Classrooms Olga Visbal

227

14. Intercultural Competence in Management Consultancies in Germany: Does It Exist? Melissa Lamson

237

Notes on Contributors

265

Index of Names

271

Index of Subjects

281

— vi —

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 8.1 8.2

The population in the Northern District in the year 2000 in settlements with more than 1,000 inhabitants Means of the number of cases filed in 2000 and 2001 according to the division between Arabs and Jews Average ratio of criminal files opened according to the size and ethnic origin of the settlement Number of cleared files in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000 Number of property felony files opened in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000 Number of violence against the human body files opened in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000 Number of drug files in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000 Representation of Jews and non-Jews in the Israeli police and border control Arabs serving in the state police Arabs serving in the border police Representation of women in percentages in the Israel Police from 1948 to 2003 Representation of non-Jews in percentages in the Israel Police and Border Patrol from 1948 to 2003 The opening page of the cultural lexicon The culturally communal Israeli apartment building

8.3 Cultural variables of the Druze culture 8.4 Subvariable “Kitchen” in the Druze culture — vii —

92 92 93 94 95 97 98 112 113 113 114 114 148 149 150 150

List of Figures and Tables

8.5 8.6 9.1 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 14.1

Subvariable “House” in the Druze culture The information portrayed under the keyword “Hospitality” Means of men’s and women’s figure ratings Revised bidimensional model of immigrant acculturation strategies Bidimensional model of host community acculturation strategies Acculturation orientations of the three groups Narrative construction of the narrating I Model of “intercultural competence”

151 152 165 199 199 201 211 241

Tables 4.1 4.2 6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4

6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 7.1 7.2

Required units in the senior high school history curriculum for Jewish and Arab schools (the 1990s curricula) The 1948 Israel–Arab war in Arabic and Hebrew textbooks in Israeli schools Public attitudes on issues associated with the police. Means of statements (standard deviation) and analysis of variance Average degree of trust in law enforcement institutions (standard deviation) and variance analysis (ANOVA) according to ethnicity Preferences in filing a complaint according to ethnic group (distribution in percentages) Average of degree of concern regarding crimes and willingness to file complaints with the police (standard deviation) and variance analysis according to ethnic groups Turning to help after suffering harm from a violent crime (distribution in percentages) Distribution of police in the Northern District for the year 2003 Distribution of police quotas in the Coastal Sub-district Distributions of police quotas in the Galilee Sub-district Distribution of police quotas in the Valleys Sub-district Correlation matrix – research variables Differences in xenophobic attitudes by the research groups

— viii —

65 70 101

103 105

106 107 108 109 110 110 128 129

List of Figures and Tables

7.3 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 11.1 12.1 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 13.9 14.1

Regression equations coefficients predicting threat perception and xenophobic attitudes to the three minority groups Age, height, weight, and BMI for Jewish and Arab women and men Means and standard deviations of participants’ figure ratings for Jewish and Arab women and men Number and percentages of the differences between current figure and ideal figure, by sex Attempts to change weight in the previous year, by gender and ethnic origin Mean and standard deviation of the acculturation strategies for the three groups Coding matrix Frequency of different kinds of initiation Frequency of direct and indirect correction Frequency of verbal and nonverbal reactions Frequency of interruption Frequency of different kinds of directions Contingency analysis of interruption and kind of initiation Relationship between kinds of reactions and initiations Relationship between kind of initiation and kind of correction Relationship between kind of content and kind of interruption Comparative figures on the German consulting market in 2001

— ix —

131 164 164 166 166 201 215 230 230 230 230 231 232 232 232 232 245

PREFACE

One of the crucial tasks that face pluralistic societies today is the empowerment of minorities through education as a way of bridging socioeconomic gaps and paving the way for civil culture. This issue stands at the core of critical multiculturalism, which aims to create cultural bridges between different groups who share the same society through the redivision of power and the enhancement of political and cultural democracy. This goal is not easy to attain. It requires a broad agreement between minority and majority groups over the contents of multiculturalism and its adoption as a common ideology, as well as a way of dealing with ethnic, racial, national, and other social divisions. This book attempts to shed light on different aspects of multiculturalism. In particular it delineates the German and Israeli experiences in terms of majorityminority relations through formal and informal education. It addresses the meaning and implementation of multiculturalism in these societies through issues such as cultural policy, linguistic policy, the shaping of the school curriculum, the absorption of immigrants, the promotion of women’s status, and other related issues. This book is part of an ongoing project that started in 2002 between the Center for Multiculturalism and Educational Research at the University of Haifa and the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS) at the University of Hamburg. We are indebted to many people without whom this important project, as well as this book, would have been difficult to accomplish. First and foremost we wish to thank the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius, who provided a generous grant for the achievement of the whole project. We especially thank Professor Dr Manfred Lahnstein, Professor Dr Michael Göring, and Frauke Hamann for their understanding and continuing support. We also thank Dr Udo Thelen and Dr Nina Smidt of ICGS for their commitment to the success of the project. We thank the authors for their cooperation and for their keen efforts to provide the most up-to-date version of their studies. Our thanks go to Dr Nina Smidt, Sivan Spitzer Shohat, and Inke Du Bois, who assisted in the first stage of preparing this book for publication, — xi —

Preface

and to Sabrina Monetha for her thorough proofreading of the final text version. Last, but not least, we thank Marion Berghahn and Mark Stanton of Berghahn Books publishing house for their kind cooperation. Majid Al-Haj, Haifa Rosemarie Mielke, Hamburg

— xii —

Introduction

EDUCATION, MULTICULTURALISM, AND EMPOWERMENT OF MINORITIES – AN OVERVIEW

With the beginning of the new millennium, internal conflicts have become more and more salient. This trend is the result of the resurgence of ethnicity, the f lourishing of local and individual identities, the increasing competition between groups over scarce resources and the rising awareness of national, ethnic, racial, and social groups of their right to be different. Societies that had been successful in dealing with external conflicts and making a transition from war to peace have realized that this does not automatically resolve internal conflicts. On the contrary, the resolution of external conflicts may even sharpen internal ones. In addition, societies that are heavily based on immigration realize that the “melting pot” strategy has failed and that the recognition of diversity is a basic condition for bridging the gap between the cleavages and divisions that make up societies. As a result, democratic societies are increasingly preoccupied with the crucial question: How to build shared civility while maintaining the cultural uniqueness of the different groups that make up the social structure of the wider society? This phenomenon has opened the path for recognizing the need for multiculturalism and intercultural policies. Indeed, since the 1970s we have been witnessing an increased interest in multiculturalism, both as a concept and as a strategy for legitimizing diversity, empowering minorities and disadvantaged groups, and dealing with problems of equality and equity. Since then, several Western democracies (Canada, Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, and others) have adopted multiculturalism as an integral part of their official policy, mainly in the social, educational, and cultural domains (see —1—

Introduction

Banks 1981; Pettman 1986; Castles 1987; McAllister 1993; Kymlicka 1995; Sleeter 1996; Eldering 1996; Banks 1997; Woodward 1998; Barry 2001). However, despite the huge body of research that has grown up about multiculturalism, there is still a wide dispute about the meaning and content of multiculturalism. Among the various models of multiculturalism, the critical model, which is adopted by many authors in this book, seems to be most convincing. This model suggests a holistic concept of multiculturalism that cannot be detached from social, political, and economic contexts. According to this model, multiculturalism entails the promotion of equality and equity in addition to the “right to be different.” This means that sociopolitical inequalities should be dealt with and power should be negotiated and shared as an integral part of promoting multicultural conceptions and shared civility. In addition, culture needs to be defined from a broader perspective, and not only as the outside cleavage of folklore. Besides the basic elements of culture (language, cultural symbols, etc.) it includes collective identity and historical narrative that should be recognized and legitimized. Also, in deeply divided societies multiculturalism should be associated with the empowerment of minorities and the widening of their share in the opportunity structure. The term “empowerment” is used to describe a process which is aimed at implementing the sense of an ability to make a difference or participate in change at the individual, group, and community levels. While leading towards this goal, empowerment should be treated carefully in a way that does not entail paternalism nor lead to another form of social control over minorities and disadvantaged groups. By definition, empowerment is aimed at the disadvantaged with the aspiration of creating the transition from a state of powerlessness to a state of power at both the individual and collective levels. Naturally, empowerment should be perceived as a process, not a one-time event. Empowered people need to be continuously fueled and motivated in order to make the transition from a state of powerlessness into a position in which they feel responsible for their fate, take responsibility for their action, and actively participate in the process of change. This process is especially difficult among disadvantaged groups and minorities who suffer not only from economic and social distress, but also from continuing discrimination and stigmatization. Researching the aspects of multicultural education, we have adopted the strategy suggested by Davidman and Davidman (1997), who emphasized that one of the main components of multicultural education has to do with empowerment of students. This empowerment process includes a number of components. The basic component is knowledge, which should be given to students with the aim of raising their awareness towards the political and economic power and power relationships at the different levels (local, regional, national, and international). Once they are informed, students need to develop —2—

Introduction

the self-confidence that they can be a catalyst for change; students should be granted opportunities for decision making and communication skills. Validation is considered a basic stage of empowerment. Thus, students should be supported in sharing their cultural identity and experiences (language etc.) with the class. However, in order to institutionalize the empowerment process there is a need for appropriate curricula and programs. For the aforementioned goals to be achieved there is a need to reinforce cultural competence among pupils and the wider society. In this sense, cultural competence means the knowledge and recognition of culture at three main levels: one’s own culture, the culture of other groups within the same society, and the exposure to cultures of other societies. Naturally, the main emphasis is on the first two levels, which are tightly connected to the individual’s surrounding environment. In this sense, the right for and construction of collective cultural uniqueness of each group should be accompanied by the building of a joint circle between the different groups, based on the recognition of their culture and the sharing of power in the different spheres. In order to deal with issues of education and empowerment, two workshops were organized and held at the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS) at the University of Hamburg (September 15–17, 2003) and at the University of Haifa (June 1–3, 2004), entitled respectively “Education for Minority Groups in Multicultural Societies” and “Education, Multiculturalism and the Empowerment of Minority Groups. The German and the Israeli Experience.” This book is based on the papers that were presented at the workshops. Most of the papers have been expanded and updated in order to meet the standards of a scientific publication; to provide a wide outlook; and to present the issues at hand from comparative perspectives. The book includes three parts: the first part, the general overview, presents the debate around the meaning of “Democracy Education” and different aspects of research on majority–minority relations today. Mitchell describes how a new understanding of Democracy Education evolved by means of a series of consultative workshops. Discussions between different kinds of activists and educational specialists, such as the protection of indigenous languages and cultures or gay and lesbian rights, as well as the choice of the participants and the geographical location of the workshops, contributed to an understanding of Democracy Education as a process designed to empower the most vulnerable members of society. Mielke presents different lines of social psychological research which contribute to our understanding of minority–majority relations and the process of stereotyping and discriminating. The scope of self-categorization theory is broadened to a theoretical model which now offers explanations for why we categorize in different ways, taking into account motivational goals which are based in a group’s world view. Social psychological research looking at the psychic consequences of being a target of discrimination revealed fine-grained —3—

Introduction

coping processes, which nevertheless leaves the question unsolved under which circumstances perceived discrimination undermines self-esteem and well-being. Finally, research on dimensions of differences between minority and majority shows that some dimensions are more important than others. The analysis of intercultural interactions between a majority and a minority member presented by House shows how interactants “mismanage rapport” through talking at cross-purposes. It is revealed how this failure to achieve mutual understanding and rapport derives from the way the institutional representatives – who are at the same time members of the majority culture – reject certain linguistic actions produced by minority group members as inadequate, and how members of the majority culture apparently feel licensed to interrupt their interactants’ turns. Suggestions for improving intercultural communication and preventing the sense of failure and frustration of minority members are given. The second part, the Israeli case, discusses different aspects of multicultural policies in Israeli society today. The studies on Israel, contributed by the researchers from the University of Haifa, paint a picture of the diverse and complex social relations that exist between majority and minority groups in Israeli society. Al-Haj examines the history curricula taught in Arab and Jewish schools as a means of social control. The history curricula were compared, using content analysis, with the official goals of the school curriculum as set by the Israeli Ministry of Education, and the textbooks used in Jewish and Arab schools. AlHaj’s analysis shows that the school curriculum in an ethno-national state reflects the ideology of the majority group. Moreover, the “official knowledge” as conveyed in the school curriculum overlooks the minority’s historical narrative, thus making it difficult to implement multicultural education in Israel. Similarly, Fathi examines the Palestinian narrative of the Jewish Holocaust as an attempt to create a differential narrative to that of the Jewish majority. On analyzing Palestinian textbooks for national education as well as Arab international discourse, the omission of Israel’s existence and the denial of the Holocaust are deemed by Fathi as the explanation and realization of the ongoing conflict. The common denominator of these discourses is their lack in according the “enemy” its narrative. Thus, although the problem of territory has to be tackled, the two rival nationalisms, histories, and collective memories first need to be reconciled. In an attempt to understand the influence police–minority relations have on the governance of the state, Hasisi studies the relationship between the Israeli police and Arab citizens. Utilizing data on the functioning of police stations and distribution of the police force in Arab communities, Arab public attitudes towards the police, and the representation of Arabs in the police force, Hasisi focused on the connection between culture and law among minority groups. The findings show that an inadequate delegation of police stations serving the —4—

Introduction

Arab sector exists. This in turn creates feelings of estrangement among the Arab minority and an “illegal culture” that rejects some of the state laws. Hasisi concludes that the burgeoning culture of illegalism in Arab society has weakened the state’s capacity for governance over Arabs in Israel and has created a negative image of the minority group among the state’s law enforcement agencies. Halperin, Canetti-Nisim, and Pedahzur examine xenophobic attitudes of the Jewish majority group towards three minority groups: Palestinian citizens of Israel, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and labor migrants. Using a unique study design, the participants were categorized according to their different socioeconomic status (level of education and employment status) and questioned on xenophobic attitudes. The research findings revealed that threat perception played a key role in the translation of socioeconomic factors into xenophobia. The authors conclude that it is through education, particularly academic education, that tolerant attitudes regarding minority groups are instilled in the majority group. In an attempt to create tolerance through knowledge, Almog and Almog utilized the internet in order to better educate university students about different cultures in Israeli society. In order to verify the correlation between the absence of cultural knowledge and the existence of stereotypes in Israel, a pilot study examining the relation between religious origin (Muslim/Jewish) and familiarity with the other faith was conducted. The research findings revealed the existence of cultural ignorance between Muslims and Jews. Hence, the researchers identified the need for an efficient tool to document and educate students on Israeli cultures in a pleasant and interesting way. Through the creation of a Multimedia Cultural Lexicon as a virtual tool, university students were provided with new information through thousands of pictures, video clips, and voice recordings. The Multimedia Cultural Lexicon Project creates a new dimension for documenting and teaching about cultures in Israel. Safir, Flaisher-Kellner, and Rosenmann examined the effect different cultural perceptions of Jews and Arabs have on personal satisfaction with body image. Using a figure scale, participants were asked to indicate their current figures, their ideal figures, the figures most attractive to the other sex, and the figures of the other sex they found most attractive. Furthermore, participants were asked to complete a demographic questionnaire which enabled the researchers to determine the BMI (body mass index) for each participant. Although it was initially assumed that Jews would be more dissatisfied with their body image than Arabs, it was found that cultural background did not influence body satisfaction, but gender and age yielded significant differences in ratings. Sa’ar examines how people of a disempowered background are positioned according to liberalism and liberal dividends. Offering the term “Liberal Bargain,” Sa’ar attempts to explain, with regard to the ongoing discourse of postcolonial feminism, power differentials among women. The liberal bargain indicates the particular consciousness and symbolic whitening that “colorized” —5—

Introduction

(i.e., excluded/oppressed) people tend to adopt when they attempt to cash in on the liberal promise. The third part, the German perspective, focuses on multicultural experiences in Germany today. The contributions from researchers at the University of Hamburg are examples for different empirical approaches in the area of intercultural education. Included are studies with standardized questionnaires, studies using interviews, and a study analyzing social interactions by observation. Duarte focuses with her study on the relationship between first- and secondgeneration Portuguese, on the one hand, and Germans, on the other hand. As Portugal is one of the Mediterranean countries from which so-called “guestworkers” (Gastarbeiter) were recruited after the Second World War, the relationship between Portuguese and Germans has a special historical background. Using the acculturation model of Bourhis et al. (1997), Duarte found that the generation gap is an important indicator for differences in acculturation attitudes, particularly concerning educational and linguistic levels. Looking into the future, Portuguese–German bilingual classes may contribute to more consensual acculturation orientations. On the basis of interviews with Americans who emigrated to Germany, DuBois analyzes the reconstruction of national identity by this special group. In particular, the reconstruction of “negative” social identity which is developed in response to the host society members’ attitudes is illuminated. The multiplicity, dynamics, and ambivalence of such national identity construction show that fixed categories as minority members are not sufficient in describing the experience of immigrants and expatriates. In her observational study, Visbal looks at the interaction processes in bilingual classes. Her focus is on mistake corrections by native language teachers and their students. Obviously, correcting their own mistakes is difficult for students in bilingual classes. Support by teachers to advance self-correction could not influence self-correction; mistakes were mainly corrected by others. Empowering students in bilingual classes to self-regulate their language learning seems to be quite difficult. The study shows that dominance structures are already effective when differences occur because of different linguistic competence levels. Intercultural competence should also be an important topic of management consultancies. Relying on models of intercultural competence development by Spitzberg (1990) and Bennett (1986), Lamson analyzes interviews with consultants in German companies. Asking for attitudes towards intercultural awareness, communication, and social competence, the answers show how intercultural competence is perceived and developed by this group. Further questions concerning cultural differences in the perception of intercultural competence arose during the study but could not be answered by the empirical material.

—6—

Introduction

Altogether the contributions of this book may look as separate pieces in different countries with different situations concerning diversity problems. What joins us is the common goal to contribute to new perspectives on changing the society through changes in the educational system. We hope that through educational changes, based on the notions of diversity, multiculturalism and democracy, the next generation will be better prepared for a more peaceful living together.

References Banks, James A. 1981. Multiethnic Education: Theory and Practice. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. ——— 1997. Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society. New York: Teachers College Press. Barry, B.M. 2001. Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bennett, Milton. 1986. “A Developmental Approach to Training for Intercultural Sensitivity,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 10(2): 179–95. Bourhis, Richard Y., Lena C. Moïse, Stephane Perreault, and Sacha Senécal. 1997. “Towards an Interactive Acculturation Model: A Social Psychological Perspective,” International Journal of Psychology 32: 369–86. Castles, Francis. 1987. “Modern Welfare States: A Comparative View of Trend and Prospects,” Journal of Public Policy 7: 210–11. Davidman, Leonard and Patricia T. Davidman. 1997. Teaching with a Multicultural Perspective: A Practical Guide. New York: Longman. Eldering, Lotty. 1996. “Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education in an International Perspective,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 27: 315–30. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McAllister, Ian. 1993. “From the Prophets Deserts Come: The Struggle to Reshape Australian Political Culture,” The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 2: 265–66. Pettman, Jan. 1986 “Multiculturalism and Anti-racism in Australian Education” Working Paper no. 7. London: University of London Institute of Education, Center for Multiculturalism. Sleeter, Christine E. 1996. Multicultural Education as Social Activism. New York: State University of New York Press. Spitzberg, Brian H. 1990. Model for Intercultural Competence. New York: Springer Verlag. Woodward, Vann C. 1989. “Meaning for Multiculturalism.” In Multiculturalism and American Democracy, ed. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and Richard Zinman. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, pp. 55–68.

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Part I

GENERAL OVERVIEW

Chapter 1

STORIES OF STRUGGLE: TRANSNATIONAL ADVOCACY AND DEMOCRACY EDUCATION

Gordon Mitchell

The terms “Democracy” and “Democracy Education” have been so overused that many are embarrassed to appear to be doing the same, and would prefer an alternative terminology. Others, such as the UNESCO Institute of Education (UIE), have sought to stimulate a debate around the meaning of “Democracy Education” by means of a series of consultative workshops on the topic between the years 2001 and 2004; and have, as I shall argue in this paper, contributed to giving it sharper contours. The decision about which participants were to be invited as well as the geographical location of the meetings inevitably shaped the process. The papers presented by the participants and the recorded discussion will form the basis for the present article. As I reread the material it seemed that two concepts played a decisive role in shaping an emerging consensus about the meaning of “Democracy Education”: gender struggle and postcolonialism. The proposed models for educating teachers in the subject will be discussed and, finally, something will be said about the consultative process as a whole. A growing body of research has also begun to seek to understand such processes in categories such as “transnational civil society” or “transnational advocacy” (cf. Mundy and Murphy 2001). The terminology suggests a certain — 11 —

Gordon Mitchell

disregard for national boundaries as well as a passion for change. Such initiatives may cooperate as well as compete with one another. An important precursor is the Council of Europe’s Education for Democratic Citizenship program which resulted in the analysis of an exemplary set of case studies (Birzéa 2000; cf. Naval, Print, and Veldhuis 2002). Such publications have a history and life of their own. A selection of the presentations from the UIE process have been published as well (Medel-Añonuevo and Mitchell 2003). Some observations about the nature and relevance of this genre for educational research, teaching, and policy making will be made at the end of the study.

Participants and Places The UIE, based in Hamburg, was established in 1952 as part of postwar reconstruction in Europe to foster democracy through education. By the 1970s it had come to see itself as sharing in the worldwide mission of UNESCO, whose membership had expanded within the newly independent states of the developing world. One of its main concerns has been in the promotion of adult literacy and lifelong learning (UNESCO Institute of Education 2002). The considerable statistical overlap between the disenfranchised and poor, on the one hand, and access to literacy, on the other, had made it clear that the provision of adult literacy would be an important challenge. Furthermore, if these statistics from developing countries are examined in more detail, it is clear that there are almost twice as many women as men who are illiterate. The UIE’s very significant role in generating and inf luencing theoretical discourses surrounding adult literacy and gender has been well documented (Tuijnman and Boström 2002: 93–110). Democracy Education has always been an integral part of this work. Nevertheless, the need was seen to facilitate a process which would give it greater clarity and force. Furthermore, there had been an undertaking in 1997 at CONFITEA V, held in Hamburg, that had listed democracy as one of Lifelong Learning’s key themes for the next five years and beyond. There had already been consultations – for example, a conference on “Lifelong Learning, Higher Educations, and Active Citizenship” held at the University of the Western Cape in October 2000 – but there was nevertheless a perceived need to develop the theme further. For the new cycle of consultations, in keeping with their usual practice of ensuring a gender balance and obtaining fair regional representation, invitations were sent to selected individuals from different parts of the world. Particularly at the first meeting in Kiev in November 2001, there were generally more women than men, which in one sense is because the UIE program coordinator, Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo, had been able to build on an already existing gender network. If there had been some form of affirmative action at work it might also explain why there were somewhat more “southern” participants throughout. The UIE — 12 —

Stories of Struggle

regularly organizes workshops that bring a range of people together from NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), government departments, and universities, in other words: policy makers, practitioners, and theoreticians. Participants at the three consultations were predominantly from NGOs who were able to report directly on their work, and even the occasional university academic or civil servant had a background in one or the other form of activism. In the composition of the network, which itself changed from consultation to consultation, not only did chance play a role, but also geographical location. Thus, for example, when it took place in Hamburg in June 2002, the role of UNESCO was very evident not only because of the venue at the UIE headquarters on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary celebration, but also because of the active involvement of local staffers. In Cape Town in September 2004, South Africa’s Ministry of Education was co-host, which resulted in the involvement of senior government policy makers. It does seem that not only did participant numbers increase at each meeting (from fourteen in Kiev to over fifty in Cape Town), but also that the official status of participants rose each time. Locating meetings in different parts of the globe gives a greater range of people an opportunity to be involved and reinforces the transnational message of what was being done, but the places themselves can give particular shape to the deliberations. Kiev, 110 kilometers south of Chernobyl, capital of a formerly communist state now embracing capitalism, provided a vivid context. Extremes of wealth and poverty were much in evidence. One of the participants, the human rights activist Vsevolod Rechytskiy, provided penetrating critique on the ongoing erosion of civil liberties and the rise of romantic Ukrainian nationalism (Rechytskiy 2001). The setting in Hamburg did not present such extremes, but on the final day there was a visit to Neuengamme, a former concentration camp on the outskirts of the city. Reading the lists of the dead, seeing the factory where inmates had worked, and the neat little house and garden where the camp commander had lived with his young family, were a stark reminder of the challenge for Democracy Education. The consultation in Cape Town had a deliberate focus on Africa and a majority of participants were from the continent. South Africa became famous both for the way in which cultural difference was used to legitimize denying certain categories of persons their democratic rights, and for the way in which such policies were systematically opposed. Post-apartheid South Africa presented a combination of dazzling change side by side with extreme contradictions and unfulfilled expectations. The settings in which the meetings took place – Kiev, Hamburg, Cape Town – therefore added their own stories. The UIE brings people together for meetings, but in order to sustain and spread their impact the various contributions are normally made available in the form of collected essays. Presented Papers by no means always reflect unanimity, but they are nevertheless published by the UIE. Their publications policy is well illustrated by the activities of the Gender Network which they coordinate. — 13 —

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Gender Democracy An important illustration of this inner dialogue within UIE networks is the contribution of Sara Longwe (Longwe 1997, 1999a, 1999b). A brief look at her role serves to illustrate how a particular strand of feminist thought is highlighted and at the same time located within a wider spectrum of opinion. The Women’s Empowerment Framework for which she is well known is an analytical tool intended to transform the field of adult literacy education by clearly distinguishing between different levels. Welfare level:

Women’s material welfare relative to men. It sets out to ensure that women have equal access to food, income, and medical care.

Access level:

Women’s access to resources such as land, capital, and markets.

Conscientization level:

Women come to an understanding of their role, their worth, and their rights.

Participation/ mobilization level:

Women work together to challenge and analyze discriminatory practices.

Control level:

Women achieve equality of control whereby neither men nor women dominate the other.

The collection of essays Breaking Through: Engendering Monitoring and Evaluation in Adult Education (Medel-Añonuevo 1999b) is clearly presented as a UIE publication, but at the same time there is their customary disclaimer that they do not necessarily endorse the facts and opinions of the authors. In the introduction it is related that at the conference Longwe’s framework had set the tone for discussion, but the reader is cautioned at the same time that it is not meant to be solely definitive (Medel-Añonuevo 1999b: 3). A cursory study of the collected essays published by the UIE (e.g. Medel-Añonuevo 1999a, 1999b) well illustrates a practice of both providing a broad direction and at the same time creating space for different voices. These people are invited to conferences and have their contributions widely publicized. In one sense the UIE thereby creates a neutral platform from which new ideas may emerge. In another sense, there is a conscious exercise in choice about who is invited and what is published, which is certainly not neutral. In spite of the mixed messages this may communicate, it is in retaining such a balance that the UIE appears to see its role with regard to gender and literacy program evaluation. They have produced a series of publications consisting of articles showcasing concrete initiatives from around the world (Medel-Añonuevo 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2002).

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The priority of Gender Democracy within any understanding Democracy Education was established without controversy in Kiev and at subsequent meetings. However, the particular configuration of participants resulted in the question of gender becoming radically multifaceted and serving as a forthright challenge to staid and accepted definitions of Democracy Education. Courses on sexuality and reproductive health are not usually what one would expect to find under the umbrella of Democracy Education. Sara Nasserzadeh describes her work in a Women’s Health project in Iran, emphasizing consistently that “democracy begins from the most private and intimate relations of society” (Nasserzadeh 2002). In a situation where there is severely limited knowledge of sexuality and reproductive health, education which breaks the silence becomes a powerful way of challenging what she terms “sexual injustice.” Instead of suffering in isolation, women together obtain the knowledge resources necessary to make decisions about what directly affect their lives. Sexuality is a taboo subject and is not taught in schools or made available to the general public. In her survey of 300 female university students, Nasserzadeh found not only that many lack basic knowledge about, for example, contraception but also that there are cultural norms which view it as the woman’s duty to sexually satisfy her husband, even during menstruation. Education on such topics as legal rights and contraception is therefore, in her opinion, also education in democracy. An introduction to the world of gay rights activists in the United States opens up further horizons. Bob Hill’s paper (Hill 2003) takes up the issue of sexual minorities which include lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender, intersexuals, and self-identified queer individuals (under the acronym LGBTIQ). He builds upon the logic of minority politics in arguing that state-sanctioned hegemony of heterosexism results in “silencing, invisibility, marginalization, and violence” (ibid.: 107), in effect a policy of “forced assimilation” (ibid.: 128). Learning and education are central to the struggle for the rights of these citizens. “Radical democracy” requires that sexual minorities claim the right to construct their own knowledge and history, affirming what he calls “fugitive knowledge.” Community centers can provide a safe haven for the disenfranchised, sites of learning and resistance. He offers examples of “grassroots democratic efforts.” Stories of discrimination and activism are central to the curriculum. Education programs are first and foremost for self-knowledge and self-empowerment, while education of others lies in making public opinion aware of these stories. This opens the way for pedagogies which are “radically democratic, unsettling and unsettled, dynamic and inclusive” (ibid.: 131). Such perspectives certainly do unsettle a number of assumptions on more conventional Democracy Education. Furthermore, the phenomenon of transsexuality and intersexuality blurs the boundaries of what constitutes male, female, gay, or lesbian, further undermining notions of citizenship rooted in heterosexism and gender stereotypes. The need for reciprocal learning is stressed: for example, gay men are — 15 —

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not only victims but, in relation to women and groups such as transsexuals, they also benefit from the hegemony of maleness. Debates between black feminists and white feminists draw further attention to the burdened and ambiguous nature of human identifications. A pedagogy of critical social analysis is one that is found in different ways in all the presentations, most of which are set in specific regional and historical contexts. Several of these are introduced briefly in the next section.

The Postcolonial Metaphor Linguistic heterogeneity in a society is often viewed as a negative factor in relation to democracy. Differences are seen to be divisive. In a provocative essay (Silué 2003), Sassongo Silué of Côte d’Ivoire surveys the political situation across the African continent, and is able to show examples of diverse societies with high levels of democratic participation, and unilingual societies which are undemocratic. At the same time, he recognizes that without the possibility of communication, democratic activity is truncated. Competing forces for control over social, economic, and political decisionmaking are bound to interact, and interaction means communication. Colonialism has left a dual linguistic legacy: European languages – English, French, or Portuguese – as the languages of public political life and commerce; and at the same time an overemphasis on the differences between local languages resulting from compartmentalized academic study during the early colonial period. Furthermore, lack of literacy skills excludes many adults from decisionmaking, and, unfortunately, current programs of instruction in a European language are not proving successful. The solution proposed is adult literacy programs in the local languages, together with a sustained attempt at standardizing linguistically related African languages along the lines suggested by the Centre for Advanced Study of African Societies (ibid.: 59–60). The hegemony of the language proficiency of cultural elites would thus be challenged. In this way, the business of language construction and language learning become crucial aspects of building a democratic culture. Clearly, language empowerment is integral to Democracy Education. John Salong reported on the development of an adult education program for Vanuatu in the South Pacific (Salong and Lovegrove 2002). It has a resident population of 78,000 people living on eighty-two islands. Since its declaration of independence in 1980, there has been a degree of instability in its government. Although it is a formal democracy, there is, according to the authors, “a crisis in governance, leadership and decision making” (ibid.: 3). Salong and Lovegrove’s handb--ook has a great deal of material on the meaning of democracy and its institutions, and places emphasis on participatory information sharing and decision making in small groups called “learning circles.” Module 2, “Brief History of Governance in Vanuatu,” begins with a survey of the precolonial — 16 —

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period. In those days, meetings known as nasaras were an occasion for participants, all seated in a circle, to speak and to be heard. Although usually reserved for men, there were villages where women participated as well. The task of the gathering was to ensure the well-being of the community by means of participatory processes in which restorative justice and reconciliation were fundamental. The handbook poses the question as to what strengths and weaknesses the indigenous model has, and asks whether there are lessons to be learned by contemporary society. This is followed by a description of the period under French and British rule. A cartoon of a European wearing knee-high boots stepping onto the beach with musket in hand and determined visage dominates the page. Facing him, standing in front of her reed hut, is a lightly clothed mother trying to comfort two fearful children. The new colonial masters – the civil servants, the plantation owners, and the missionaries of various denominations – were now the ones who made decisions, and not the nasaras! Even though it has been a centralized democracy since the independence of Vanatu, there is still an absence of “grassroots governance”; and although there may be village meetings, national issues are not dealt with there. The “learning circles” are designed to change all that. The cartoon on the front cover of the handbook captures the atmosphere of the program. Under the shade of palm trees a group of eight people sit on a grass mat facing each other; half are men and half are women. They are relaxed and smiling. A short distance away is a small mat piled with objects: French and British flags as well as crucifixes of different shapes and sizes. One of the participants remarks: “It’s great we can discuss openly and leave aside our differences.” The colonial period is used as a way of describing what should not happen in a democracy, which is also evident in Dylan Vernon’s account of the campaign in the 1990s for greater democracy in Belize (Vernon 2003). Having gained independence from Britain in 1981, the “identity and political culture of the colonizers” had been retained (ibid.: 72). Democracy made little difference to people’s lives because politicians were not held accountable. In spite of the fact that a third of the population lived under conditions of extreme poverty, there was very little popular participation. The educational system was failing to create “a citizenry and an electorate that were aware of their rights, that understood the political system, and that could make informed decisions on important issues in the society” (ibid.: 74–75). A civil society organization, the Society for the Promotion of Education and Research (SPEAR), initiated “a people-led process of democratic and constitutional reform” (ibid.: 71). Their educational methods were hardly conventional. In addition to extensive use of public media, other means of popular communication also proved highly effective. In a street theater project “Mr Politician,” actors from all the world looking and behaving like politicians (black suits, white shirts, sunglasses) would step out of luxury cars and speak to people on the market or at bus stops. The laughter that followed, once it had dawned on the audience, from the — 17 —

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politicians’ increasingly exaggerated promises and extraordinary behavior, was a foundational democratic expression. Humor as critique is also extensively used in a popular educational video produced by SPEAR: A Closer Look: Democracy in Evolution. Here, the villains who try to dissuade people engaged in local collective action are often laughably exaggerated English gentlemen. In these ways the campaign, which proved very influential in that small country – Belize has a population of 274,000 – demonstrated that politics is not the exclusive domain of political parties or politicians (ibid.: 80). It was “a process of national democratic education” (ibid.: 75). The report on the subject of Democracy Education in Malaysia describes the political system there as a “pseudo democracy,” where a powerful state “disallows dissent,” and the economic system is dominated by “crony capitalism” in which corruption is rife and social inequalities are maintained (Joseph 2001: 1). State-run institutions such as schools do little to promote democracy. It is against this background that the work of NGOs amongst “grassroots communities like indigenous peoples and the urban poor” is set (ibid.: 1). Community Communication Center, for example, works with a three-stage Democracy Education model of “feel,” “understand,” “act,” which enables people “to experience democracy in the smallest unit possible within their community” (ibid.: 2). By means of a participatory methodology, drawing on the work of Paolo Freire (1972), people are empowered to take control of their own lives. Although pride in indigenous cultures is fostered, this does not mean limiting democracy to a “traditional leadership that does not allow democracy to flourish” (Joseph 2001: 2). The role of the NGO is to facilitate such processes. “Awareness building” is the development of a “common understanding of the issues affecting the community,” and in this way they “democratize information.” Joint action enables them to take charge of their lives and is the next step in the democratic process. For example, it is “demanding for community land titles for the indigenous village” (ibid.: 3). Networking and solidarity with neighboring communities, where one community visits the other in a “people-to-people” exchange, enables them “to feel a sense of strength as a larger community” (ibid.: 4). Democracy Education means effective facilitation, but it is essentially what people themselves do. The Pan Valley Trust works with grassroots immigrant activist organizations in California’s Central Valley in order to build a political voice with a particular focus on women (Nateras 2003). Its own particular contribution is to bring together groups of South Asian, Indigenous Mexican, and Latino women. Solidarity is thus built between minority identities. For example, a calendar is produced honoring their diverse cultural backgrounds as well as their shared interests. At the same time, they develop skills that will enable them to operate effectively and achieve democratic rights in this new environment. Cultural exchange thus becomes a tool for building a civic voice. Throughout, the emphasis is on a Democracy Education, which fosters self-assertiveness and provides knowledge and skills for claiming one’s rights. — 18 —

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At the meeting in Cape Town in September 2004, it was arranged that the University of the Western Cape’s Inaugural Nyerere Lecture on Lifelong Learning would be delivered by Naledi Pandor, the South African Minister of Education (Pandor 2004). It was an opportunity for her to showcase the seminal contribution of Julius Nyerere’s call for a communal approach to education (ujamaa), particularly in his famous essay “Education for Self Reliance” (Nyerere 1968), where he questions the objectives and methods of colonial education. Students are to become self-confident and cooperative, with critical enquiring minds. Having outlined the approach, Pandor then addresses a widespread assumption that Nyerere’s experiment in African Socialism was a dismal failure, and instead pays tribute to his influence on policy makers in South Africa. “In the 1990s we had to confront similar problems to those that Nyerere faced in Tanzania in the 1960s. We had to reconstruct our education system to eradicate racism” (Pandor 2004: 8). In her conclusion, she sees the task of educators as being that of producing persons “wise to the global dimensions of neocolonialism, wise to the challenge of creating a strategically unified Africa, … wise to building African knowledge …” (ibid.: 11). Because of her role, both as a government minister and as a former activist, Pandor has no difficulty with the language of struggle or with emphasizing the unfinished nature of the task. Those involved in the training of teachers often seek to do the same, in that they need to prepare them to teach the national curriculum as well as to undermine it.

Teacher Education The Moralia Research Group at the Distral University in Bogota paints a grim picture of circumstances in Colombia (Ruiz et al. 2003). In an instant, violence and threats of violence, both criminal and political, deny people their rights. The question of how to break such a pattern in society is clearly of fundamental importance. The project sought to develop an approach that would be theoretically consistent and practically implementable. Standard approaches to moral education since the 1960s have emphasized the need to create educational contexts in which learners can clarify and develop their own positions. The researchers now argue that such an emphasis on cognitive processes is insufficient and ought to be supplemented. Morality needs a narrative, and education cannot avoid giving priority to certain values. Because their focus is teacher education, an important step was to investigate perceptions held by both students and lecturers. Cross-perceptions, it turned out, were very negative, with each sector doubting the credibility of the other to teach anything about values. A widespread recognition of the need to start talking again about democracy and human rights has resulted in the development of a teacher education program where values can be clarified, debated, and owned. — 19 —

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If the role of pedagogical method is crucial for Democracy Education, then it is equally a supreme irony for democracy to be taught in ways which subvert its very nature. “The Education for Democracy in the Ukraine Project” is therefore insistent that teacher education holds the key to improved practice (Poznyak 2003). With European Commission and United States sponsorship, and working closely with the Ukrainian Education Ministry, they have developed teacher training and in-service training that both propagate and subvert the curriculum. Their pedagogic principles, they argue, are derived from human rights. Thus, in the training there is to be “dignity and security,” “free participation,” “access to information,” and so on. Civics is nothing new in the Ukraine and, within the Soviet Union, state ideology had been unashamedly propagated in schools. Instead of being communist, the Ukraine is now democratic and independent. Within the new syllabus, an association is made between democratic and newfound national ideals. The project, with its emphasis on critical pedagogy, therefore has a vital role in ensuring that the ideals of democracy retain their human rights emphasis and subversive agenda.

Some Observations Although the participants in the UIE Democracy Education network were from all over the world, they shared a clearly delineated common culture (cf. Schumacher 2003: 98–101). In the presentations there is a shared language in which the quality of Democracy Education is expressed in adjectives such as “grassroots,” “participatory” or “empowering.” The founders sometimes mentioned and frequently copied are figures such as Freire or Nyerere. The storyline is easily traced: good and evil are identifiable, and although the opposition is awesome, it is not invincible. The question of Democracy Education is thus approached by means of stories: programs are outlined with scientific fairness, but also with the passion of those who believe in what they are doing. Far from being country-specific case studies, they present different facets of struggles for democracy, often overlapping and even competing for space with each other. Topics that normally come to mind in association with Democracy Education would be a study of political systems, voting practice, and so on. What the UIE’s selection of participants in effect achieves is to draw attention, in a vivid and nuanced way, to the unfinished task. Two metaphors, gender democracy and postcolonialism (along with the academic fields of Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies), offer critical tools for analyzing current practices of democracy and citizenship education, and giving them a radically sharper edge. As stories of “empowerment,” it might be argued, they have little appeal beyond their own lobby, providing affirmation to voices from the margins, offering an opportunity to draw strength from each other. If, however, there is also an educational task that goes beyond this audience, but — 20 —

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which still draws responsibly on these traditions of empowerment, there are several possibilities which are presented. One is some form of intercultural education: as long as people are disempowered because of language, customs, religion, physical appearance, gender, or their sexual orientation, then intercultural educational programs for all parties can hold out some hope of mutual learning. The intention then is that those in privileged cultures in particular, would come to understand and perhaps appreciate the experience of those struggles. A second option or perhaps a supplement is the pedagogy of memory, or more specifically the notion of “borrowed memory.” In societies such as Germany, which have sought to come to terms with “memory” from the point of view of the perpetrators, the role of stories of the victims has been fundamental in facilitating a cognitive as well as an affective understanding. Only very recently, however, has there been research on how migrant pupils in German schools relate to the history of the Nazi period (see Georgi 2003). What is fascinating is the range of ways in which minority pupils, in their appropriation of the narrative, identify with both victims and perpetrators in order to understand their own position in society. A third possibility is to value and build upon the narrative diversity that is made available by a case study approach similar to the one outlined in this essay. Because of cross-cutting identifications of class, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, there is opportunity for almost everyone to have themselves at some point considered as victims or as perpetrators, as minorities or as majorities. Gender and postcolonial struggles offer unsettling narratives in which to ground principles of human rights. Transnational storytelling in turn is an important corrective to nation-based approaches to citizenship and Democracy Education, which increasingly are flirting with notions of “national sentiment” (White 1997), and serves as a counternarrative to the homogenizing national narratives. As a curricular exercise that consciously transcends the nation state, the process set in motion by the UIE is similar to a parallel initiative under the auspices of the Council of Europe (Birzéa 2000). Nevertheless, by including case material from projects often not understood as part of Democracy Education, the UIE manages to create a particular focus on empowerment. Such models, in many cases from societies in transition or from small, localized projects, are very specific and contextual, and at the same time have the capacity to universalize themselves.

References Birzéa, César. 2000. Education for Democratic Citizenship. A Lifelong Learning Perspective. Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Co-operation. Freire, Paulo. 1972. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books. — 21 —

Gordon Mitchell Georgi, Viola. 2003. Entliehene Erinnerung. Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Hill, Robert. 2003. “Turning a Gay Gaze on Citizenship, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Contesting/ed Terrain.” In Citizenship, Democracy, and Lifelong Learning, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo and Gordon Mitchell. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 99–139. Joseph, Jerald. 2001. “Adult Education for Democracy amongst Grassroots Community.” Paper Presented at the workshop Strengthening Democracy and Social Integration through Lifelong Learning in Kiev, November 28–30, 2001. Longwe, Sara. 1997. “Education for Women’s Empowerment or Schooling for Women’s Subordination.” In Negotiating and Creating Spaces of Power: Women’s Educational Practices amidst Crisis ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 17–24. ——— 1999a. “Monitoring and Evaluating Women’s Educational Programs: Concepts and Methodology Issues.” In Breaking Through: Engendering Monitoring and Evaluation in Adult Education, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 5–30. ——— 1999b. “Two Different Voices on Education for Women’s Empowerment.” In Learning Gender Justice through Women’s Discourses, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 7–20. Medel-Añonuevo, Carolyn (ed.). 1996. Women Reading the World. Policies and Practices of Literacy in Asia. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education. ——— (ed.). 1999a. Learning Gender Justice through Women’s Discourses. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education. ——— 1999b. Breaking Through: Engendering Monitoring and Evaluation in Adult Education. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education. ——— 2002. “Harvesting Lessons and Showcasing Good Practices in HIV Preventive Education.” In Addressing Gender Relations in HIV Preventive Education, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 39–43. Medel-Añonuevo, Carolyn, and Gordon Mitchell (eds.). 2003. Citizenship, Democracy, and Lifelong Learning. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education. Mundy, Karen and Lynn Murphy. 2001. “Transnational Advocacy, Global Civil Society? Emerging Evidence from the Field of Education,” Comparative Education Review 45(1): 85–126. Nasserzadeh, Sara. 2002. “Reproductive Health Education: A Pathway from Knowledge to Practice.” Paper presented at the UIE seminar on Strengthening Democracy and Critical Citizenship through Lifelong Learning in Hamburg, June 2002. Nateras, Myrna. 2003. “Fostering Cross-cultural Relations to Promote Civic Participation.” In Citizenship, Democracy, and Lifelong Learning, ed. Carolyn MedelAñonuevo and Gordon Mitchell. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 141–51. Naval, Concepcion, Murray Print, and Ruud Veldhuis. 2002. “Education for Democratic Citizenship in the New Europe: Context and Reform,” European Journal of Education 37(2): 107–27. Nyerere, Julius. 1968. Freedom and Socialism. A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965–1967. Dar-es-Salaam: Oxford University Press.

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Stories of Struggle Pandor, Naledi. 2004. Inaugural Nyerere Lecture on Lifelong Learning by the Minister of Education. Naledi Pandor, MP. Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, September 9, 2004. Poznyak, Svetlana. 2003. “Training Teachers for Citizenship Education.” In Citizenship, Democracy, and Lifelong Learning, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo and Gordon Mitchell. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 175–85. Rechytskiy, Vsevolod. 2001. International Convention on Protection of Intellectual Freedom. A Draft. Kharkiv: Kharkiv Group for Human Rights Protection. Ruiz, Alexander, Marieta Quintero, Bibiana Restrepo, and William Sánchez. 2003. “Moral Education in Columbia.” In Citizenship, Democracy, and Lifelong Learning, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo and Gordon Mitchell. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 85–97. Salong, John and Bernie Lovegrove. 2002. Participation in Decision Making: A Learning Circle on Democracy and Citizens’ Participation in Governance in Vanuatu. Australia: Asia South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education. Schumacher, Julia. 2003. Wie interkulturell sind internationale Tagungen? Eine Untersuchung subjektiver Sichtweisen am Beispiel einer Tagung des UNESCO-Instituts für Pädagogik. Hamburg: Universität Hamburg. Silué, Sassongo. 2003. “The Role of National Languages in Promoting Democracy in Africa.” In Citizenship, Democracy, and Lifelong Learning, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo and Gordon Mitchell. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 43–69. Tuijnman, Albert C. and Ann-Kristin Boström. 2002. “Changing Notions of Lifelong Education and Lifelong Learning,” International Review of Education 48(1–2): 93–110. UNESCO Institute of Education. 2002. Towards an Open Learning World: 50 Years. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education. Vernon, Dylan. 2003. “Creating an Environment for Democracy through Adult Education. Some Lessons from Belize.” In Citizenship, Democracy, and Lifelong Learning, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo and Gordon Mitchell. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute of Education, pp. 71–83. White, John. 1997. “National Myths, Democracy and Education.” In Education, Autonomy and Democratic Citizenship, ed. David Bridges. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 15–22.

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Chapter 2

WHAT’S GOING ON BETWEEN MEMBERS OF MAJORITIES? CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Rosemarie Mielke

Introduction Categorizing people and judging them according to the main characteristics of the group to which they belong is a very fast process. Most of the time, people are unaware of the judgments implicit in their behavior toward other people. The behavior is based on an intuitive process which stays unconscious as long as a person does not explicitly reflect upon it. According to social psychological intergroup theories the characteristics of the relationship between groups and the belonging to one group are strong determinants for the maintenance of judgments in favor of one’s own group members and to the disadvantage of outgroup members. Even without hostility and hatred, which may explicitly strengthen the mutual rejection, the automatic processes based in the characteristics of the intergroup structure are fundamental for prejudice and discrimination. Social psychological intergroup theories such as social identity (Tajfel and Turner 1979) and self-categorization theory (Turner et al. 1987) are able to explain the underlying mechanisms which govern the processes between groups. The model of dual attitudes (Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler 2000) and the model of impulsive and reflective determinants of social behavior (Strack — 25 —

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and Deutsch 2004) shed some more light on the processes occurring inside the individual. Intercultural learning programs are based directly or indirectly on intergroup theories and social identity models. In this chapter, some newer social psychological knowledge is summarized which may add to our understanding of processes, that go on in the minds of perpetrators and victims of prejudice and discrimination.

Categorization: Roots and Consequences of Distinguishing between “We” and “They” Human history is full of conflicts between groups. The most terrible atrocities committed by humans have often not been the acts of criminals or madmen but of ordinary, loyal citizens acting in the presumed interests of their group against another group. Throughout time, human beings have had a tendency to form groups. Living together in groups turned out to have many advantages for their daily lives. Through the specialization of skills and division of labor among various groups in society, people found that they could live longer, happier, and more fulfilling lives. From an evolutionary perspective, it is argued that living together in groups provides many survival benefits (Buss 1995). Obviously, the benefits of forming groups are tremendous for the individuals who belong to one. But if you have a group of people belonging together there are always people who do not belong to this group. People inside a group tend to form closer ties to other members, and they tend to be suspicious of and reject those who do not belong to their own group. The result is that group members favor their own group over other groups to which they do not belong. These preferences may have adaptive utility from an evolutionary and practical point of view, but at the same time it is the basis for feeling negatively about other groups and their members (prejudice) and believing that certain characteristics are associated with other groups (stereotyping). When outgroup members are perceived to violate the ingroup’s welfare or values, these ingroup preferences may turn into more severe negative behavior towards the outgroup, such as intergroup hostility and violence.

Negative Feelings and Beliefs Root in Normal Psychological Processes In the last twenty-five years, social psychological intergroup theories, developed in the European tradition of social identity (Tajfel and Turner 1979) and selfcategorization theory (Turner et al. 1987), were very successful (for a critical evaluation see Abrams and Hogg 2004) in shedding some light on the underlying processes of discrimination, hostility toward foreigners, and also of reactions to intergroup differences such as tolerance (Mummendey and Wenzel — 26 —

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1999). Many trainings for reducing prejudice and educating children for a more peaceful coexistence across group boundaries refer to the insights of this research (see for a recent example Suleiman 2004). Even the contact hypothesis developed and already well elaborated by Allport (1954) in the 1950s could be refined into a process model by Pettigrew (1998) using the explanatory power of self-categorization theory. People inherently categorize others, typically in ways that delineate one’s own group from other groups (Tajfel and Turner 1979). The mere categorization of people into ingroups and outgroups, even on the basis of arbitrary assignment, is sufficient to initiate an overall evaluative bias in which people categorized as members of one’s own group are evaluated more favourable than are those perceived as members of another group (Rabbie and Horowitz 1969; Tajfel 1970). Social categorization fundamentally influences how people process information about others: actual differences between members of the same category tend to be minimized whereas differences between groups tend to be exaggerated (Abrams 1985); people retain more information in a more detailed fashion for ingroup members than for outgroup members (Park and Rothbart 1982) and remember less positive information about outgroup members (Howard and Rothbart 1980). Social categorization influences affective reactions: Categorization in terms of group membership rather than individual identity evokes greater feelings of fear and lower levels of trust in interactions with others (Insko et al. 2001).

The Readiness to Categorize is Dependent on One’s World View An important extension of the social categorization approach in the tradition of Tajfel and Turner (1979) was developed by John Duckitt (2001). He combined the personality approach to prejudice and stereotype of Bob Altemeyer’s (1981) version of Adorno’s (Adorno et al. 1950) authoritarion personality and Pratto et al.’s social dominance orientation (Pratto et al. 1994) with socialization models and came up with a model with which he also could include some explanations for outgroup derogation. He was able to support his model with a couple of studies in North America, New Zealand, and South Africa. Although it is based on personality constructs, he claims that his model is able to provide some explanations on ideological or social attitudes rather than only on personality trait dimensions. The basis of the model is the idea that the readiness to categorize in particular ways is a result of the socialization process. Social world views and ideological beliefs are held by individuals but are also socially shared beliefs, or social representations (Moscovici 1983). World views ref lect the social environment, which is inevitably a shared environment. Particular social world views therefore tend to characterize particular collectives, cultures, or social — 27 —

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groupings. D’Andrade (1992) and Strauss (1992) have proposed a cultural analysis of motives. They assume that motivational goals are activated or made salient for individuals by schema-driven perceptions or interpretations of reality. Such schemas will typically have been made highly accessible for individuals through cultural socialization. Duckitt (2001) proposes a model with two kinds of opposing motivational goals. He perceives the authoritarian-conservatism dimension (measured by the right-wing-authoritarianism scale, Altemeyer 1981) as the expression of the motivational goals of social control, security, and conformity versus autonomy and individual freedom. The goalschema of social control, security, and conformity is developed when the social world is perceived as dangerous, unpredictable, and threatening, meaning when the social schema of threat is prevalent. This motivational goal would be expressed in the collectivistic sociocultural values of conformity, traditionalism and in authoritarian social attitudes. The opposite goalschema of personal autonomy may be predominantly developed when the social world is perceived as safe, stable, and secure, meaning the social schema of security is prevalent. The related world view is characterized by individualistic sociocultural values and nonauthoritarian social beliefs and attitudes. The second dimension is derived from the social dominance theory of Pratto et al. (1994). Duckitt (2001) assumes that the social dominance construct includes the motivational goals of superiority, power and dominance versus an altruistic social concern. The goalschema of seeking power, superiority, and dominance over others is developed when the social world is perceived as a “competitive jungle characterized by a ruthless, amoral struggle for resources and power in which might is right, and winning everything” (ibid.: 51). This goal schema might be expressed in sociocultural values of power, dominance, and hierarchy and in a social belief of inequality and a desire that one’s own group be superior and dominate others. The opposite goal schema of helping and valuing others and sharing with them as equals might be developed when the social world is perceived as one of cooperative harmony in which people care for, help, and share with others. The predominant values are those of egalitarianism and humanitarianism.

The Nature of Prejudices: Intuitive and Reasoned Judgments Social psychological theories try to explain human behavior as a function of social conditions. One common root of these explanations is Kurt Lewin’s field theory (1939). According to his understanding of social conditions, behavior is a function of the psychological environment, which consists of the person and the environment. So the famous equation B = f (P, E) (behavior is a function of person and environment) might be changed to Bt = f (St) (behavior at a specific time is a function of the situation at a specific time) when we refer to a specific — 28 —

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point in time. Obviously he considered that it is not dependent on the person alone which will determine the behavior he or she will perform. On the other hand, the behavior of a person is not totally a function of the situation and far less of a single stimulus. What behavior we show is dependent on the situation as situational cues trigger cognitive concepts like stereotypes and schemata, which we use to interpret and make sense out of the situation. At the same time, abilities and motives are activated. The answer to the question of how we may ensure that the kind of behavior activated will be a behavior which does not lead to a conflict between persons or groups is dependent on the theoretical explanations of how people perceive, interpret, and judge persons and situations and how their behavior is activated. If we examine these processes more closely, we may be interested in the question of to what extent the person her– or himself is explicitly involved in the way she or he perceives and judges situations or individuals and to what extent he or she might activate his or her behavior by intention. Knowing more about these processes might, for example, prevent attributing evil intent to persons who react on the basis of her or his first impression. Some new answers to the question regarding the basis on which we judge and react might be given by recent models in social psychology which reflect the automatic versus the controlled activation of stereotypes and behavior. With his social intuitionist model of moral judgment, Jonathan Haidt (2001) opposes the widespread belief that moral judgment is the result of moral reasoning. The model of dual attitudes of Wilson and his colleagues (2000) adds to the idea that two kinds of attitudes might exist in parallel systems. An even more comprehensive view is involved in the model of Strack and Deutsch (2004), which integrates several dual process theories (Chaiken and Trope 1999) of the last thirty years and describes reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior.

Prejudice as Intuitive Judgments The central claim of the social intutionist model (Haidt 2001) is that moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions and is followed by slow, ex post facto moral reasoning. Intuitions as well as reasoning are both forms of cognitions. The distinction between these two kinds of cognition has a long history in philosophy and psychology. The most important difference between intuition and reasoning is that “intuition occurs quickly, effortlessly, and automatically, such that the outcome but not the process is accessible to consciousness, whereas reasoning occurs more slowly, requires some effort, and involves at least some steps that are accessible to consciousness” (ibid.: 818). In accordance with connectionist models of the cognitive structure, Haidt (2001) includes into his model the knowledge that the brain tunes up slowly but is then able to evaluate complex situations quickly (Rumelhart et al. 1986; — 29 —

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Anderson 1993). Reasoning might change moral intuition, as we are able to think about our intuitive judgments toward moral problems. But Haidt (2001) assumes that moral intuitions are more often influenced by moral intuitions, moral judgments, and moral reasoning of other persons. He recommends treating moral judgment style as an aspect of culture and trying to create a culture that fosters a more balanced, ref lective, and fair-minded style of judgment. Years of implicit learning tunes up intuitions about justice, rights, and fairness, leading to an automatic tendency to look at moral problems. Attempts to directly teach thinking and reasoning, e.g. in a classroom setting generally have little effect on moral judgment.

Prejudice as Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Most of the time we judge and behave according to our intuitions, which means that we judge and act according to our well-learned (implicit) attitudes (Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler 2000; Haidt 2001). Stereotyping and prejudice can exist on an implicit, automatic level and on an explicit controlled level. “People simultaneously have implicit and explicit attitudes toward members of outgroups” (Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler 2000: 110). We are able to learn to avoid intuitive judgments and related behavior, but we only do it when we are motivated or when we explicitly activate the new learned attitudes. That means that when we have enough cognitive capacity left and when we are not engaged in another cognitive activity, we judge and behave on the basis of what we have learned by insight. Intergroup encounters often succeed in changing explicit attitudes but most of the time they do not touch implicit attitudes. Explicit attitudes may be changed, while implicit attitudes remain untouched. If people frequently “practice” the new attitude, if they think about it, discuss it with other people and try out how to behave in accordance with this new acquired attitude, the attitude may become habitual. Insofar as it is habitual, it replaces the implicit attitude, “Just as, with a great deal of practice, an older automatic motor response may be replaced with a new one” (Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler 2000: 121). In contrasting their dual attitude model with the position of Bargh (1999), Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler (2000) point out that they agree that people cannot prevent the influence of implicit attitudes on responses they are unable to control or which they do not monitor. Nonetheless, they assume that people can form explicit attitudes that are retrieved from memory and acted on under some conditions. People have the ability to simultaneously have explicit attitudes that at least influence some behaviors. Implicit attitudes remain, however, and continue to influence implicit responses. The most similar approach to the model of dual attitudes is Gaertner and Dovidio’s research on aversive racism (Gaertner and Dovidio 1986; Dovidio et al. — 30 —

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1997; Dovidio and Gaertner 2004). Aversive racists are characterized as people who consciously endorse egalitarian values, but have negative feelings which are typically excluded from awareness (Gaertner and Dovidio 1986). People learn to openly endorse nonprejudiced beliefs because principles of fairness, justice, and equity are universal and profoundly shape human functioning and social life (Kelman 2001). However, they maintain negative feelings which often are expressed in subtle, indirect, and rationalized ways.

Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Prejudice The ref lective–impulsive model proposed by Strack and Deutsch (2004) integrates many features of prevailing dual process models. It extends previous models by integrating motivational components. The two postulated systems are thought to be distinct although they interact in specific ways. The impulsive system is always active, whereas the reflective system might be additionally “switched on.” The impulsive system works on the basis of associative links and does not require much mental capacity. The reflective system is much more sensitive to disruptions and works on the basis of semantic relations, which allows the system to evaluate information according to a true–false decision. Behavioral schemata are activated by the impulsive system; the reflective system might influence the activation process indirectly. The decision to behave in a certain manner might be based on expectations and values and can be a reflective one. The behavioral decision might or might not release a behavioral schema. Once the schema is released, it will be realized through a process of activation spreading in the impulsive system. There might be a delay between the behavioral decision and the behavior. The realization of the behavior is dependent on an intention which bridges the gap between the decision and the behavior. Referring to the implicit/explicit distinction of Wilson et al.’s (2000) model of dual attitudes, Strack and Deutsch (2004) emphasize that they prefer to use the terms explicit versus implicit for psychological processes and not for mental contents. Consequently, their understanding of the role of implicitness and explicitness for prejudice and stereotypes is somewhat different. They define a stereotypical belief as an evaluative decision that follows the reflection on what is good and bad. Thus, the belief is the result of an explicit process which takes place in the reflective system. At the same time, they talk about evaluative associations to describe links between concepts and evaluative responses in the impulsive system – this is meant when we refer to stereotypical associations. There are automatic components of stereotypes or implicit processes involved when forming an impression about another person (as an individual or as a representative of a group) but the stereotypical belief is the evaluative decision about that person which is the result of an explicit process which takes place in — 31 —

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the reflective system. From their perspective, the psychological status of implicit and explicit measures such as the implicit association test (IAT) (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998; Fazio and Olson 2003) is quite clear: the measures are defined by the cognitive operations which they capture. With explicit measures one obtains information about people’s knowledge or beliefs, and implicit measures deliver information about the associative structure. They claim that the ref lective–impulsive model could help to understand how behavior might be inf luenced by explicit and implicit mechanisms. The cognitive and motivational structure underlying such influences might be much better clarified by this model, as it describes the nature of interconnections between conceptual and behavioral mental representations.

Social Identity: A Closer Look at the Members of Minority Groups Another line of social psychological research in the last twenty years centered around the special situation of individuals who belong to disadvantaged groups. Many classical theories on the effects of prejudice and discrimination assumed that experiencing discrimination and prejudice would inevitably lead to injuries of the personality and especially the victim’s self-esteem. A vast amount of empirical research seemed to support the opposite: Members of stigmatized groups do not differ in their global self-esteem. Contemporary theory and research now emphasize that there is a great variability in targets’ responses to prejudice and discrimination. There is empirical evidence for both: vulnerability and resilience. Now the focus lies in seeking to identify factors that differentiate these responses.

Attributing Negative Events to Discrimination In the late 1980s, contradicting theories concerning the relationship between self-esteem and the attribution of negative events to discrimination were developed. Some theories predicted that attributing rejection, poor evaluation, or bad test grades to discrimination had a positive effect on the subjects of the studies, because negative outcomes or failures could not touch their self-esteem (Crocker and Major 1989). Crocker and Major (1989) reviewed more than twenty years of empirical research and concluded that “members of stigmatized groups often have levels of global self-esteem as high or higher than members of nonstigmatized groups” (Major, Quinton, and McCoy 2002: 253–54). In their attempt to explain this paradox they made the counterintuitive argument that membership in a stigmatized group might help to protect self-esteem from prejudice and — 32 —

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discrimination. They offered three different cognitive processes which might be responsible for this effect: (1) as a member of a stigmatized group, one has the chance to attribute negative feedback to the prejudiced attitudes of others toward one’s group rather than to one’s own deservingness; (2) outcomes may be selectively compared with members of one’s group rather than with members of more advantaged groups; (3) attributes in which their group perform poorly are devaluated and attributes in which their own group excels are highly valued. However, these explanations turned out to be far too simple. Perceiving and attributing outcomes to discrimination are dependent on personal, situational, and structural factors. Certainly, no one group of factors alone is able to explain the responses, since personal factors interact in complex ways with situational and structural factors. Individuals who have a high ingroup identification, for example, are more likely to perceive themselves and their group as being victims of discrimination. But group identification only makes a difference when situational cues to prejudice are ambiguous. When those cues are absent or overt, low- and high-identified persons do not differ in attributing negative outcomes to discrimination. There is empirical evidence that the position of one’s group in the social structure influences the perception of discrimination. Among members of stigmatized groups, the endorsement of the ideology of individual mobility is associated with a decreased tendency to attribute rejection to discrimination. Among high-status groups, endorsement of the same ideology is associated with an increased tendency to attribute rejection by a lower-status outgroup to discrimination. That means that stigmatized groups refrain from attributing rejection to discrimination when they have hope of joining the higher-status group. Members of higher-status groups feel discriminated against by lower-status groups when they are rejected because they support the ideology of mobility.

Psychic Consequences of Perceiving the Self as a Target of Discrimination We have seen that attributing negative events to discrimination, instead of to the self, is dependent on several factors and is not always the most convenient strategy for dealing with negative feedback. In their review of psychological research on attributions to discrimination, Major et al. (2002) came to the conclusion that there appeared to be little support for Crocker and Major’s (1989) speculation that people who perceive themselves as victims of discrimination might be able to protect their self-esteem to a great extent by attributing negative outcomes to their disadvantaged status. They had to admit that the “preponderance of correlational evidence indicates that members of stigmatized or lower-status groups who generally perceive themselves or their group as targets of discrimination have lower self-esteem and poorer well-being than those who do not” (Major, Quinton, and McCoy 2002: 300). — 33 —

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The question remains as to whether attributions to discrimination are adaptive or maladaptive for self-esteem. Does this kind of attribution help to support self-esteem or has it detrimental effects on the self? Theories opposing Crocker and Major’s self-esteem protection approach argue that the victims’ well-being is injured because the attribution process links their social identity to acknowledge that the world is not just and fair, that important outcomes are out of their control, and that they are not valued members of society (Branscombe, Schmitt, and Harvey 1999; Major and Schmader 2001). Once again, Major et al. (2002) screened the literature to look for empirical evidence. They found that some research suggests that attributing negative feedback to discrimination is associated with higher self-esteem and reduced negative effect directed toward the self. This was especially the case in studies where the attribution to the discrimination of the group was compared to self-blame (Major, Quinton, and Schmader 2003) – so the group’s stigma contributed to a discharge of the self. Other research suggests that attributing negative feedback to discrimination increases stress and negative effect. These results could be especially obtained when attributions to discrimination were compared to external blame (Schmitt and Branscombe 2002). Major et al. (2002) argue that research should concentrate on the question, “When, and for whom, are attributions to discrimination adaptive versus maladaptive?” (2002: 305). They discuss the influence of factors which moderate the impact of attribution to discrimination on self-esteem and self-directed negative affect. These are situational factors, especially the clarity of discrimination; personal factors, which moderate the effect of attribution to discrimination on self-esteem, especially group identification and justice ideology; and there are also structural factors, specifically group status, which determine if attribution to discrimination has an impact on self-esteem. Some of the most important findings were that clear cues of prejudice decrease uncertainty and legitimize other-blame. When attributions to prejudice are made under these conditions, self-esteem is protected. Attribution to discrimination is not selfprotective in situations where prejudice cues are ambiguous. In such situations uncertainty is aroused because no clear target of blame emerges. Concerning personal factors, empirical evidence shows that differences in group identification and endorsement of legitimizing ideologies may moderate emotional responses to prejudice. There are reasons to expect that these factors may either exacerbate or alleviate the impact of perceived discrimination on well-being.

Moral Diversity is More Problematic than Other Kinds of Diversity In intergroup contexts groups may differ on different dimensions. Some groups are different because of their ethnic background, others are perceived as — 34 —

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different groups because of their religious belief or because they favor different sports clubs. Haidt and his colleagues (Haidt, Rosenberg, and Hom 2003) examined different kinds of diversity to determine if some kinds of diversity are more problematic and difficult to handle than other kinds. They discovered that not all kinds of diversity are equally valued. Moral diversity reduces desires for interaction more than other kinds of diversity (Haidt, Rosenberg, and Hom 2003). Moral goods are experienced as affectively laden self-evident truths or intuitions. People care strongly about them and find it difficult to explain their goodness to someone who does not share their moral intuitions (Haidt 2001). Wanting moral diversity seems to be incoherent. Morality requires that moral rules apply universally (Kant [1785]; 1966). Moral goods are social, personal, or spiritual obligations (e.g. justice, social harmony, self-actualization, piety, chastity). One refers to them to justify or criticize the practices and behaviors of oneself and of others. They are felt to be binding for all people. Moral diversity means that within a group many different ideas of right and wrong are represented, and there is no widespread consensus about which moral goods should be pursued. Other studies analyzed the inf luence of locations on the tolerance of diversity. Empirical evidence was found that diversity is differently valued in different domains. In a study on students, Haidt (2003) compared three different domains of interaction (university campus, seminar, shared accommodation). The exposure to differences in the controlled and safe setting of a classroom was desirable. However, the students did not want to room with students who were very different from them. “Even fraternity brothers who wanted little diversity in sexual orientation at the university … and who wanted none in a roommate …, reported wanting to be exposed to gay people in a seminar class” (Haidt, Rosenberg, and Hom 2003: 30). The findings support the fear that moral differences might be more socially divisive than ethnic differences. The study has not established that moral diversity is bad. Even if students do not want to interact with morally diverse others, one could still argue that such interactions would be good for them.

Some Consequences This short and somehow selective view on findings from social psychological research on intergroup processes and social identity raises some considerations concerning the benefits of this knowledge for intergroup encounters between majority members and members of discriminated minorities. Since the research on prejudice has changed from blaming specific kinds of persons for their prejudiced judgments and behaviors to a more cognitive view, basic categorization processes were made responsible for stereotyping and discrimination. Educational programs which aim at preventing prejudice and — 35 —

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discrimination consider these categorization processes. There was a longer debate about the question of how useful it is to try to completely ignore belonging to groups in intergroup contact situations. Opponents argued that in intergroup contacts, reducing prejudiced behavior would not generalize if the participants did not know each other’s group membership (Hewstone 1996) – the outing of membership to groups seemed to be a necessity for transferring the prejudice reduction to situations and persons outside the contact situation. Later on, a longer process from de- to re-categorization on a common level (Pettigrew 1998) was proposed for permanent changes. This claim went hand in hand with the research of Gaertner et al. (1993), who proclaimed the common ingroup identity model as the only way to reduce intergroup bias. In considering the insights of Duckitt (2001), that options for categorizations result from the socialization process, the expectation of being able to change these options by short-term education programs might be judged less optimistic. Nevertheless, analyzing one’s own world view according to the main dimensions of security versus individual autonomy, on one hand, and superiority versus altruistic social concerns, on the other hand, may help to reach a better understanding of the basis of one’s own judgments and behavior and those of others. We behave toward others according to behavioral schemata which are determined by ref lective and impulsive determinants. These schemata are flexible insofar as they are activated where there is an optimal fit between the situation and our capabilities. This activation process gives us maximal security and prevents us from being helpless. But these schemata are not only flexible; they are also changeable. Changes might be obtained by a slow, implicit, learning process which we do not realize, or by an intentional process, which we start in order to automatize reactions that are consistent with our conscious believing system. The learning process may be counterbalanced and take place on both sides – perpetrators as well as victims act according to the social norms they are used to. We cannot change the social norms directly; there is no other way than to install learning processes in which both sides are involved. Moral rules seem to be the most difficult to change and the most difficult to agree upon when groups of different cultural background have contact with each other. It might be wise to concentrate on differences which are less difficult to overcome. Accepting differences in sexual behavior and agreeing upon rules about how to deal with equal opportunities for men and women in obtaining a job and integrating family and employment is not a contradiction. Nevertheless, it seems to be difficult to agree upon similar social structures to give the equality of rights a chance.

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Rosemarie Mielke Haidt, Jonathan. 2001. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108: 814–34. Haidt, Jonathan, Evan Rosenberg, and Holly Hom. 2003. “Differentiating Diversities: Moral Diversity Is Not Like Other Kinds,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 33: 1–36. Hewstone, Miles. 1996. “Contact and Categorization: Social-Psychological Interventions to Change Intergroup Relations.” In Foundations of Stereotypes and Stereotyping, ed. C. Neil Macrae, Charles Stangor, and Miles Hewstone. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 323–68. Howard, John M. and Myron Rothbart. 1980. “Social Categorization for In-group and Out-group,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38: 301–10. Insko, Chester A., John Schopler, Lowell Gaertner, Tim Wildschut, Robert Kozar, Brad Pinter, Eli J. Finkel, Donna M. Brazil, Cndy L. Cecil, and Matthew R. Montoya. 2001. “Interindividual–Intergroup Discontinuity Reduction through the Anticipation of Future Interaction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80: 95–111. Kant, Emmanuel. [1785], 1966. Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Kelman, Herbert C. 2001. “Reflections on Social and Psychological Processes of Legitimization and Delegitimization.” In The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations, ed. John T. Jost and Brenda Major. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 54–73. Lewin, Kurt. 1939. “Field Theory and Experiment in Social Psychology: Concepts and Methods,” American Journal of Sociology 44: 868–97. Major, Brenda and Toni Schmader. 2001. “Legitimacy and the Construal of Social Disadvantage.” In The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology Justice and Intergroup Relations, ed. John T. Jost and Brenda Major. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 176–204. Major, Brenda, Wendy J. Quinton, and Shannon K. McCoy. 2002. “Antecedents and Consequences of Attributions to Discrimination: Theoretical and Empirical Advances.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Mark P. Zanna. San Diego, CA: Elsevier Academic Press, pp. 251–330. Major, Brenda, Wendy J. Quinton, and Toni Schmader. 2003. “Attributions to Discrimination and Self-esteem: Impact of Group Identification and Situational Ambiguity,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39: 220–31. Moscovici, Serge. 1983. “The Phenomenon of Social Representations.” In Social Representations, ed. Robert Farr and Serge Moscovici. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–69. Mummendey, Amélie and Michael Wenzel. 1999. “Social Discrimination and Tolerance in Intergroup Relations: Reactions to Intergroup Difference,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3: 158–74. Park, Bernadette and Myron Rothbart. 1982. “Perception of Out-group Homogeneity and Levels of Social Categorization: Memory for the Subordinate Attributes of Ingroup and Out-group Members,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42: 1051–68. Pettigrew, Thomas F. 1998. “Intergroup Contact Theory,” Annual Review of Psychology 49: 65–85.

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Majorities and Minorities from the Point of View of Social Psychology Pratto, Felicia, Jim Sidanius, Lisa M. Stallworth, and Bertram F. Malle. 1994. “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67: 741–63. Rabbie, Jacob M. and Murray Horowitz. 1969. “Arousal of Ingroup-outgroup Bias by a Chance Win or Loss,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13: 269–77. Rumelhart, David, James L. McClelland, and PDP Research Group. 1986. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vols. I and II. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmitt, Michael T. and Nyla R. Branscombe. 2002. “The Meaning and Consequences of Perceived Discrimination in Disadvantaged and Privileged Social Groups.” In European Review of Social Psychology, ed. Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 167–200. Strack, Fritz and Roland Deutsch. 2004. “Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Social Behavior.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8: 220–47. Strauss, Claudia. 1992. “Models and Motives.” In Human Motives and Cultural Models, ed. Roy D’Andrade and Claudia Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–20. Suleiman, Ramzi. 2004. “Planned Encounter between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis: A Social-psychological Perspective,” Journal of Social Issues 60: 323–37. Tajfel, Henri. 1970. “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination,” Scientific American 223: 96–102. Tajfel, Henri and John C. Turner. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, pp. 33–48. Turner, John C., Michael A. Hogg, Penelope J. Oakes, Stephen D. Reicher, and Margaret S. Wetherell. 1987. Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-categorization Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Wilson, Timothy D., Samuel Lindsey, and Tonya Y. Schooler. 2000. “A Model of Dual Attitudes,” Psychological Review 107: 101–26.

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Chapter 3

TALKING AT CROSS-PURPOSES: MISUNDERSTANDING IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Juliane House

Cross-talk is a phenomenon which routinely occurs in everyday talk both among members of the same culture and language community and members of different cultures. However, when misunderstanding occurs between members of different cultures, who also speak different native languages, the damage done by misunderstandings is often considerable and its negative effects on personal relationships can last for a long time. But what do we mean when we talk about “misunderstanding,” can it be prevented, and, if so, how would one go about it? These are some of the questions I want to tackle in this paper. However, before attempting to give an answer to these questions, I will first of all explain what “misunderstanding” is, and give a brief introduction to some of the most important theoretical approaches to the complex phenomenon of misunderstanding. I will then, by way of illustration, describe a project on misunderstanding that I have been conducting at the University of Hamburg for a number of years. Finally, I will outline some ways and means of developing intercultural competence as an antidote to intercultural misunderstanding.

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The Complexity of Misunderstanding Misunderstandings are extremely complex phenomena. They may result from many different and possibly interacting sources: They may stem from inadequate perception, inappropriate comprehension at the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse levels of language or of gaps in the interlocutors’ knowledge of the world; they may result from uncooperativeness on the part of one of the speakers, who may have understood perfectly well but just wanted to be “awkward”; or the interactant may have perceived and comprehended correctly and intended to cooperate, but was simply unable to assemble a move that was, at this stage in the discourse, expected from his interactant. The most interesting and indeed puzzling misunderstandings in intercultural interactions will presumably arise not from mishearing, mispronouncing, or misusing lexicogrammatical rules, but rather as a result of a failure to interpret the other’s “mental representations” and those meanings hidden behind discourse elements and structures. As work on communicative styles, politeness phenomena, indirect speech acts, Gricean implicatures, and relevance theory has revealed, “normal talk” is notoriously and inherently indirect, which means that if we want to understand other people we must “infer” their intentions in order to find out how the words they use are “really meant.” Because indirectness tends to produce failed alignments, it may also lie at the heart of many misunderstandings in talk. And alignment failures and hidden differences in positioning and footing are much more likely in talk between persons of different cultural backgrounds, where indirectness and politeness conventions tend to either diverge or overlap, resulting more often than not in illusions of either comfortable likeness or insurmountable difference. One of the consequences of the complexity that seems to be the hallmark of misunderstanding is that it is grossly inappropriate to attempt a watertight definition of “misunderstanding,” other than giving a sort of “working definition,” for instance in the following form: “what participants perceive as a misunderstanding in fact counts as such” or, if we want to invoke Goffman’s (1981) characterization of a “valid” response as one inspired by a prior speaker that is aligned to what is occurring now, and is to be understood as “relevant now,” we might perhaps say – in a slightly more scientific way – that a misunderstanding is a move interpreted as not in alignment with the preceding discourse and thus “not appropriate” at the moment of speaking. However insightful such an approximation to a “definition” may be, it is clearly difficult to operationalize. Therefore, I think it is best to say that misunderstanding is one of a number of problems in communication and if we want to describe it we need a theoretical framework that can give us adequate terms of reference. Understanding the various forms and functions of misunderstanding clearly requires an interdisciplinary, or what Halliday (1990) has called a “transdisciplinary” approach to research. An attempt in this direction was made — 42 —

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by Coupland, Giles and Wiemann (1991: 13ff.). As a common framework for the linguistic and communicative perspectives, they distinguish six levels of misunderstanding (cf. also House, Kasper, and Ross 2003 for a recent discussion of different approaches to misunderstandings): 1. Misunderstanding as something inherent in the nature of symbolic meaning exchange, which is unavoidable and omnipresent, unrecognized, and thus not repairable. 2. Misunderstanding as minor local routine disruptions, manifest for instance in turn stealing, as something to be “let passed,” possibly recognized at some low awareness level and possibly locally repaired. 3. Misunderstanding as based on personal deficiencies and inadequacies and therefore potentially leading to blame, guilt, and shame. Behavior culminating in misunderstanding is interpreted as deviating from the norm according to some implicit standard of adequacy, the assumption being that persons engaging in such inadequate behavior can be improved upon through education. 4. This level of analysis may reveal the strategic value of misunderstanding and relate it to goal management in everyday talk. Misunderstanding at this level comes into participants’ full consciousness. “Misunderstanding” is an appropriate label for all sequences that fail to achieve desired social outcomes in some salient aspect, with repair being always possible. 5. Misunderstanding is seen as residing in cultural and group differences in communicative norms, values, and expectation, predisposing misalignments. Culture is here regarded as having communicative consequences for participants. The salient dimensions of context are assumed to be status/power and affiliation. Identity is defined in social group membership rather than personal terms. From this cultural perspective, misunderstanding can also offer a dimension for acculturation in that, for instance, children, immigrants, or conversationalists in general may be enabled to reach new depths of understanding. 6. At the sixth and deepest level of conceptualizing, misunderstanding relates to “ideological framings of talk.” Misunderstandings arise because certain interactants are disadvantaged while other groups are deemed “normal” or even “morally correct.” The ideological foundations of communication are typically not consciously known by participants. Their analysis requires insight into societal power structures and their (re)production through communication. Such a multilevel view of misunderstanding is a good illustration of the fact that misunderstanding can only be approached from a variety of different angles. For example, a sexist remark of the kind, “For a woman, you’re remarkably intelligent,” may be analyzed (a) as stemming from differences in — 43 —

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group norms or residing in a particularly macho personality, (b) as a momentary lapse that one can let pass as an insignificant slip, or (c) as an ideologically anchored instance of social and institutional oppression of females etc. Which of these interpretations would be more valid is obviously a matter of the context in which such an utterance occurs, and its analysis highlights the critical relationship of figure and ground, of linguistic forms and the context in which they occur. In order to tackle this crucial relation between text and context in misunderstanding analysis, between language and mind and language and social life, I will now briefly review several relevant research paradigms with a view to the possibility of eclectically combining them in actual research into misunderstandings.

Some Approaches to Researching Misunderstanding Social Views of Analyzing Misunderstanding Approaching language from a social viewpoint can be traced back (in the twentieth century) to linguists and literary critics belonging to Russian Formalism and Prague School Linguistics, who differentiated between different functions of language and described functional styles, and in general stressed the interconnectedness between language and social contexts; to British linguists who pointed to the importance of “the context of situation” for meaning in language; to American sociologists of language and sociolinguists, for whom the embeddedness of language in the context of culture and society is of paramount importance. Important too in this tradition is Goffman (1981) and his distinction between a “response” and a “reply” in interaction: replies are directly verbally connected to what was said before, achieving cohesion through explicit and overt surface connections (as is the case for instance in repartees in situational comedies), response proved “deeper” links via “mental aligning” across the entire discourse.

Intercultural Miscommunication Central to this strand of research is the seminal work by Gumperz (1982a, 1982b, 1992) on intercultural misunderstanding. In Gumperz’s view, misunderstandings tend to result from interactants’ misuse of “contextualization cues,” i.e., prosodic, phonological, and lexical choices, which signal relevant interpretive “frames” that are often culture specific and thus open to misinterpretation by cultural outsiders. According to Gumperz, it is these linguistic cues which are crucial for understanding because they act like signposts for the process of conversational — 44 —

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inferencing, i.e., the context-bound “situated” process of interpretation interactants use when attempting to decode one another’s intention. Another classic approach in this paradigm is Tannen’s (e.g. 1979, 1993) research into interactions between members of different (sub)cultures. She sees misunderstanding as a mismatch of “frames,” as frame breaking, or reframing, frames being dynamically linked such that negotiated “footings” in a chain of responding constantly change. Further influential studies on intercultural communication include work on differences in communicative styles (Lakoff 1990), indirectness, and politeness (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993). Politeness is important for misunderstanding analysis because it is the most important guideline for any human contact, used to minimize the potential for conflict and confrontation inherent in all human interchange (Lakoff 1990: 34). This is not the place for going into the vast literature on politeness; suffice it to say that when considering cross-cultural talk and misunderstanding, one must have some understanding of politeness that would minimally explain the tension between universal aspects of politeness and culture-specific ones. A simplistic theory would involve, first, a fundamental biological, psychosocial level based on animal drives (“coming-together” versus “noli-me-tangere”; (cf. Brown and Levinson’s [1987] classic distinction of negative and positive politeness); second, a philosophical level seeking to capture the biological drives in terms of a finite number of principles, maxims, or parameters; and, third, an empirical descriptive level concerned with the fact that in cultures 1-n, politeness operates in terms of a particular (open-ended) set of norms, tendencies, or preferences. The first two levels are universal ones; level three, however, is clearly variable (cf. House 2005).

Pragmatic Theory-based Analyses of Misunderstanding Misunderstandings in this paradigm are analyzed at different levels of pragmatic meaning. So what “went wrong” is described by reference to at least the following questions: What did the speaker say? (this refers to the propositional meaning of the utterance); what was the speaker talking about? (i.e., what did s/he say plus what was implicated; this is the extended semantic meaning of the utterance); why did the speaker bother to say what s/he said? (this is the illocutionary force of the utterance); and lastly, why did the speaker say what s/he said in the way s/he did? (this is the “key,” tone or tenor of the “message”). Blum-Kulka and Weizman (1988) make a further distinction between a speaker’s meaning (the “individual-I-meaning”) and what they call the “collective-we-direction” of the discourse. On one or several of these levels (or an interaction between them) misunderstandings can theoretically arise.

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Philosophical Views of the “Self-orientedness” of Communication As opposed to Grice’s well-known approach to explaining communication via the operation of the principle of cooperation, another, less well-known research strand is one that relates to the individual speaker’s “insularity,” his reliance on his individual mode of interpretation evoked. Levinas’ (1961) theory is of interest here and its more recent interpretation by Jaszczolt (1996). Interaction is in this view interpreted as a relationship between two interactants, who are basically two separate entities, as something “doubly dynamic,” which cannot be described using the metaphor of a dance with one conversational partner leading, the other one following. Rather, each speaker dances on his own, with meaning being created in between them, each speaker presenting his thoughts which do not necessarily access the other. Communication is basically selfcentered, with the speaker leaving the hearer the freedom of interpretation and, in the last analysis, the freedom to create (rather than recover) assumptions. This ”selfishness” in talk, which has been downplayed in today’s mostly mutuality-based theories of conversation (cf. Markova, Graumann, and Foppa 1995), seems to be particularly suited for explaining misunderstandings – in fact, one might consider such a “non-other-orientedness” to be a major reason for misunderstanding in that a concentration on oneself would prevent one from listening, anticipating, and generally trying to throw oneself into the partner’s mind.

Psychopathological Views of Misunderstanding This view goes back to Freud’s famous writings about the “psychopathology of everyday life” and especially his discussion of the genesis of “slips of the tongue,” and to the more recent investigations by Langer and her associates (see e.g. Langer 1989) as well as the German psychologists Heckhausen and Beckmann (1990). The main point in this approach is that an attempt is made to relate misunderstanding to interactants’ “mindless,” “automatic,” i.e., nonthoughtful behavior. It is through interactants’ routinized and automatized actions carried out without conscious mental control that “interactional slips” or misunderstandings may and do occur. This “nonthinking” explanation of misunderstanding is supported by the extremely productive line of research on the packaging of knowledge in the mind, suggesting that in many actions speakers (must) rely on ready-made plans, schemata, scripts, or social episodes in human memory, which enable them to predict upcoming moves. The consequence of such “lean cognitive management” is that speakers often stop paying attention to interactants’ real input. Speakers’ illusion of being in control of the interaction is then only disrupted by misunderstandings, with which reality suddenly and forcefully intrudes. — 46 —

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Information Processing Approaches to Analyzing Misunderstanding These approaches are linked to the psychopathological approach to misunderstanding in that here too the existence of scripted behavior imprinted in the human mind is assumed, and cognitive plans, frames, and schemata are postulated and conceived as representations of repeated behavioral patterns designed to alleviate cognitive work in humans. Understanding language requires forming a mental model based on the language used, background knowledge, and inferences. Cognitive models set up to predict and explain processes involved in discourse comprehension and production are therefore particularly relevant to explaining processes of misunderstanding. They offer a fruitful way of approaching cross-cultural misunderstanding because one might be able to integrate all the different insightful perspectives outlined above in a systematic way. For instance, social views of misunderstanding can be incorporated in that norms and conventions as well as behavioral tendencies must have cognitive substrates, and the interpretation of contextualized, situated meanings and misunderstandings can also be interpreted as an explication of underlying cognitive processing mechanisms. Cognitive models are based on the assumption mentioned already above that – given the complexity of the phenomenon of misunderstanding adumbrated above – one must transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries and strive towards an eclectic model powerful enough to handle diverse cases of misunderstandings and to overcome the limitations of staying inside on particular research paradigms, ignoring the cross-fertilization potential a transdisciplinary approach offers. In the following I will, by way of illustration, describe a research project in which I am currently involved and in which such a cognitive model (House 1993, 2000) is being used for analytical purposes.

Description of the Hamburg Project on Misunderstanding Data Collection Procedures While it would obviously be advisable in the interest of maximal validity to have at one’s disposal a large corpus of fully contextualized naturalistic data, the relationship between effort and outcome is problematic: the amount of data needed for misunderstandings to “naturally happen” is enormous. Therefore, alternative I have pursued over the past twenty years is to use various different data collection methods, which have generated a differentiated corpus consisting of the following parts: ●

audio-taped open role-plays involving German learners of English in interactions with native English speakers (n = 200) — 47 —

Juliane House ● ● ● ●

field observations documenting naturally occurring misunderstandings (n = 44) diaries (self-ref lective notes) of naturally occurring misunderstanding incidents (n = 52) audio-taped narrative interviews about “critical incidents” (n = 32) audio-taped authentic interviews (n = 8)

Analyses and Results The analyses of these sub-corpora (cf. House 1993, 1996a, 1998, 2000, 2003a, forthcoming) have focused on a variety of different discourse phenomena that also feature in a series of German–English contrastive discourse analyses (for a summary see House 1997; House 2006) covering discourse phases and structures, discourse strategies, gambits, or discourse particles, and speech act sequences as well as contrastive analyses of phenomena such as politeness and indirectness. One of the outcomes of these analyses (which for reasons of space cannot be described here) is the postulation of the following four types of misunderstanding: 1. Operational (processual) misunderstandings, in which an input is apparently ignored and in which a sort of mental “short-cut” takes place, i.e., discourse frames and schemata are automatically activated without “intrusion of reality” – a clear case of a psychopathological form of misunderstanding. 2. Language-based misunderstandings, where the locus of the misunderstanding is in the linguistic encoding and decoding processes. 3. Conceptually based misunderstandings, i.e., those to be located at the conceptual levels with cultural differences in conventionalized expectation norms leading to misunderstanding. 4. Strategic misunderstandings, i.e., deliberately manufactured (language- or conceptually based) misunderstandings serving an interlocutor’s ulterior motive. In the following I will give an example of an interaction in which both conceptually based and operational/processual types of misunderstanding occur. This piece of data is taken from the corpus of naturally occurring dyadic interactions between American exchange students studying at Hamburg University and their native German friends and fellow students. The interaction took place in German (translations mine). The students are twenty and twentyeight years of age. The American speaker was given a recording device and asked to self-record his interactions in a university context. To triangulate this primary data, I conducted retrospective interviews asking participants to comment on the taped and transcribed interactions. — 48 —

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The Rice Episode Brian, an American student spending a year in Germany, has cooked a meal for Andi, a German friend, who has recently helped him with his German seminar paper. Andi has just arrived. 01 Brian: hallo Andi wie geht’s? Hallo Andi how are you? 02 Andi: ja prima oh prima doch ja; yeah fine oh fine really yea; 03 Brian: so (.) es is alles fertig jetzt (.) ich hoffe es schmeckt dir gut (0.3) ich 04 hab es selber gekocht [so weil] so everything’s ready now (.) I hope you like it I have cooked it myself so because 05 Andi: [ja prima] [yeah fine] 06 Brian: isst man bei uns im Süden that’s what we eat in the South 07 Andi: [in a loud voice] aber das is ja so VIEL das is ja VIEL ZU VIEL Reis but that’s so much that is FAR TOO MUCH rice 08 Brian: das MACHT doch nichts (0.1) ich hab es ja bezahlt (.) und ich hab 09 dich EINgeladen (.) [du hast] that doesn’t MATTER I have paid for it and I have INVITED you have 10 Andi: [nein das] MACHT DOCH was DOCH DOCH denk doch an die 11 armen vielen hungernden Menschen die sowas gern essen würden 12 [also ich] no it does matter it does it does think of the many poor people who go hungry and would like to eat something like that [well I] 13 Brian: [ich ich] glaube ich (0.1) ich [finde] [I I ]believe I I [ find] 14 Andi: [ich finde] man sollte in dieser gemeinsamen Welt in der wir alle 15 doch leben (0.2) der Welt in der wir alle so UNgleich mit materiellen 16 Gütern ausgestattet sind sollten wir uns zumindest in kleinem 17 Maßstab bemühen keine Verschwendung keine unnütze 18 Ver[schwendung] [I find] one should in this common world where we do all live in which we are all endowed with material goods so unequally we should at least in small scale try to produce no waste no useless [waste] 19 Brian: [also Andi] ich bin nicht ich (0.2) [glaube nicht ] [well Andi] I am not I (0.2) [don’t believe] 20 Andi: [keine Ver]schwendung zu produzieren und immer in unserem 21 Bewusstsein daran zu denken, daß wir in der reichen westlichen 22 Welt etc etc. {monologue continues for 1.5 minutes} — 49 —

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[no waste] to produce and always in our consciousness to think that we in the rich western world etc. etc. In the retrospective narrative interview, the American student, Brian, said that in his role as host he felt unpleasantly “talked at” by his friend, who in his view acted like a “know-all” teacher. He was disappointed that his German friend did nothing to keep a “real conversation” going. In informal social talk, he said he, like other Americans, would tend to prefer to “engage in collaborative … talk wishing to establish common ground. …” The German line of talk, he suggested, was to separate oneself more from the interlocutor as one gets “sucked up by the theme of the conversation.” It is interesting to note that Brian, despite these comments on what he thought were differences in German and American communicative norms, nevertheless, in the concrete performance of this conversation, was quite unable to apply this “knowledge” in order to foster understanding. Rather he let himself be overcome by a sense of misunderstanding, he felt sad and disappointed and even “took a dislike” to Andi, to whom he imputed inconsiderateness and “selfishness” – and this despite the fact that this same Andi had “selflessly” helped him before with his German essays. Andi, the German interlocutor, commented that he thought they had had a good conversation about problems of the so-called “Third World” and the way structural problems in the economies of the developing countries might be resolved. He said he was often surprised that the Americans he knew personally had a different outlook on the resources available in different countries and that this kind of “overly generous” handling of the resources was also reflected in their often irresponsible behavior vis-à-vis food and possessions. He was surprised that Brian had said so little and believed he was simply not interested in the topic. Clearly, this is a case of “cross-talk,” of misunderstanding emerging because of different communicative styles. The monologous and monothematic nature of the discourse is marked. Ample use is made by Andi of the supportive move type “expander” (elaborating information) in order to keep a particular topic in play. The result is the impression that it is one participant who clearly “hogs” the topic (Andi), with the other’s (Brian’s) two attempts to gain the floor being overrun. Marked also is the nonreciprocity of the “How are you” move in turn 2, and the nonconcatenation of turn 6 and turn 7. The move in turn 5 is clearly a remark, a type of ritual move characteristic of a conversational opening phase or phatic talk in general, which would conventionally (in certain Anglophone discourse types) be coupled with either a follow-up request for information or another remark thematically linking turn 7 with turn 6, opening up a chain of sequentially relevant moves as contiguous replies in Goffman’s sense. By contrast, what happens in turn 7 is an abrupt topic switch in the form of a complaint followed by a request in turns 10 and 11, with both these speech acts being produced at high levels of directness. — 50 —

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The misunderstanding in this excerpt (as revealed in both the interview and the analysis) is both conceptually based and operational/processual. It seems to result from differences in the pragmatic knowledge base, interactional goals, and choice of discourse strategies but also from a process-internal short-cut. Andi and Brian have different conceptions of communicative conventions holding in ritualized conversational opening phases, of the topics appropriate for a particular discourse event (a dinner table conversation), and of the appropriateness of turn allotment and floor holding during that event. The moves produced by Andi thus strike Brian in their differentness as offensively self-oriented and preoccupied with a particular topic relentlessly, self-servingly, and monologically pursued. Further, we may also interpret Andi’s rejection of Brian’s attempts to gain the floor as a short-cut in the processing route: by ostensibly not listening to Brian, Andi jumps directly from his own interactional goal to an immediate communicative plan and its linguistic encoding, thus bypassing not only his interlocutor’s real input but also any strategic considerations of his own. This creates non alignment (sensu Goffman), since Andi often produces neither a response nor a reply, he simply initiates. The “individual-I-meanings” (in Blum-Kulka and Weizman’s sense) seem to be widely divergent in this stretch of talk; a collective we-direction is not discernible. The importance of emotional/affective factors come into play by Brian’s feelings of being “talked at,” his disappointment, sadness, and anger, all of which Brian attributed to Andi as a person, not to his potentially cultureconditioned event-specific communicative style. The emotive-cognitive gut reaction is strikingly negative for one of the conversationalists. As concerns interactants’ awareness of the existence and the causes of the emotional “disturbance” resulting from the nature of the interaction in this encounter, interactants’ comments clearly reveal that Andi lacks this awareness. It is only Brian who is acutely aware of his own emotional upset, but is unable to “proceduralize” his intuitions about how his friend and himself differ in terms of internalized conventions holding for a particular discourse event.

Understanding Misunderstanding: Explanatory Hypotheses One might hypothesize that the misunderstandings in this interaction derive essentially from incommensurable cultural representations leading to a negative gut reaction in one of the interactants. The negative emotional reaction is, in a sense, unavoidable if we follow Jaszczolt’s (1996) view that each interactant has the freedom to create meanings (rather than be bound to recover them) and that emotions are liable to severely interfere with discourse interpretation. We may hypothesize that these “interfering” emotional states are exacerbated by differences in communicative styles, which tend not to be diagnosed as such but rather as “personal deficiencies and inadequacies” (cf. Coupland, Giles, and — 51 —

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Wiemann et al. 1991, level 3 above). In intercultural interactions, then, the hearer is apt to (mentally) redistribute the cognitive-emotive attributes of the speaker and even, in a sense, to create him as a person anew, to the point that there may be little in terms of assumptions in the speaker’s utterance that would need “recovering,” given the hearer’s “own world,” his own linguistic and cultural background. This means that intercultural interactions may be to a considerable degree “self-centered” with hearers’ particular freedom to create their own assumptions. And given this freedom, the doors are wide open for (conceptual) misunderstanding which, in this interpretation, appear to be a basically non preventable part of intercultural interaction. The analysis of the above excerpt shows that one important reason for the occurrence of conceptually based misunderstandings seems to be the differential weighting given to the interpersonal functional component by German as opposed to Anglophone speakers. This difference is manifest in an overall greater focus on the “content” of the talk by German speakers (evidenced also in the use of certain gambits and discourse strategies, and a preference for a monothematic line of discourse) as opposed to a more developed “etiquette of simulation” on the part of Anglophone speakers, evidenced for instance in the use of reciprocal routines such the How-are-you move, interpersonally active discourse strategies such as the disarmer, and a dialogic, addressee-directed line of discourse. In order to provide a “deeper” explanation of the findings laid out in this analysis, it may be useful to look at the results of a series of contrastive German–English discourse analyses conducted by the present author over the past twenty years. As mentioned above, the data collection methods in these studies are varied and include open (nonprescriptive) dyadic role-plays often followed by retrospective interviews, discourse completion tasks combined with metapragmatic assessment tests, field notes, diary entries, interviews as well as authentic interactions of the type presented in this chapter. Apart from oral data, I have also undertaken contrastive pragmatic analyses of German and English written discourse and translations in a variety of different genres. The discourse analyses of these different data sets are all based on the discourse model provided by Edmondson and House’s interactional grammar (1981) as well as the categorial scheme developed inside the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989). The discourse phenomena investigated include opening and closing discourse phases, topic-nomination, -maintenance, and -change, discourse strategies, gambits, and the execution of specific speech acts. From the individual results of these analyses based on a variety of different data, elicited with different methodologies and subjects, a consistent pattern has emerged. In a nutshell, German speakers tend to interact in many different discourse events in ways that can be described as more direct, more explicit, more self-referenced and more content-oriented than Anglophone speakers. This pattern of — 52 —

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communicative preferences in different discourse events, which emerges from a series of German–English contrastive pragmatic and discourse analyses, can be displayed along the following dimensions: Directness

Indirectness

Orientation towards Self

Orientation towards Other

Orientation towards Content

Orientation towards Addressees

Explicitness

Implicitness

Ad Hoc Formulation

Verbal Routines

The validity of these dimensions (cf. House 2006) is supported by the results of other contrastive-pragmatic German–English studies such as, for instance, Byrnes (1986), Clyne (1987), Kotthoff (1989), and Watts (1989). It is important, however, to emphasize that we are not dealing with clear-cut dichotomies. Oppositions such as “directness versus indirectness” represent but end points on different clines. In general, however, my analyses suggest that German subjects give preference to positions on the left-hand side of these dimensions. If one relates the hypothesized dimensional preferences to the differences in interactional behavior found in the above data extract, one may hypothesize that the dimensions may serve as explanatory hypotheses for these findings. In other words, interactants’ discourse behavior may be explained with reference to the operation of different empirically established communicative preferences displayed in the form of these dimensions of cross-cultural differences. How legitimate, however, is it to suggest such generalizations, especially since – given widespread postmodernist critiques – there is a deep-seated doubt whether such a concept as “the culture of a linguistic community” can exist at all? Has not the extension of “culture” beyond the traditional ethnographic concern with “the way of life” of indigenous peoples to complex modern societies brought about a complexification and problematization of the concept of “culture” which renders it useless as a methodological and conceptual entity? (see e.g. Holliday’s [1999] suggestion to substitute “nonessentialist,” “nonreified” “small cultures” for “culture”). Obviously there is no such thing as a stable social group uninfluenced by outside influences and personal idiosyncrasies, and obviously it is wrong to assume a unified culture out of which all differences between people are idealized and cancelled out. Nevertheless, modernist relativization and problematization has, in practice, never led to its logical conclusion, i.e., the annihilation of research concerned with “culture,” nor has it prevented ethnographers (and applied linguists like myself) from describing cultures as interpretive devices for understanding emergent behavior. Further, we cannot (and should not) ignore the experiences reported by many individual observers (such as, for instance, the participants in the above stretches of discourse and their metapragmatic comments) when they — 53 —

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perceive members of different groups or speech communities to be “different” in terms of talking and behaving in particular situated discourse events. A recent original approach to resolving the hotly debated issue of generalization vs. diversification and individualization of cultures is the one by Sperber (1996), who views culture in terms of different types of “representations” (of ideas, behaviors, attitudes, values, norms etc.). A multitude of individual “mental representations” exists within each group. A subset of these, which can be overtly expressed in language and artifacts, turn into “public representations,” which are communicated to others in the social group. This communication gives rise to similar mental representations in others, which may again be communicated by involving the creation of mental representations and so on. If a subset of these representations is communicated frequently enough within a social group, these representations will become firmly entrenched and turn into “cultural representations.” Members of a particular culture are constantly being influenced by their society’s (and/or some of the society’s subgroup’s) public and cultural representations, and this influence is exerted most prominently through language and discourse as used by members of the culture in communication with other members of the same group, and it is primarily through communicative interchanges with other members of their culture that they construct their view of the world and their personality. Given such a sociocognitive approach to “culture,” there may be some justification in trying to describe culturally conditioned discourse phenomena from the dialectically linked etic (culturally distant) and emic (culturally intrinsic) perspectives (see also Hymes 1996 for further argumentation). Moreover, as Ramathan and Atkinson (1999: 51) have pointed out, the linking of “culture” to concepts like “discourse,” as I have done here, clearly reduces the risk of ethnic and national stereotyping because the focus in any pragmatic-discourse approach is on social groups displaying patterned, cohesive verbal actions. The question of whether and how language and culture are intertwined or separated (see Agar 1994, who, in looking for explanations for the sort of “language shock” one often experiences in foreign places, speaks of “languaculture” to indicate the inextricable link between language and culture) becomes critical in cases where a language is used “supranationally” as a lingua franca. This is increasingly the case with the English, a topic which I cannot pursue further in this paper (but see House 2003b). In what follows I will look at some ways of reducing cross-talk.

Developing Intercultural Competence and Reducing Cross-talk Four points need to be stressed for the teaching of intercultural communicative competence in the foreign or second-language classroom: — 54 —

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1. Learners of any foreign language – and in particular learners of English as a lingua franca – who are interested in using a foreign language for communication purposes should be enabled to keep their individual discourse styles, their individual capacity for wit, humor, social charm or repartee – in other words their very own social persona in the medium of the English language. This can be achieved not through proclaiming lofty and vague intercultural objectives of tolerance, empathy, and mutual understanding, but rather through the acquisition of rather more mundane, practical communicative-linguistic skills such as, for instance, “pragmatic fluency” (House 1996b) with which misunderstandings can be minimized and/or successfully negotiated. 2. For developing intercultural competence in a foreign language, it is essential to intensify and effectivize the teaching of interactional phenomena so as to enable learners to manage turn taking smoothly through sensitizing them to points of transitional relevance, to use a multitude of different discourse“lubricating” gambits and discourse strategies, and generally to provide learners with the linguistic means for realizing their full interpersonal competence, i.e. achieve their own goals and remain polite. These goals can best be reached by increased metapragmatic knowledge and awareness, i.e. by developing learners’ insights into their own communicative potential – their communicative strengths and deficiencies – in realizing their communicative intentions. It is important both to heighten students’ sensitivity to others’ communicative needs and to enable them to formulate their own questions and reply appropriately to questions posed by others, to realize their own communicative intentions in a less superficial manner, and to reach a deeper understanding of others’ communicative intentions. For developing intercultural competence in second language learning, I suggest that a language-oriented approach be given preference, and in promoting consciousness of the functions and uses of language in situated discourse one will at the same time foster a heightened cultural awareness. 3. In dealing with misunderstanding, both in the classroom and outside, we must not forget to highlight the moral implications of those “strategic misunderstandings,” I briefly mentioned before, i.e., those manipulative practices found in deliberately deceitful talk, propaganda, and demagogy as well as in some types of advertising. Further, one should be wary of the possibility of intentionally conflictual, confrontational discourse, where misunderstanding seems to be built into participants’ communicative practices. And it is only these “strategic misunderstandings” which can be, and for ethical reasons should be, avoided. All other types of misunderstandings can at least be attenuated in their consequences if one simply acquires more knowledge about one’s interactants, which may then increase one’s awareness of the consequences of acting out one’s own discourse style in ways that might give offense to one’s hearer. And for the extension of knowledge we need, as I have tried to show, transdisciplinary work informing in-depth analyses of — 55 —

Juliane House

authentic intercultural interactions in different contexts as well as introspections, where interactants’ own voices are heard. But, alas, knowledge is not enough given the nature of language and the nature of human beings. Since meaning is never laid out clean and neat but must be inferred, and since inferences in the fast give-and-take of spoken discourse tend to be quick, automatic, and fixed when they really need to be slow, flexible, and readily revisable, we also need a kind of attitude that I’m not ashamed to call “an openness of mind.” To counteract the damaging personal recriminations and emotional upsets in many intercultural misunderstanding events, such an openness would imply taking things more slowly, keeping them in abeyance to avoid premature judging or prejudice. Handling misunderstanding in the classroom is of prime importance as we are here focusing on using language in a sensitive, informed, and reflexive way. 4. On a very practical level, I would suggest the following “types” of teaching and learning approaches for developing intercultural competence in the classroom and for sensitizing students to become aware of misunderstandings in intercultural interactions: ● cognitive teaching: emphasizing cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies, communication strategies, ref lexive activities, and guided “noticing” in order to increase awareness of interculturally “rich points” and develop systematic knowledge about culture- and languageconditioned differences in communicative styles and preferences ● process teaching: promoting the learning process using a variety of ethnographic activities such as keeping learner diaries, formulating “subjective theories” about individual learning processes in the form of field notes, guided observation of interactions, and regular personal conferencing, interviewing members of the foreign languaculture. ● experiential teaching: using multimedia modules, treating intercultural misunderstandings as “critical incidents” using simulations, scenarios, and open role-plays. Critical incidents should stem from learners’ own personal experiences and not prefabricated “culture standards.” Learners’ own authentic intercultural interactions should be taped, transcribed, collaboratively interpreted, and discussed in class. ● critical teaching: discussing stereotypes and prejudices, and constructing humorous multiple choice tasks, in which such stereotypes are satirized. ● interactional sensitivity training: making learners observe general rules of interaction such as the following: ● Always watch out for misunderstandings. ● Use checks to immediately clarify nascent problems. ● Use repair strategies whenever you suspect a misunderstanding, but make sure to avoid loss of your own and your interlocutor’s face. ● Delay interpreting your interlocutor’s moves as long as possible, and always be prepared to revise your preliminary interpretations. — 56 —

Talking at Cross-purposes ●

●

●

Be f lexible and move back and forth from a micro- to a macroperspective in your cumulative discourse interpretations. Do not hesitate to switch codes whenever you think this might help your interlocutor. And finally (and perhaps most importantly): Never assume that others understand you.

Conclusion As we have seen, misunderstanding is part and parcel of human communication. This does not mean, however, that its effects need to be allowed to run their full course. Particularly in intercultural communication between members of majority and minority groups, interactants are well advised to acquire, and make use of, strategies to minimize offending others’ feelings or affecting their well-being.

References Agar, Michael. 1994. Language Shock. New York: Morrow. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, and Elda Weizman. 1988. “The Inevitability of Misunderstanding: Discourse Ambiguities,” Text 8: 219–41. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper (eds.). 1989. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Brown, Penelope and Steven Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byrnes, Heidi. 1986. “Interactional Style in German and English Conversations,” Text 6: 89–206. Clyne, Michael. 1987. “Cultural Differences in the Organization of Academic Texts. English and German,” Journal of Pragmatics 11: 211–47. Coupland, Nikolas, Howard Giles, and John Wiemann (eds.). 1991. “Miscommunication” and Problematic Talk. London: Sage. Edmondson, Willis J. and Juliane House. 1981. Let’s Talk and Talk About It. A Pedagogic Interactional Grammar of English. Munich: Urban & Schwarzenberg. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Gumperz, John.1982a. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1982b. Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1992. “Contextualization and Understanding.” In Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–52. Halliday, Michael A.K. 1990. “New Ways of Meaning: A Challenge to Applied Linguistics,” Journal of Applied Linguistics 6: 7–36. Heckhausen, Heinz and Jurgen Beckmann. 1990. “Intentional Action and Action Slips,” Psychological Review 97: 36–48. Holliday, Adrian. 1999. “Small Cultures,” Applied Linguistics 20: 237–64. — 57 —

Juliane House House, Juliane. 1993. “Toward a Model for the Analysis of Inappropriate Responses in Native/Non-Native Interactions.” In Interlanguage Pragmatics, ed. Shoshana BlumKulka and Gabriele Kasper. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 163–84. ——— 1996a. “Contrastive Discourse Analysis and Misunderstanding: The Case of German and English.” In Contrastive Sociolinguistics, ed. Marlis Hellinger and Ulrich Ammon. Berlin: Mouton, pp. 345–61. ——— 1996b. “Developing Pragmatic Fluency in English as a Foreign Language,” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18: 225–52. ——— 1997. Translation Quality Assessment. A Model Revisited. Tübingen: Narr. ——— 1998. “Politeness and Translation.” In The Pragmatics of Translation, ed. Leo Hickey. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 54–71. ——— 2000. “Understanding Misunderstanding: A Pragmatic-Discourse Approach to Analyzing Mismanaged Rapport in Talk Across Cultures.” In Culturally Speaking, ed. Helen Spencer-Oatey. London: Continuum, pp. 145–65. ——— 2003a. “Misunderstanding in Intercultural University Encounters.” In Misunderstanding in Social Life, ed. Juliane House, Gabriele Kasper, and Steven Ross. London: Longman, pp. 22–56. ——— 2003b. “English as a lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism?” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 556–78. ——— 2005. “Politeness in Germany: Politeness in Germany?” In Politeness in Europe, ed. Ko Hickey, Miranda Stewart. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 13–28. ——— 2006. “Communicative Styles in English and German,” European Journal of English Studies 10, 249–68. House, Juliane, Gabriele Kasper, and Steven Ross (eds.). 2003. Misunderstanding in Social Life. London: Longman. Hymes, Dell. 1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality. Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis. Jaszczolt, Katarzyna. 1996. “Relevance and Infinity: Implications for Discourse Interpretation,” Journal of Pragmatics 25: 703–22. Kasper, Gabriele and Shoshana Blum-Kulka (eds.). 1993. Interlanguage Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. Kotthoff, Helga. 1989. Pro und Kontra in der Fremdsprache. Frankfurt: Lang. Lakoff, Robin. 1990. Talking Power. New York: Basic Books. Langer, Ellen J. 1989. Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalite et Infini. The Hague: Nijhoff. Markova, Ivana, Carl F. Graumann, and Klaus Foppa (eds.). 1995. Mutualities in Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramathan, Vai and Dwight Atkinson. 1999. “Ethnographic Approaches and Methods in L2 Writing Research: A Critical Guide and Review,” Applied Linguistics 20: 44–70. Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Tannen, Deborah. 1979. “What’s in a Frame.” In New Directions in Discourse Processing, ed. Roy Freedle. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 137–81. ——— 1993. Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watts, Richard J. 1989. “Relevance and Relational Work: Linguistic Politeness as Politic Behavior,” Multilingua 8: 131–66.

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Part II

THE ISRAELI CASE

Chapter 4

A CURRICULUM BETWEEN CONFLICT AND PEACE: THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN JEWISH AND ARAB SCHOOLS IN ISRAEL

Majid Al-Haj

Theoretical Considerations Pluralistic societies increasingly face the need to deal with internal issues of social inequality and cultural diversity, while simultaneously building a shared civility among their various national, ethnic, religious, and social groups. These challenges have led to the rise of multiculturalism both as an indicator for social structure and as a concept (see e.g., Banks 1981, 1989; Lynch 1986; Kymlicka 1995; McLaren 1995; Sleeter 1996; Giroux 1997; Wieviorka 1998). The school system is considered a foremost means for the promotion of multiculturalism and the deepening of intercultural relations. Accordingly, multicultural education has become one of the main subjects that pluralistic societies attempt to introduce for the new generation (Sleeter 1991, 1996). But is the education system capable of propelling social change and affecting the wider society? Or is it merely a reflection of the power relationships that exist in the wider society? Various approaches in the sociology of education attempt to answer these questions. Notable among them are the positivist approach and the conflictcritical approach. The former, based on the functionalist school, views the — 61 —

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formal educational system as the major institution for socialization, vocational and professional training, development of skills, and shaping the younger generation’s attitudes, values, and behaviors (see Parsons 1959; Armer and Youtz 1971). According to this approach, the educational system helps train elites and political leaders, and dispenses the technical and administrative knowledge essential for the construction of modern institutions and economic expansion (Apple 1982). The positivist approach does not deal with the dynamics of the relationship between the educational system and the power structure outside the school walls. Relying on the positivist-functional principle, it ignores the concepts of conflict, conflicting interests, and state control of minority and weaker groups by means of the educational system (Apple 1982; Giroux 1991). Unlike the positivist approach, the conflict model sees formal education as a mechanism for economic exploitation and sociocultural control by the dominant group (Freire 1985; Apple 1988; Giroux 1997). Advocates of the critical approach consider the educational system an obstacle to the development of weaker groups and a tool for the preservation of the status quo (Leschinsky 1988). Nor does the conflict model see the educational system as a neutral institution, but as one that in practice reflects the power relations that prevail in the broader society (Apple 1979). The teaching of history occupies a central place in any discussion of the link between school and society, since the history curriculum is a central instrument for the reconstruction of students’ identity and collective memory (Phillips 1998). It has been argued that “official history,” which is taught in schools, is frequently widely separated from “unofficial history,” which is received through informal and out-of-school agencies of socialization (family, community, media, heritage, etc.; Phillips 1998: 40). This situation becomes even more crucial and problematic when the “official history” wholly contradicts the unofficial one, especially in the context of an ongoing conflict, where history becomes both an integral part of the present and a means for determining the future (Makkawi 2002).

The Israeli Case Israel seems perfectly suited for a discussion of the relationship of education, power, and culture, since it is a deeply divided society, which was created under conflict and as a result of conflict. Today, after nearly a hundred years of conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian national movement, the situation still fluctuates between conflict and the search for peace. Under these circumstances, the national division in Israel has become the deepest and most salient of all divisions in Israeli society (ethnic and religious divisions). Palestinians in Israel are an indigenous minority, who until 1947 constituted the majority (two-thirds) of the population in Palestine. After the 1948 war, in which — 62 —

A Curriculum between Conflict and Peace

the Arabs were defeated, only 156,000 Palestinians remained in Israel, and they became Israeli citizens (Al-Haj and Rosenfeld 1990). Today there are over one million Palestinian citizens in Israel, constituting 17 percent of the total population (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2001). The two groups differ in nationality, religion, and national goals. Despite the conspicuous development experienced by Arabs, they are still the most disadvantaged group in Israeli society (see Rosenfeld 1978; Smooha 1990; Rouhana and Ghanem 1998; Yiftachel 1999). The rift between Jews and Arabs has become deeper as a result of residential segregation. Also, Jewish and Arab students study in almost completely segregated school systems until they enter institutions of higher education. What is the impact of this situation on the education system in Israel? Has the system been used as a means for nurturing peace education, or rather for the reconstruction of the collective memory in an ethnocentric manner? Does education form a unifying factor for the majority and the minority, or is it a reflection of the above-mentioned deep division? To tackle these questions we will analyze the history curriculum in Jewish and Arab schools in Israel. First we briefly trace the main trends in the history curriculum until the 1990s, and then concentrate on the main developments of the past decade. The concentration on this period is of major importance as it is the only period during this longstanding conflict in which we have seen a transition from conflict to peace or at least toward reconciliation.

Trends in the History Curricula Implemented in Arab and Jewish Schools between the 1950s and the 1980s In several articles published elsewhere we have presented an overview of the main development of the history curriculum in Arab and Jewish schools over time. We divided the key trends into three main periods: from the 1950s to the 1970s; from the 1970s to the 1990s; and from the 1990s to the present (see AlHaj 2003). A comparison between the history curricula of the Jewish and Arab schools in the first period reveals that the Jewish schools’ curriculum emphasizes the Jewish national theme, whereas the curriculum for Arab students ignores the Arab national theme. Arab students learned “that human culture is the fruit of the combined endeavors of all peoples of the world,” whereas Jewish students were taught that “the Jewish people played a central role in shaping human culture” (Al-Haj 1996: 104). Values promoting Arab–Jewish coexistence, with an accent on the superiority of the Jews, were inculcated in Arab students by constant emphasis on the role shared by Jews and Arabs in history and the shared destiny of the two peoples. However, values of coexistence were not conveyed to Jewish students, for whom the Arabs as a people were included in the term “other nations.” What is more, Arab students were expected to — 63 —

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understand the importance of the State of Israel to the Jewish people, rather than to Jews and Arabs in the same degree (Farah 1991). The asymmetry of the curricula in the Arab schools and Jewish schools was also reflected in the number of teaching hours allocated to each sub-topic, Arab history and Jewish history, within the history curriculum. In both systems, world history occupied about 60 percent of the curriculum. Other history topics were divided very unevenly: whereas Jewish schools devoted most of the remaining 40 percent of their teaching hours in history to Jewish history, Arab schools devoted only half this proportion to Arab history. In fact, Arab students spent about 20 percent of their history classes learning Jewish and Zionist history, whereas Jewish students spent less than 2 percent of their history classes studying parallel topics in Arab history (based on Al-Haj 1996: 104–6). The history curriculum for both Jewish and Arab schools was revised in the mid-1970s according to the objectives proposed by the Peled Committee. Even after that revision, however, Jewish students were educated to love Israel as their homeland and the state of the Jewish people, while Arab students were taught to internalize the message that they were not full citizens but partial partners in Israeli society, and that they must obey the rules that were set by the Jewish majority and were consistent with the basic ideology of the state (ibid.). The official objectives proposed for the new Arab and Jewish curricula were criticized for being imbalanced and asymmetrical (Nakhleh 1977; Mari 1978; Sarsour 1981). At the heart of this criticism was the claim that the proposed objectives included no recognition, explicit or implicit, of the fact that the Arabs in Israel constituted a national minority and were an inseparable part of the Palestinian people. Moreover, only the goals set in the Arab schools’ curriculum emphasized the aspiration to peace. The goals drafted for Jewish schools made no mention of either the aspiration to peace or Jewish–Arab coexistence (Sarsour 1981). Thus, it has been argued that formal education was being used as a mechanism of control over the Arabs in Israel and a legitimizing system for the dominant Jewish-Zionist ideology (see Mari 1978; Mazawi 1994; Al-Haj 1995; Amareh and Abd al-Rahman 1999; Makkawi 2002).

The New History Curriculum in the 1990s The new history curriculum, revised in the late 1990s for Jewish senior high schools, comprises five required units: Cities and Communities; The Modern Age; Nationalism; From Totalitarianism to the Holocaust; and Building a State in the Middle East. Unlike the previous curriculum, the new one integrates Jewish-Zionism and world history. Thus the history of the Jews is no longer a separate and freestanding chapter, but is presented as part of world history, with an emphasis on external influences alongside the distinctiveness of the Jewish people.

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To investigate the portion of the curriculum devoted to each topic, we analyzed both the general guidelines published by the Senior High School History Curriculum Committee of the Ministry of Education (1999a: 1–16) and the textbook written on the basis of these guidelines by Bar-Navi and Naveh (1999). Despite the changes in the new curriculum for Jewish schools, more of it is similar to its predecessor than different (for a discussion of the old curriculum see Al-Haj 1995). Like the previous curriculum, the new one ignores Arab, Islamic, and general Palestinian history. Jewish students learn about these subjects only in the context of conflict and not in the broad context of general human history. The history curriculum for Arab senior high schools also evinces a certain change from its predecessor. The part devoted to medieval Arab and Islamic history has been expanded significantly, from 22 percent to 33 percent. On the other hand, the part devoted to Jewish history and the State of Israel has been reduced from 22 percent to about 17 percent. Also diminished is attention to the twentieth century, by almost the same proportion. The unit devoted to the modern Middle East until the end of the British mandate remains unchanged (see Table 4.1). Nevertheless, the new curriculum for Arab schools is for the most part a continuation of its predecessor with regard to content. Unlike the curriculum Table 4.1: Required units in the senior high school history curriculum for Jewish and Arab schools (the 1990s curricula) Jewish schools Unit

Arab schools Percent

World history

41.1

Jewish history

26.6

Israel–Arab–Palestinian

Israel and Israeli society

Total

Unit

Percent

Medieval Arab and Islamic history Administrative and social structure

33.3

14.4

History of the Middle East Conflict in modern times until the end of the British Mandate

33.3

17.9

Modern Jewish history

16.7

History of the twentieth century

16.7

100

100

Source: For Jewish Schools: Ministry of Education and Culture (1999a); for Arab Schools: Ministry of Education and Culture (1999b). — 65 —

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for Jewish schools, the units in the Arab curriculum are not integrated, and each stands alone. Thus, the trend found in the new curriculum for Jewish schools of presenting the particularistic history of the Jewish people in the Middle East within a broader general context is not as prominent in the Arab schools’ curriculum. As a result, the history curriculum presented to Arab students has a narrower and much more restricted perspective than that presented to Jewish students. The broad perspective with which history is presented to Jewish students is limited, however, as regards general Arab and Islamic history. By contrast, Arab students study both Islamic and Arab history and Jewish and Zionist history extensively, even though the latter section has been reduced slightly. Note that the curriculum for Arab schools provides incomplete treatment of the Israeli–Arab–Palestinian conflict, because the analysis ends with the 1948 war and the establishment of the State of Israel. By contrast, developments that occurred in both the domestic and the international arena between 1948 and 1990 occupy a central place in the curriculum for Jewish schools.

History Textbooks In 1995 the Ministry of Education published Part 1 of a series of history textbooks for Arab schools written by Sa’id Bargout, George Salameh, and Atallah Copty according to the guidelines of the new senior high school curriculum for Arab schools. Part 2, by Sa’id Bargout and a team of authors, was published in 1998 (see References). For the Jewish schools, a new series of textbooks was published in 1999 to match the new history curriculum. The series comprises five core textbooks; three for the ninth grade (Naveh 1999; Ya’cobi 1999; Tabibian 1999) and a twovolume book for senior high school (Bar-Navi and Naveh 1998, 1999). The new curriculum was approved during the term of the Netanyahu government, when the Ministry of Education was controlled by the National Religious Party (the late Zevulun Hammer and then Yitzhak Levy). Our comparison focuses on the above-mentioned two-volume book, entitled Modern Times, by Eli Bar-Navi and Ayal Naveh (for more details, see References). Part 1 of the textbook for Arab schools, which parallels Part 1 of the book by Bar-Navi and Naveh, covers the period up to World War I, focusing on the history of the Middle East in the modern era and the Arab nationalist movement vis-àvis the Zionist movement. It provides a chronological description of the history of the Middle East under Ottoman rule; the confrontation between the Ottoman empire and European imperialism; the history of Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Western influences; and the Middle East in the shadow of World War I. Despite differences in some areas (to be discussed later), in general terms, this curriculum reproduces the previous one. — 66 —

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The section in this book that relates to Arab nationalism focuses on Syria and Iraq, and describes the development of the various organizations that led the field in the debate on Arab nationalism. It also addresses the issues raised by the various streams, such as the future of the Arab world, its link to the Ottoman empire, and the debate between pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism and the differences between them (Bargout, Salameh, and Copty 1995: 194–210). The material for Arab schools is presented in a dry, factual, and neutral manner. The chapter on the Zionist movement is also written in a factual style and describes the stages in the evolution of the Zionist movement, which is treated as a national liberation movement. This declaration is placed prominently at the beginning of the chapter: “Zionism is a movement that emerged to implement the idea that the Jews are a people with a distinct identity who, like every other people, have the right to freedom, to return to the land they call the land of their ancestors, that is, Eretz Israel-Falastin, and to establish their state in that land” (ibid.: 211). The contrast between the textbooks intended for Jewish and Arab schools is profound. Whereas Arab students are exposed to the Zionist narrative, Jewish students are given no direct exposure to the Palestinian narrative. Moreover, from both the introductory statement and from the rest of the chapter, Arab students learn that the Zionist movement came into being of its own initiative, with well-defined goals that integrated pragmatism and ideology. Jewish students are exposed to the Arab national movement in general and its Palestinian section in particular only in the shadow of the Zionist movement, and not as a movement in its own right. The Arabic book’s treatment of Palestinian society before the establishment of the State of Israel is purely reflexive. It emphasizes the beginning of the Jewish–Arab confrontation in the shadow of the Arabs’ and especially the Arab peasants’ (fellahin) fear of a Jewish takeover of their lands. Also highlighted in the book is the gaping cultural abyss that developed between the Arab population and the Jewish immigrants (ibid.: 213). Part 2 of the Arabic book (Bargout 1998) focuses on the Middle East in the twentieth century. It covers Turkey after World War I; the establishment of modern Turkey and Iran; developments in Arab countries as a result of World War I; Britain’s role in the Zionist–Arab conflict; the Arab countries’ struggles for independence; ideological currents in the Arab world; pan-Arabism under Nasser; and social changes in the twentieth century. Next the book treats a number of countries separately: Lebanon; the Arabian Peninsula; Turkey after World War II; and the idea of Arab unity. In an attempt to preserve a comparative perspective with the books intended for Jewish schools, our analysis henceforth concentrates on Chapter 13 in the textbook for Arab students, which deals with the issue of Palestine from the end of World War I until the 1948 war and the establishment of the State of Israel. Whereas the earlier chapters reproduced, more or less, the previous curriculum — 67 —

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for Arab schools, the chapter on the problem of Palestine incorporates changes in a number of areas associated with the conflict in the Middle East. It addresses the developments that took place prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and the relegation of a large part of the Palestinian people to refugee status, in both Arab countries and their homeland. The approach adopted in the new books for Arab schools is significantly different from that in the books for Jewish schools. The book for Arab schools attempts to provide a balanced picture that includes the attitudes of both sides, Jewish and Palestinian. The authors take pains to use neutral terminology that is devoid of any ideological burden for either side; however, at the same time, they ignore many loaded issues (such as the massacres during the 1948 war, the causes of the Palestinian refugee problem, etc.), which in fact are included in the books for Jewish schools. As a result, Arab students, in practice, learn a different version of the Zionist–Palestinian–Arab conflict and are exposed to a more evenhanded approach, in which each side’s perspective is reflected. In addition, the book in Arabic presents a picture and interpretations that are significantly different from those in the Hebrew book. We shall deal with these in detail below. This chapter in the book for Arab students begins by presenting the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate. Unlike the books for Jewish schools, which emphasize the balanced and conciliatory role of the mandatory authorities, the Arabic book highlights Britain’s pro-Jewish and anti-Arab stance, as reflected in Britain’s commitment, incorporated in the Mandate, to the establishment of a national home for the Jews, in the spirit of the Balfour Declaration (Bargout 1998: 278–88). Another significant difference between the Hebrew and Arabic books involves the treatment of the Palestinian national movement. As stated, the books in Hebrew refer to the Palestinian national movement as having appeared only in the 1930s, in the shadow of the Zionist movement. These books include no treatment of the social and cultural context in which the Palestinian movement evolved. Instead, the Palestinians are described as a backward and rural society led by a single family and the clerical leadership. As a result, Palestinian society appears monolithic and devoid of ideological pluralism. The book for Arab schools, by contrast, presents a broader picture of the Palestinian national movement, which had already begun to loom large in the nineteenth century and not simply as a satellite of the Zionist movement. In addition, while in the Hebrew books the presentation of Arab and Palestinian nationalism is generally accompanied by an emphasis on their hostility toward Jews and their intention to halt the development of the yishuv (Jewish settlement), the presentation in the Arabic book adopts a different and more complex approach. For example, in the description of the Arab national movement in the nineteenth century, the Arab book emphasizes:

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A Curriculum between Conflict and Peace The consolidation of Arab nationalism in the nineteenth century was not accompanied by any form of hostility toward Jews before the first wave of Jewish immigration in 1882. On the contrary, the Muslims evinced tolerance of Jews and allowed them to establish their neighborhoods alongside the Arab neighborhoods and also protected them when necessary. This position did not change until there was a change in the nature of Jewish life, from religious to settlement. (Bargout 1998: 286)

Unlike the books in Hebrew, the book in Arabic describes the Palestinian social and cultural milieu at the turn of the century, including a description of the cultural institutions, periodicals, and community and political organizations. In its treatment of the Palestinian national movement, the Arabic book describes the ideological and political pluralism that existed among the Palestinians, including the proliferation of political parties, some led by well-todo families and others by young and educated activists with a consolidated political awareness (the al-Istiqlal Party; the al-Shebab al-Arabi Conference; the al-Difaa al-Watani party; the Arab Palestinian Party; the Hizb al-Aslah alWatani; the Hizb al-Kawatleh al-Wataniya) (Bargout 1998: 290). The Arabic book describes developments in the 1930s and 1940s from both the Jewish and Arab perspective and, to a large extent, it does so in a factual manner. Not unlike the books in Hebrew, the Arabic book describes the series of British commissions set up to inquire into the Jewish–Arab conflict, as well as the involvement of the United States and other Western countries. The account of the 1947 United Nations partition resolution is similar in both languages too. From this point on, the Arabic book brief ly describes the sequence of military actions in a factual style, and avoids raising some of the sensitive issues that are key ingredients in the Zionist and Palestinian narratives. The Arabic and Hebrew books present very different versions of the Palestinian Arab uprising that began in 1936. The Arabic book lists the reasons that sparked the uprising, including the increasing number of Arabs who had been forced out of their villages; the rise in the number of unemployed following Jewish organizations’ implementation of the “Hebrew labor” principle; Arab fears regarding the increasing number of Jews migrating to Palestine; the authorities’ failure to impose restrictions to prevent the transfer of land from Arab to Jewish hands; the influence of revolutions in Arab countries; and the circulation of reports about the death of Iz ed-din al-Qasim. (Bargout 1998: 294) The Hebrew book, by contrast, addresses the reasons for the surge in Palestinian nationalism in the late 1920s, and notes that the rise of the extreme right in Europe helped stoke the fires in the Middle East. “Mussolini declared himself the friend and protector of Islam, and Nazi propaganda stressed the alliance between Germanism and Arabism, both of which were subject to a threat posed by the same enemies – Judaism, democracy, and Bolshevism” (BarNavi and Naveh 1999: 120). The distress of the Arab common folk, which according to the Arabic book played a central role in igniting the uprising, is not mentioned in the Hebrew — 69 —

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book. The latter emphasizes instead the collective causes and ignores the level of the individual, while highlighting the uncompromising “anti-Jewish, antiBritish” motif as a key catalyst of the uprising. As mentioned earlier, in its description of the sequence of events in the 1948 war, the Arabic book steers clear of discussing loaded issues, which feature prominently in the Hebrew book. Table 4.2 summarizes the key points. Notably, the Arabic book concludes with the establishment of Israel and makes no mention of subsequent events, whereas the chapters in the Hebrew book that deal with the Arab world in general continue until the early 1990s. As a result, the book in Arabic, unlike the books intended for the Jewish schools, ignores a number of important points relating to the Palestinian national movement

Table 4.2: The 1948 Israel–Arab war in Arabic and Hebrew textbooks in Israeli schools Arabic book

Hebrew book

Uses the neutral expression “1948 War.”

Uses the Zionist-ideological term “War of Independence.”

Ignores the massacres that took place during the war and ethniccleansing actions directed against the Palestinians.

Refers to the Deir Yassin massacre but in a fashion that diminishes the impact.

Describes the chronology of the war in a factual manner.

Description of the war highlights “Jewish heroism.”

No reference to this topic.

The war of the few (Jews) against the many (Arabs) and victory of quality over quantity.

Palestinian refugees: “Israel annexed 80 percent of the territory of mandatory Palestine, and most of the Arab inhabitants of this area were forced to leave their homes and villages for camps set up for them in Arab countries” (p. 316).

For the most part the Palestinians fled – “ran for their lives” – except for “about 10,000 villagers who were expelled after the end of the fighting in order to clear border areas of hostile elements” (p. 238).

No discussion of the debate on the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Discussion of the transformation of the Palestinians from refugees into a national group, including the Palestinian intifada.

Source: For Arab schools: Bargout (1998: 276–319); for Jewish schools: Bar-Navi and Nave (1999: 226–39, 316–23). — 70 —

A Curriculum between Conflict and Peace

after 1948, current events, Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, and the peace process in the Middle East. These are precisely the points that interest Arab students, who are examining their environment in search of answers to questions that arise in their daily lives regarding the political, economic, and social developments that impact the community in which they live, the state of which they are citizens, and the Palestinian people of which they are members. The book in Hebrew, by contrast, devotes several chapters to the wars between Israel and the Arab countries, the Palestinian national movement after 1948, the question of the occupied Palestinian territories, the implications of the intifada, and the transition from a century-old conflict to the start of a resolution and mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinians. Although this study criticizes the treatment of the material in these chapters, the fact remains that these issues are tackled in the Hebrew books, in contrast to the astonishing lacuna in the Arabic book. One might have expected that, as a text intended for Arab students, the Arabic book would devote significant space to addressing the conversion of the Palestinians into a minority in Israel and citizens on the margins of Israeli society. What is more, treatment of these issues could provide a framework for a discussion of the link between past, present, and future. But the Arabic book ignores these topics, referring to the Arab citizens of Israel in only a single sentence: “In the territory of the State of Israel there remained about 150,000 [Arabs] who received citizenship [in Israel], with about 25 percent of this number considered refugees because they had been forced out of their villages and resettled in neighboring villages and towns” (Bargout 1998: 316). Two chapters in the Hebrew book are devoted to the social structure of Israel. The first chapter deals with “the emergence of the Israeli nation” (Bar-Navi and Naveh 1999: 260–65). It surveys Israel’s struggle for economic independence, the creation of an Israeli nation, and the influences of mass immigration, economic challenges, wars, and the principle of ingathering of exiles, which created social tensions, dividing Israeli society according to ethnic groups. Nowhere in this chapter is there a single word about the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel. Jewish students learn about Israeli society as purely Jewish. There is no reference to the fact that one of the central challenges that faced the state, aside from the creation of the Jewish nation, was its treatment of the Palestinian population, which numbered about 13 percent when the state was established and involuntarily became a minority of second-class citizens.

Concluding Remarks This article has dealt with the history curriculum in Jewish and Arab schools in Israel. We have traced the main trends that characterize the goals and contents — 71 —

Majid Al-Haj

of this curriculum over five decades, with special emphasis on the period of the 1990s, which, following a century of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, was marked by a serious attempt to shift from conflict to reconciliation. Our analysis shows that Jewish and Arab students in Israel are exposed to almost completely different curricula, despite the fact that both school systems are under the official administration and control of the Ministry of Education. Although changes were introduced in the 1990s version of the textbook, the curriculum for the Hebrew schools is still oriented first and foremost toward the consolidation of a “national unity” and a national (and to some extent nationalist) identity among Jewish students. Unlike the Hebrew curriculum, the curriculum intended for Arab schools has long attempted to sidestep any content that might reinforce national feelings among Arab students. Also, it inculcates in Arab students the ideology of the dominant Jewish majority, without providing either students or teachers the chance to challenge this ideology. Nevertheless, the revised curricula of the 1990s for Arab and Hebrew schools, which were designed after the Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians (but before the start of the El-Aksa intifada in October 2000), are a slight improvement over their antecedents. The Hebrew curriculum presents for the first time a more balanced approach to the Israel–Palestinian conflict and the Palestinian national movement, in the context of the transition from war to reconciliation. It introduces the prospect of ending the Arab–Israel conflict. However, while the approach to the topic of the ongoing conflict seems more evenhanded, the new Hebrew textbooks still adopt a one-sided view that goes hand in hand with the mainstream Zionist-Jewish narrative. In this sense the improvement is insufficient, since no effort has been made simultaneously to address the Palestinian narrative. Moreover, the Hebrew curriculum deals with Israeli society as purely Jewish, without a single mention of the multicultural structure of Israel, which includes the Palestinian–Arab minority. Unlike the Hebrew curriculum, the 1990s Arab curriculum attempts to provide a balanced picture, by presenting simultaneously the Zionist-Jewish and the Palestinian narratives. However, throughout the Arabic textbooks the materials are presented in a factual, dry manner, failing to meet the declared aim of reinforcing the national Palestinian-Arab identity among Arab students. We may conclude, therefore, that while the “official history” in Jewish schools perfectly suits the mainstream “unofficial history” of the Jewish majority, there is still a wide gap between the “official” and the “unofficial” histories prevailing among the Palestinian community in Israel, despite the changes introduced in the 1990s curriculum. In this sense, a systematic effort has been made by the Ministry of Education to reconstruct the identity and collective memory of Jewish and Arab students alike. Accordingly, it attempts to strengthen national solidarity among Jewish students, while blurring national identity among Arab students.

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This trend is concomitant with the “militaristic culture” that has developed in Israeli society in light of the Israel–Arab conflict. In the framework of this culture, every effort is made at the official and public levels to turn the Jewish majority into an “enlisted” group, suggesting a framework within which all individuals have an active role in protecting national unity, as defined by the mainstream ideology (Ben-Eliezer 2003). At the same time, Arab citizens are considered a “hostile minority” and therefore subject to continuous control. As for the theoretical level, our analysis shows that the school curriculum reflects the power system in the wider society and relays the dominant ideology. Therefore, even if a transition occurs toward reconciliation, conflict is conveyed to students in an active manner, while peace is taught in a passive way that does not aim to turn students into active participants.

References Al-Haj, Majid. 1995. Education, Empowerment and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel. New York: State University of New York Press. ——— 1996. Arab Education in Israel: Control and Social Change. Jerusalem: Magnes. (Hebrew) ——— 2002. “Education for Multiculturalism in Deeply Divided Societies: The Case of Israel,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 26: 169–83. ——— . 2003. The History Curriculum for Arab and Jewish Schools in Israel: Policy, Content, and Goals. Haifa: The Center for Multiculturalism and Educational Research. Al-Haj, Majid and Henry Rosenfeld. 1990. Arab Local Government in Israel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Amareh, Muhammad and Abd al-Rahman Mari. 1999. Issues in Linguistic Education Policy in Arab Schools in Israel. Givat Haviva: Institute for Peace Studies. (Hebrew) Apple, Michael W. 1979. Ideology and Curriculum. New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——— 1982. Education and Power. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——— 1988. “Social Crisis and Curriculum Accords,” Educational Theory 38(2): 191–201. Armer, Michael and Robert Youtz. 1971. “Formal Education and Individual Modernity in an African Society,” American Journal of Sociology 76: 604–26. Banks, James A. 1981. Multiethnic Education: Theory and Practice. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. ——— 1989. “Multicultural Education: Characteristics and Goals.” In Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, ed. James Banks and C.A. Banks. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 2–26. Bargout, Sa’id, George Salameh, and Attalah Copty (eds.). 1995. The Middle East in the Modern Era. Part 1. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture. (Arabic, all excerpts in English were translated by the author of the current study.) Bargout, Sa’id (ed.). 1998. The Middle East in the Modern Era. Part 2. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture. (Arabic, all excerpts in English were translated by the author of the current study.) — 73 —

Majid Al-Haj Bar-Navi, Eli and Ayal Naveh. 1998. Modern Times. Part 1, 1870–1920. Tel Aviv: Sifrey Tel Aviv. (Hebrew, all excerpts in English were translated by the author of the current study.) ——— 1999. Modern Times. Part 2, 1920–2000. Tel Aviv: Sifrey Tel Aviv. (Hebrew, all excerpts in English were translated by the author of the current study.) Ben-Eliezer, Uri. 2003. “Militaristic and Civil Society in Israel: Forms of Neomilitarism and Anti-Militarism in a Post-hegemonic Era.” In In the Name of Security: Sociology of War and Peace in a Changing Era, ed. Majid Al-Haj and Uri Ben-Eliezer. Haifa: Haifa University Press. (Hebrew) Farah, Naif. 1991. “Teaching of History: Curriculum and Textbooks.” In Education for the Arab Minority in Israel. Issues, Problems and Demands, ed. Mohammed Habib-Allah and Attallah Copty. Haifa: Al-Karmah, pp. 109–13. (Arabic) Freire, Paulo. 1985. The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey. Giroux, Henry A. 1991. “Democracy and the Discourse of Cultural Difference: Towards a Politics of Border Pedagogy,” British Journal of the Sociology of Education 12(4): 501–10. ——— 1997. Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope. Theory, Culture and Schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Goodstein, Lynne. 1994. “Achieving Multicultural Curriculum: Conceptual, Pedagogical and Structural Issues,” The Journal of General Education 43(2): 102–16. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2001. Statistical Abstract of Israel. No. 52. Jerusalem: Central Bureau of Statistics. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lechinsky, Achim.1988. “Educational Theories and School Development in Germany in Historical Perspective,” Education 37: 97–110. Lynch, James. 1986. Multicultural Education: Principles and Practice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Makkawi, Ibrahim. 2002. “Role Conflict and the Dilemma of Palestinian Teachers in Israel,” Comparative Education 38(1): 39–52. Mari, Sami. 1978. Arab Education in Israel. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Mazawi, Andre. 1994. “Palestinian Arabs in Israel: Educational Expansion, Social Mobility and Political Control,” Compare 24: 277–84. McLaren, Peter. 1995. “White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Toward a Critical Multiculturalism.” In Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference, ed. Christine Sleeter and Peter McLaren. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 33–70. Ministry of Education and Culture. 1998. History Curriculum for Grades Seven to Nine in the State Stream. 2nd rev. edn.. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture, Pedagogic Secretariat. (Hebrew) ——— 1999a. Senior High School History Curriculum Committee. Mimeographed. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture. ——— 1999b. The History Curriculum for Arab High Schools. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education and Culture, Pedagogic Secretariat. (Arabic) Nakhleh, Khalil. 1977. “The Goals of Education for Arabs in Israel,” New Outlook (April–May): 29–35.

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A Curriculum between Conflict and Peace Naveh, Eyal. 1999. The Twentieth Century: On the Threshold of Tomorrow. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Books. (Hebrew) Parsons, Talcott. 1959. “The School Class as a Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society,” Harvard Education Review 29(4): 297–318. Phillips, Robert. 1998. “Contesting the Past, Constructing the Future: History, Identity and Politics in Schools,” British Journal of Educational Studies 46(1): 40–53. Rosenfeld, Henry. 1978. “The Class Situation of the Arab National Minority in Israel,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20(3): 374–407. Rouhana, Nadim and As’ad Ghanem. 1998. “The Crisis of Minorities in Ethnic States: The Case of the Palestinian Citizens in Israel,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30: 321–46. Sarsour, Sa’ad. 1981. “Arab Education in a Jewish State: Major Dilemmas.” In One of Every Six Israelis, ed. Alouph Hareven. Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, pp. 113–31. (Hebrew) Sleeter, Christine E. 1991. “Introduction: Multicultural Education and Empowerment.” In Empowerment Through Multicultural Education, ed. Christine E. Sleeter. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 1–23. ——— 1996. Multicultural Education as Social Activism. New York: State University of New York Press. Smooha, Sammy 1990. “Minority Status in an Ethnic Democracy: The Status of the Arab Minority in Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13(3): 389–413. Tabibian Ketzia, (ed.). 1999. Journey to the Past: The Twentieth Century, by Virtue of Freedom. Center for Educational Technology, Unit for Adapted Pedagogy of the Center for Educational Technology. Tel Aviv: Center for Educational Technology. (Hebrew) Wieviorka, Michel. 1998. “Is Multiculturalism the Solution?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21(5): 881–910. Ya’cobi, Dani et al. (eds.). 1999. A World of Changes. A History Textbook for the 9th Grade. Ministry of Education: The Division for School Curriculum. (Hebrew) Yiftachel, Oren. 1999. “Between Nation and State: ‘Fractured’ Regionalism among Palestinian Arabs in Israel,” Political Geography 18: 285–307.

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Chapter 5

THE EVOLVING ARAB RECEPTION OF THE HOLOCAUST AND PALESTINIAN TEXTBOOKS: A CONTRIBUTION TO DEMOCRACY AND PEACE EDUCATION?

Schirin Fathi

In August 2001, the Welt am Sonntag, one of the most widely circulated German daily newspaper supplements, blasted a headline on its front page that read: “Germany is financing anti-Jewish [‘judenfeindliche’] schoolbooks for Palestinians.” The uproar this news item caused can be easily imagined, especially as the article went on to elaborate that it was German taxes that were financing the anti-Semitic textbooks that would prepare children to become martyrs in the “Holy War” against Israel. Already in the previous year, when the first, newly devised Palestinian textbooks went into use, there had been an outcry in Israel, and even Mrs Hillary Clinton, in her bid to secure a seat in the U.S. Senate, felt prompted to go out of her way to stress that these books were not acceptable and appealed to the then First Lady of the Palestinian autonomous territories, Mrs Suha Tawil, to do something about the situation. I have quoted these examples to demonstrate that the issue of Palestinian textbook revision has made waves far beyond the local or regional arena and has warranted international involvement. — 77 —

Schirin Fathi

One such involvement was offered by the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research,1 located in Braunschweig, Germany. This institute, founded in 1951, was named after the Chair of the UNESCO Commission for the revision of schoolbooks, the historian Georg Eckert. As a result of his wartime experience he was intent on improving international understanding, mainly through the revision of history textbooks, where the tainted portrayal, national stereotyping, and exclusive historical narratives can be found most frequently. With the help of numerous experts from different fields, he was able to work toward the objectification of school textbooks. At the center of Eckert’s attention had been efforts to come to an understanding with former war enemies. The most outstanding success, and a milestone in schoolbook revision, was the German–French memorandum on controversial questions in European history. But too, the German–Polish recommendations, which is an ongoing project, and later on the German–Israeli schoolbook recommendations from 1985, can be counted among the more memorable successes of the work of this institute. It defines its mission in a scientific, didactic, and also political way. It has evolved more and more into a forum to bring conflicting parties together and – if possible – to aid in reformulating and revising the historical narratives that so often lie at the root of these conflicts. The scope of the institute has expanded to include the former Eastern Bloc after its political opening in 1989/90, Greek–Turkish relations, Latin America, German–Japanese cooperation, in addressing mutual deficits in perception, a project devising new history textbooks for a democratic South Africa, as well as many more thematic projects. One of the latest projects and – I must, unfortunately, interject before the discussion – one of the least successful has been the project, “From Peace Making to Peace Building – an Israeli–Palestinian Comparative Research of History and Civics Textbooks and Curricula Statements,” under the chairmanship of Falk Pingel.2 This project was designed in the post-Oslo euphoric atmosphere that gave rise to so many joint projects euphoric, I might add, in the international realm more than on the domestic front, where most keen observers were aware that there was no real chance of peace because of the inherent asymmetry of the accords. The project consisted of several rounds of workshops and meetings, starting in 1996, with the stated aim of presenting more objective textbook representation on both sides.3 Suffice it to say here that the aforementioned issue that brought Palestinian textbook revision to global media attention, albeit presented in an exaggerated and noncontextualized way, pointed to a major problem involving this textbook revision in the wake of the attempted peace negotiations of the mid – to late 1990s. The first impression one gains when analyzing the new schoolbooks in the context of the criticism levied against them is the blatant incongruity of interests. Therefore, the analysis of schoolbooks is symptomatic of the whole Israeli–Palestinian conflict. A recent analysis and review of the new Palestinian textbooks for national education (alternatively called Palestinian society population education) — 78 —

Arab Reception of the Holocaust and Palestinian Textbooks

reiterates that the perceived major problem was the lack of a distinct Palestinian perspective, a national Palestinian narrative, in the hitherto Egyptian and Jordanian textbooks which were used in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. According to the First Comprehensive Palestinian Curriculum Plan, authored by the Palestinian Curriculum Development Center, the design of a distinct Palestinian perspective and an emphasis on Palestinian history and society were indispensable prerequisites for the realization of a viable Palestinian society. In this context, Nordbruch remarks, “as a basic obstacle for social development, Israel and its occupation of Palestinian lands are referred to in various units. … However, Israel itself – its politics, interests and history – is entirely neglected. … While some brief References to Jewish history are limited to a negative depiction, the Israeli state remains entirely opaque in these units” (Nordbruch n.d.: 8). These observations are concordant with my own observations in the Palestinian textbook reviews from 1998, where the omission of Israel’s existence was conspicuous, and where the textbook authors went to great – and sometimes unintentionally comical – lengths to not have to mention the name “Israel.” I feel compelled to interpose at this point that this problem is not a onesided one. Israeli textbooks, too – despite some advances in recent years as a result of the untiring commitment of a small group of teachers and NGOs who are inspired by the findings of the so-called “New Historians” and “New Sociologists” – continue to deny the existence of an “Other” on the territory of their state prior to the existence of their state. According to Raz-Krakotzkin (2004), Israeli history textbook authors make great efforts to ignore the history of the territory between the destruction of the Second Temple and the beginning of Zionist immigration. The establishment of the Israeli national consciousness is thus based on the active obliteration of the history of Palestine. Thus, the Israeli historical narrative assumes the mythical connotation marked by a messianic-theological quality. At the core of this conflict lies the concept of rival, exclusive nationalisms that thrive on the denial of others’ histories, pasts, myths, and symbols. A prerequisite for any possible sustainable and peaceful solution is based on the mutual recognition of each other’s legitimacy and history. The role of the formal educational system as a prime agency of political socialization and appreciation of diversity cannot be overstated. As society and educational practices engage in an interactive relationship, old patterns of education have to be transcended and historical dissent has to be incorporated. For a democratic system thrives on an open political culture wherein people can forcefully claim the right to voice their own opinions and share their histories whilst respecting the rights and histories of their opponents. In this regard, the role of the Holocaust for Israel and in the Israeli national image is an issue that has been dealt with quite extensively by Israeli and Jewish academics (among others Gutman 1985, 1996; Segev 1994; Zuckermann 1999; Finkelstein 2000; Diner 2000; Bar-On 2001; and last, but not least, Zertal 2003) — 79 —

Schirin Fathi

– even as the Shoah is passing from memory to history and even if for a steadily increasing number of Israelis the Holocaust may no longer be the only legitimizing factor for the state’s right to exist. Yet, in the Israeli collective consciousness, the Holocaust retains an exclusive place that Palestinians and Arabs have to grapple with in any attempt to engage in dialogue with Israel. Arab academics, however, are beginning to realize the importance of understanding the Holocaust for the current peace debate. Following a period of neglect, Arab commentators focused on the denial of the historical occurrence of the Holocaust, and only recently has a serious debate started to take shape. Concurrent with a resurgence of Islamic anti-Semitism, the Arab media – at least, some – has ref lected significant criticism of these new manifestations of anti-Semitism. I will attempt to briefly trace this evolution of the Arab reception of the Holocaust and situate it within the discourse of peace and Democracy Education. A recently published volume edited by Höpp, Wien, and Wildangel (2004) revisited the statement by Fisk (1996) that Arabs were “blind to history” when it came to their relationship with the National Socialist regime in Germany. The conf lict in Palestine soon came to dominate all discussions about the relationships between Arabs and the Axis powers. Both sides in this conflict, the Israelis and the Palestinians, embarked upon instrumentalizing the past in an effort to present the “right” version of history. Comparisons of Hitler with Arafat, Hitler with Nasser and, vice versa, of Hitler with Sharon and Hitler with Begin were and are commonplace. In addition, an absurd competition broke out regarding the question of who constitutes the greater victim in moral and historical terms. According to the relatively recent analyses of Arab intellectual discourses regarding the Holocaust (see for example Kamil 2003), Arab occupation with this topic dates back to the beginnings of direct confrontation between Jews and Arabs, i.e. the clash of rival nationalisms in the same small stretch of territory. As the Israeli orientalist Gershoni (1999 quoted in Kamil 2003) tried to show, the intellectual discourse among Arabs until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba had centerd on a rejection of European antiSemitism. After the disastrous Arab defeat in 1948/49, the Holocaust became one of the rhetorical tools in the anti-Zionist discourses of Arab intellectuals and the mass media, subordinate to the Arab–Israeli conflict as such. Kamil (2003) identifies four patterns of discourse in an otherwise eclectic, ambivalent, and inconsequential handling of the topic. These four patterns can only vaguely be assigned a chronological order and they range from total neglect of the Holocaust in light of the Arab Nakba, which is regarded as the actual catastrophe, to a comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba (second pattern) – whereby the latter is accorded much more importance. The third discourse pattern rejects the Holocaust as a complete fabrication of the Zionist movement, as only a tool toward the establishment of the Jewish state; whereas the fourth — 80 —

Arab Reception of the Holocaust and Palestinian Textbooks

discourse concentrates on the European civilizations and their inability to integrate Jews in their midst, so that finally the Palestinians, who were in no way responsible, had to pay the price for a development that originated in Europe. What all these discourses have in common is that they do not accord the “enemy” the legitimacy of his own history; they either deny this history, or downplay or instrumentalize it. It is also safe to assume that these four discourses, in varying degrees, represent the general attitude of the Arab populace – probably up to this date. This was reflected in the reception that Roger Garaudy, the notorious French Holocaust denier, and David Irving, the British equivalent, were accorded in Arab capitals. It is only among some individual and isolated learned circles that a new consciousness is starting to emerge. Two of the most well known representatives of this consciousness are Azmi Bishara and Edward Said. Coming from different directions and having slightly different agendas in mind, they distance themselves from the instrumentalization of the Holocaust in Arab discourses. Both demand that Arab intellectuals recognize the Holocaust for what it was, a crime against humanity, and they heavily criticize Arab intellectual denial so far, pointing to many of the historical mistakes the Arabs have committed in their recent past. Said spells it out most clearly in an article in the Arabic daily alHayat in November 1997, where he states that only when Arabs are capable of recognizing the suffering of others – even their oppressors – will the world be able to recognize Arab suffering. Said’s article marks the turning point in Arab intellectual discourse. At least, it elicited enough criticism to propel a new preoccupation with the Holocaust. The reactions center around the interconnection between the question of Palestine and the Jewish question – however unjust and unfair this interconnection may be and however much it may complicate both questions. In more recent times it has furthermore centered on the comparison of the Holocaust and the actions of the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories, equating Zionism with Nazism and heading dangerously close to coming full circle again. In times of a heightened level of violence, it is particularly necessary to accord special importance to the project of educating the youth. For increased “violence creates a renewed dehumanisation and delegitimisation of the ‘other’ ” (Adwan and Bar-On 2004: 114). Especially in the aftermath of the second intifada, it has become difficult for the new intellectuals to downplay the “Zionism–Nazism” comparison. If the discourse of the “new” intellectuals was a product of the early 1990s concurrent with the hopes of a nascent peace process, the last decade has proven to be counterproductive. Since the start of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, this conflict and its attendant media presence has mobilized dormant antiSemitic sentiments not only in the Middle East, which has for the most part imported European anti-Semitism in the wake of modernization starting from the beginning of the twentieth century, but also in Europe. In Christianity as well as in Islam, religious stereotypes and long-held antagonisms surface, — 81 —

Schirin Fathi

coupled with a virulent anti-Americanism. This facilitates such incredible alliances as can be observed between Western right-wingers, Islamists, and leftist anti-globalization activists. In light of the development of the past four years, it is all the more vital for the slowly emergent new consciousness to take root not only among a select circle of intellectuals but among the Arab masses too in order to deconstruct the still existent discourses on the Holocaust that either deny, relativize, or instrumentalize it. In this regard, the role of the educational sector comes into full play. The encouraging note is that among all Arab nations it is a segment of the Palestinian people who, out of necessity and a more intensive interaction, have probably come the furthest in revisiting the Holocaust and reconsidering its unique historical importance for the Jewish people, and for humanity at large. In 2003, a group of Palestinian intellectuals in Israel founded a study group on understanding the Holocaust with the aim of eventually visiting Auschwitz. Their credo reads: “remembering the pain for the sake of peace” (Lavie 2003). The Arab–Israeli initiative published a communiqué which read in part: “We, the undersigned, a group of Arab citizens in Israel, fear the deterioration of relations between Arabs and Jews in our land … relations that have been characterized largely by great fear of the other and by nationalistic seclusion. … The two peoples cannot abandon the path of bloodshed unless each understands and internalizes the other’s pain and the other’s fears … understanding this principle, we have decided to delve deeply into history and swim in the Jewish past” (as quoted by Solnick 2003). Prior to this event – which generated a lot of media attention – some Arab members of the Knesset and other public figures had already paid visits to the death camps or participated in the annual “March of Life” from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Those were acts of individuals, often politically minded. But to have a large segment of a population, part of the Arab minority population of Israel, back such an initiative, sets different standards. This population might have, because of its close historical interaction with the State of Israel, an added interest in cooperation and good neighborly relations, especially after the unrests following the Al-Aqsa intifada, which left thirteen Arab citizens of Israel dead. Or, it might be argued, the close daily interaction might forge a need to understand the other. The opening of a Holocaust Museum in March 2005 in Nazareth, especially geared towards the Arab population in Israel, points in that direction. Whatever the reasons, these initiatives are not welcomed uniformly and also draw sharp criticism from part of the Arab public. Apart from the inevitable reactions that fear a belittling of their own experience of suffering as long as it is not portrayed in its uniqueness, or a fear of dwarfing their own problems, there are also voices fearing a “Zionization” of the Arab minority in Israel. Counter-initiatives are called for, such as a visit to Sabra and Shatila refugee camps “as a message to the world that the real tragedy is that of the Palestinian voices” (as quoted by Solnick 2003). — 82 —

Arab Reception of the Holocaust and Palestinian Textbooks

Even such a seasoned and reasonable voice in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as Azmi Bishara himself an Arab citizen of Israel and a member of Knesset – who, incidentally, was one of the first Arab intellectuals to state that the Arab populations need to engage in a serious dialogue with the “Other” by understanding the historical narrative of the “Other” – took on a very reserved and ambiguous stance on the issue of visiting Auschwitz at that particular time (Bishara 1994). As he seems to echo the voices of those most willing to compromise, the progressive and forthcoming segments of the Palestinian population, I find it useful to quote him here at length: If this interest is a genuine and honest desire to know about the historical and collective memory of the majority in the state in which we live, I think it is good. Anything like this is welcome. The problem is that I am a little sceptical. I fear, for example, that there is here an attempt to be “‘okay” – as if this in itself would open the Jews’ heart and influence their public opinion, [and they] will begin to take an interest in us the moment they see that we are taking an interest in them. The problem is that it is not proven that talking more [about], and taking greater interest in, the Jews’ pain increases the Jews’ sensitivity to other peoples. To date, when other peoples took an interest in the Holocaust, the result was that Israel turned this opportunity into an instrument. A situation arose in which the more you understand the history of the persecution of the Jews [the more] you must justify and understand Israel and its behavior today. This is what they call instrumentalization of the Holocaust. There are two great crimes regarding the Holocaust – denying it and [using it] as it is being used. Both contain an element of denial, because as soon as you compare the Holocaust to anything, you also dwarf it. (Azmi Bishara in Ha’aretz, February 5, 2003, as quoted by Solnick 2003)

Bishara’s comment displays the split perception that is very typical of progressive Arab intellectuals. On the one hand, there is a marked effort to distance oneself from the Holocaust deniers, and a clear commitment to compassion for the unique suffering of the Jewish people on a human level. Yet, on the other hand, and in a hermeneutically defined way, there remains a deep mistrust and a fear of instrumentalization in the context of the Palestinian–Israeli impasse. The situation in the occupied/autonomous territories is slightly different; the focus here is more on practical cooperation. Among the Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank there had been an upsurge in cooperative activity and joint projects following the signing of the Oslo accords. Not much of this activity has remained after the deadlock in the peace process and the renewal of heightened violence. Hardly anybody dares to, or finds it appropriate to, give the reception of the Holocaust a high priority. Thus, it is only PRIME’s project on sharing history that deals with the reception of the Holocaust, out of the eighteen organizations introduced in the booklet on Peace Building under Fire. Palestinian/Israeli Wye River Projects by the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) in Beit Jala. What does this portend? Is it assumed that a — 83 —

Schirin Fathi

discussion of the Holocaust will come naturally with more contact? Is the discussion subsumed under the unassuming and nonprovocative heading of “education” or is it deemed too hot to touch? Will such a discussion, if it is enforced, separate more than it binds at this stage? Will it move toward achieving more symmetry or accentuate the already existing asymmetry between these two unequal partners? These are valid questions that have remained mostly unanswered in the existing literature. They should, however, be used as possible yardsticks for future discussions. PRIME, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization established by Palestinian and Israeli researchers with the help of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, is one of the last resilient vestiges among the past inflation of joint projects. Its stated purpose is to pursue mutual coexistence and peace building through joint research and outreach activities. The chief architects of PRIME, Dan Bar-On and Sami Adwan, have understood that “a peace process is usually composed of peace-makers who work on top-down peace agreements, and peace builders, who work on the grassroots level, bottom-up. The success of a peace process is dependent on the successful synchronization of these two processes” (Adwan and Bar-On 2004).4 One of PRIME’s major projects is one on “sharing history,” as was mentioned before. Its main goal is to “disarm” the teaching of Middle East history in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms. Teachers and schools are seen as the critical “long-term change agents for deeply entrenched and increasingly polarized attitudes on both sides of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.” Its objective is not limited to revising existing textbooks, as in some other projects, but to teaching two parallel narratives and to engage teachers on both sides “in an entirely new collaborative process of teaching the history of the region” (Adwan and Bar-On 2004: 12–13). Obviously, their work too is confronted with numerous stumbling blocks set by all sides. In 2000, a project was launched to include Holocaust studies in the Palestinian curriculum by the former Palestinian Planning and International Cooperation Deputy Minister, Anis Al-Qaq. The idea, however, was never implemented and instead it elicited serious Palestinian criticism. Among others, the Chairman of the Education Committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council was quoted as saying: “There will be no attempt to include the history of the Holocaust in the Palestinian curriculum. … The Holocaust has been inflated so as to show the Jews as victims of a great injustice, in order to justify [the claim] that Palestine is necessary as a homeland for them, and to give them the right to demand compensation. When the history of the Holocaust is taught [in the Palestinian schools], it must be explained to the pupils that the Holocaust was significantly inflated and that we, the Palestinians, were forced to live with its results: Our country, Palestine, was lost and was occupied by Israel. It is better to teach the pupils about what is happening to our people” (Solnick 2003). Other voices, quoted in the same article, feared that “teaching the Holocaust endangers the developing Palestinian mentality,” In April 2005, — 84 —

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notwithstanding the progress that has been achieved so far in terms of raising consciousness, the newsletter of the Israeli embassy in Berlin circulated a notice by Nathan Sharansky (Minister without portfolio, responsible for Jerusalem, social and Jewish diaspora affairs). In this notice, he points out that tenth-grade students in the Palestinian autonomous territories are going to study the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” without reference to the fact that these alleged protocols are a forgery. Considering that we seem to have come full circle under the influence of renewed violence that abets a resumption of the exclusive hegemonic narrative, the work of those organizations that aim to break the cycle of denial on both sides and to find options and prerequisites for coexistence seem all the more needed. The problem of territory has to be tackled, but more than that, two rival nationalisms, histories, and collective memories need to be reconciled. The Palestinian authority in charge of issuing the new textbooks not only faces the difficult task of reworking the bulk of their own history, but is also faced with the delicate challenge of revising, restoring – and in some ways, “creating” – the image of the “enemy,” an enemy whose humanity has thus far been denied.

Notes 1. “Textbooks and Teaching Materials have an impact beyond the classroom. Not only do they transport factual knowledge, but also those historical images, notions of space and time, of agents, of political and social values which a society wants to convey to the next generation. In addition, they construct national images of one’s own community or nation, as well as those of others. Historically, textbooks have frequently been instrumentalized for war, for demonizing the opponent, and to justify one’s own national standpoint. Working with textbooks has a long history.” This is how the Georg-Eckert-Institute, a research institute on teaching materials in the fields of history, geography, and social studies, describes its own work assignment. 2. Dr Pingel is the deputy director of the Georg-Eckert-Institute and, among many other duties, he is also a member of the Education Committee to the German Commission for UNESCO. He chairs the Goethe Institute’s web-based Committee on Holocaust Education (www.holocaust-education.de) and represents the Eckert Institute in the Council of Europe’s project “Learning and Teaching about the History of Europe in the 20th Century in Secondary Schools” (http://culture.coe.int/hist20). 3. I became involved in this process in 1997 when I participated in the second workshop and started to look at the Palestinian textbooks as an outside analyst. I cannot possibly claim to be able to present you with a comprehensive account of this project as I am not privy to both sides of the equation. It is possible, however, to trace the process of the meetings, point to some of the recurrent issues and stumbling blocks, and, finally, take up some of the problems that led to the international criticism levied at the project and illustrate one or two reasons for its limited success. 4. The distinction between peace making (PM) and peace building (PB), according to the organizational self-description of the Israeli/Palestinian Centre for Research and Information (IPCRI), is as follows: “PM refers to the think-tanks’ political policy work on bringing Israelis and Palestinians together for policy-oriented discussions and planning aimed at developing policy alternatives for the leaders of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the international community to advance the peace process … PB refers to the work of bringing Israelis and — 85 —

Schirin Fathi Palestinians together in cooperative programs to develop greater understanding between them and to build constituencies for peace.” (Adwan and Bar-On 2004: 41–42).

References Adwan, Sami and Dan Bar-On. 2004. Peace Building under Fire. Palestinian/Israeli Wye River Projects. Beit Jala: Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). Bar-On, Dan. 2001. Die “Anderen” in uns: Dialog als Modell der interkulturellen Konfliktbewältigung; sozialpsychologische Analysen zur kollektiven israelischen Identität. Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung. Bishara, Azmi. 1994. “Die Araber und der Holocaust – die Problematisierung einer Konjunktion.” In Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust: Europa – USA – Israel, ed. Rolf Steininger. Vienna: Böhlau. Diner, Dan. 2000. Beyond the Conceivable. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Finkelstein, Norman. 2000. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso. Fisk, Robert. 1996. “Blind für die Geschichte,” Die Zeit, October 11, 1996. Gutman, Israel. 1985. Denying the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Shazar Library. Gutman, Israel. 1996. Antisemitism and the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. Höpp, Gerhard, Peter Wien, and René Wildangel (eds.). 2004. Blind für die Geschichte? Arabische Begegnungen mit dem Nationalsozialismus. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Kamil, Omar. 2003. “Araber, Antisemitismus und Holocaust. Zur Rezeption der Shoah in der arabischen Welt.” Parts 1 und 2. analyse + kritik 33(473): 14–15, and 474: 20–21. Lavie, Aviv. 2003. “Partners in Pain, Arabs Study the Holocaust,” CounterPunch, February 12, 2003. Nordbruch, Goetz. n.d. Palestinian Society–Population Education. A Project Report for the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Reasearch. Available at: http://www.gei.de/english/projekte/pdf/palest01.pdf (June 23, 2005). Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. 2004. “Aus dem Lehrbuch: Geschichte des Zionismus und Geschichte des Landes.” inamo 10(38): 24–28. Said, Edward. 1997. al-Hayat, November 27, 1997. Segev, Tom. 1994. The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Hill & Wang. Solnick, Alumna. 2003. “An Israeli Arab Initiative to Visit Auschwitz.” Inquiry and Analysis Series, no. 136, The Middle East Media Research Institute. Available at: www.memri.org (June 14, 2005). Zertal, Idith. 2003. Nation und Tod: der Holocaust in der israelischen Öffentlichkeit. Göttingen: Wallstein. Zuckermann, Moshe. 1999. Zweierlei Holocaust: der Holocaust in den politischen Kulturen Israels und Deutschlands. Göttingen: Wallstein.

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Chapter 6

POLICE–MINORITY RELATIONS IN A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY: THE ISRAELI CASE

Badi Hasisi

Introduction Israel is defined as a deeply divided society and the strained relations between Jews and Arabs is considered to be the worst cleavage. The severity of the division is reflected in the tense relations between the police and Arab citizens, which climaxed in the week-long disturbances during the month of October, in 2000, and resulted in the death of twelve Arab citizens (as well as another Palestinian resident from the occupied territories).1 The tense relationship between Arab citizens and the police is historically rooted and was earlier manifested in the Israeli Arab narrative in events such as “Yom Al-Ard” (“Land Day”) when violent clashes took place between the police and Arab citizens during the protests.2 A historical review ascertains that political factors are prominent in explaining the tense relationship between Arab citizens and the police in Israel. Factors contributing to the tension with the police are: (a) Arabs in Israel are part of the Palestinian nation and Israel has long been in conflict with the Palestinians, a fact which has led the Jewish majority to affiliate Israeli Arabs with the enemy and perceive them as having “dual loyalty”; (b) Israel defines itself first and foremost as a Jewish state; this definition has intensified the political — 87 —

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marginalization, feelings of discrimination and regime deligitimization among the Arab minority in Israel (Smooha 1993, Rouhana 1997; Hasisi and Pedahzur 2000; Ghanem 2001; Or Committee 2003; Hasisi 2005). Despite the centrality and acuteness of the political disagreement between Arabs and Jews in Israel, this is not the only factor leading to tense relations between Arab citizens and the police. The police force, as a delegated representative of the government, not only reflects the political agenda in Israel, but also carries a distinct cultural bias which is manifested in the policing of the Arab minority. There are marked cultural distinctions between Arabs and Jews. Arabs are part of a Mediterranean Islamic–Arabic culture while Jewish culture is often more Western-oriented. These differences are manifested in various cultural expressions such as: family structure, residential patterns, interrelations in the extended family (the hamula), gender relations, leisure, etc. Therefore, cultural differences between Arabs and Jews will most likely surface in the contact and relationship with the police force. Arab society is still, to a certain extent, traditional and has not undergone radical urbanization; a significant percentage of Arabs live in rural villages. This has preserved informal mechanisms of control in the community which maintain a type of social control over the behavior of its members. Nevertheless, it should be noted that communal mechanisms are not sufficient to contain certain groups that have undergone modernization, such as the younger generation. Therefore, informal mechanisms are not capable of replacing the police force, which is considered vital to the needs of Arab society in Israel, particularly in its fight against crime. This paper intends to analyze the relationship between the police and the Arab minority in Israel. The main focus will be on the connection between culture and law among minority groups and how this relationship affects and is reflected in police work among minority members. Our assumption is that cultural distinctions that exist between the minority group and the Jewish majority will be expressed in the cultural perceptions common among governmental institutions, including the police. These distinctions may further be heightened due to the underrepresentation of minority group members in the police force. The Arab minority in Israel is part of the Palestinian nation and Israel has been in a protracted, violent, and ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. With the establishment of the State of Israel, a rigorous supervisory system was set up by the security forces in order to neutralize any internal security threats posed by the minority Arab population. The climax of this practice was during the rule of the military administration (Lustik 1980; Hofnung 1991). Despite the overall efficiency of regulatory mechanisms in their control of the Arab minority in Israel, this does not mean that the state was equally successful in its governance of the Arab minority. In fact, the opposite seems to be true.3 It seems as though the State of Israel was unable, and at times unwilling, to create conformity among the Arab minority through the use of routine mechanisms of socialization, since these mechanisms rely on an ethno-cultural core of which — 88 —

Police–minority Relations in Israel

the minority group has no part. In light of this situation, expressions of “lawlessness” or “illegalism” among the Arab minority emerged. This was therefore, inter alia, due to deep cultural differences between Jewish and Arab culture. Moreover, the government’s tendency to alienate and neglect the Arab minority only promoted these illegal practices. The predicament depicted above has led the government and its institutions (including the police) to adopt a stance that relies on “judiciousness” and to engage in a segregating policing pattern that assumes minimal involvement in the matters of the minority community (Holmes 2000). This type of “policy” is supported by the “benign-neglect theory” which assumes that the police will deal with crime that threatens the majority group, but will neglect law enforcement among the minority group as long as it does not threaten the majority community. This policy of neglect evolves from the notion that the enforcement of some of the laws in the minority community carries a price. On one hand, enforcing these laws requires the state to undergo certain structural changes which might undercut the majority’s hegemony and also involves considerable expense. On the other hand, enforcement might lead to serious conflict with the minority group, especially since the latter feels that the rigid enforcement of certain laws runs against some of the cultural codes that form its group identity. It can be assumed that a differential law enforcement will mitigate the tension between the police and the Arab minority and may preserve and in fact reinforce traditional policing institutions in the minority as well as encourage the practice of “putting their house in order” by members of the community itself. Traditional, informal policing institutions will be perceived by the minority as genuine and, unlike the police, will not be suspected of having other interests. The minority community might subsequently expect state police forces to be employed only in extreme situations. This system may in fact lessen the tension between the minority group and the state in matters of law enforcement, but it may also create a negative image of state laws and government enforcement agencies among minority group members as well as encourage noncompliance with laws that are perceived as unjust (Tyler 1990; Rattner 1994). In this fashion, there is an increase in illegal practices and the legitimacy and governance of the state among the minority is weakened.

Findings The data presented here will illustrate different policing patterns which are partly explained by cultural distinctions. Then, patterns of action and contact of Arabs with the police will be linked to low levels of governance of the state among Arabs in Israel. Findings are divided into four categories: (a) data on the functioning of police stations in Arab communities; (b) Arab public attitudes toward the performance of and contact with the police; (c) data on the — 89 —

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distribution of police in Arab communities; (d) nationwide data on Arab police representation in the Israeli police force (Israel Police). Arabs in Israel within the “Green Line” (the 1949 Armistice line) constitute 16.5 percent, or about one million people, of the State of Israel’s population. The Arab population resides in three main geographical areas: the Galilee, the Triangle (the area between the villages of Tira and Taibe near the border with Jordan), and the Negev. This article refers to Arab–police relations in the Israeli Police’s Northern District jurisdiction (one out of six districts). The Northern District ranges from the Hadera Valley (Wadi Ara) in the south to the Lebanese border in the north. This district serves 1.9 million citizens: 60 percent Jews and 40 percent Arabs. The reasons for selecting the Northern District for this research were related to the fact that most of the Arab population in Israel resides in the police Northern District (about 70 percent), therefore providing the best opportunity for generalizing from the research findings to the overall state of police–minority relations in Israel. Furthermore, most of the Arab population in the Northern District resides in communities that are segregated from the Jewish population, allowing for a better comparison between police performance in Jewish settlements and in Arab settlements (this would be more difficult in mixed communities). The Arabs in Israel are not a single homogenous group but are rather marked by an inner diversity that affects their relationship with the police force. One of the features of this diversity is the religious and ethnic divide between nonBedouin Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Bedouins. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (2003), the ethnic distribution of the Arab population is as follows: 82 percent Muslims (including Bedouins), 9 percent Christians, and 9 percent Druze.4 Ethnic distinctions among Arabs in Israel are institutionalized, i.e., the State of Israel recognizes religious-ethnic ascription and finances separate institutions for each religious-ethnic group. The resulting institutionalized ethnic distinction strengthens each group’s boundaries as well as their segregation, therefore also minimizing opportunities for intermarriage.5 This ethnic distinction is not limited solely to the religious-cultural aspect, but is also manifested in the political attitudes and behaviors of the Arab minority. There is a basic difference between the Druze and some of the Bedouins, on the one hand, and non-Bedouin Muslims and Christians, on the other, in their relation to the government (Smooha 1993; Firro 1999). The Druze and Bedouins are ethnic groups whose Palestine nationalist motif is weak and who are therefore perceived as less threatening by the Israeli polity. Members of these groups are in fact drafted in to the armed forces. An indication of a distinct Druze political behavior is their voting patterns for the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset). Most Druze vote for Zionist parties, as opposed to Muslims and Christians, who vote for non-Zionist parties (about 70 percent) (Smooha and Ghanem 1999). The ethnic distinction is also evident in the relationship with the police; this will be demonstrated later on. — 90 —

Police–minority Relations in Israel

A. Police Station Performance in Arab Communities In order to compare police performance in Jewish communities with that of Arab communities in the Northern District, we focused on communities larger than 1,000 people. In northern Israel, there are many small settlements with less than 1,000 inhabitants (such as kibbutzim and hilltop settlements). By limiting the analysis to communities that have more than 1,000 inhabitants, the demographic gap between Jews and Arabs is reduced to a ratio of 52/48. Figure 6.1 demonstrates the findings for the population in the Northern District according to the distinction between Arabs and Jews in settlements larger than 1,000 inhabitants. Due to the similarity in the population size of Arab and Jewish settlements, the comparison of police performance in the north can be conducted in absolute numbers.

Findings We will begin with a review of the number of criminal cases filed in Arab and Jewish settlements. The number of cases is according to the community where the felony was committed, unrelated to the station which filed the case or the offender’s place of residence. A comparison of the two populations shows a substantial disparity between the number of cases filed in Jewish settlements and Arab settlements. A total sum of 58,000 criminal cases were filed in the year 2000 in Northern District police stations in communities with more than 1,000 inhabitants. About 73 percent of these cases (42,600 cases) were crimes committed in Jewish communities, as opposed to 27 percent (15,400 cases) that occurred in Arab communities: a ratio of almost 3:1 in spite of the demographic similarity in the Northern District (see Figure 6.1). Figure 6.2 compares the means of criminal cases filed per 1,000 people in Arab and Jewish communities of the Northern District in the years 2000–2001. This index indicates both actions initiated by the police in its fight against crime (especially in “exposure” crimes such as drugs) and citizen appeals to the police and their willingness to disclose and file complaints on crimes committed in their place of residence (Statistics Department of the Israel Police 2000; 2001). A significant difference was found in the comparison of the means of the cases filed per 1,000 people in Arab and Jewish settlements. In the year 2000, the average rate of cases filed per 1,000 citizens in Arab communities was 19 cases as opposed to 62 cases in Jewish communities, a 1:3 ratio, in spite of the similar demographic size. This ratio was consistent in 2001 as well (20 cases as opposed to 61 cases).6 According to the academic literature, there are several factors that influence the rate of criminal cases filed by the police. These include the reportability or willingness of the local population to file complaints and cooperate with the — 91 —

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Number of people

800,000 700,000 600,000 500,000

Arabs

400,000

Jews

300,000 200,000 100,000 Arabs

Jews

Figure 6.1 The population in the Northern District in the year 2000 in settlements with more than 1,000 inhabitants.

Mean per 1,000 people

70 62

61

60 50 40

2000 2001

30 20

19

20

10 0 Arabs

Jews

Figure 6.2 Means of the number of cases filed in 2000 and 2001 according to the division between Arabs and Jews.

police, the detectivability or willingness of the police to thoroughly investigate complaints, and the recordability, i.e., the nature and method of registering crimes by police officers (Black 1976, 1980). Another factor that must be taken into consideration is the size of the local population. The literature indicates a positive correlation between the size of the settlement and the volume of police work; that is, the bigger the community, the more crimes are committed and accordingly more criminal cases are filed (Cho 1974; Crank 1990). Figure 6.3 presents the rates of criminal cases filed according to the size of settlements in a comparison between Arab and Jewish settlements. Despite the similarity in the demographic size of Arab and Jewish populations in the Northern District (see Figure 6.1), a difference in settlement size is prominent. As opposed to the large Jewish cities, the Arab population is dispersed in small settlements (1,000–10,000 inhabitants). This difference could create a bias, which we avoided by regrouping the settlements into four categories: — 92 —

Average ratio per 1,000 people

Police–minority Relations in Israel

70 60

60

64

58 53

50

10,000– 10,000–20,000

40 30 20

31 23

20

20,000–30,000 30,000+

20

10 0 Arabs

Jews

Figure 6.3 Average ratio of criminal files opened according to the size and ethnic origin of the settlement. ● ● ● ●

communities under 10,000 inhabitants; communities of 10,000–20,000 inhabitants; communities of 20,000–30,000 inhabitants; communities with over 30,000 inhabitants.

Figure 6.3 shows that even when dividing results into four groups according to settlement size, the large gap of 60 to 20 criminal cases or a ratio of 3:1 between Jewish and Arab communities under 30,000 inhabitants remains. However, when focusing on communities with more than 30,000 inhabitants, the ratio of criminal cases filed between Jews and Arabs is reduced to 2:1. This finding confirms the correlation between community size and number of cases filed in the Arab sector, i.e., in the larger Arab communities there is a greater volume of police work. This finding can be explained by the greater police presence in large Arab communities (police stations are often situated in these communities), and/or by the frequency of serious crimes committed in the large Arab cities, which often call for police intervention and encourage the local population to file complaints with the police. A different picture is evident among Jewish communities. The rate of criminal cases filed does not significantly change according to community size.7 Figure 6.4 compares the distribution of cleared cases between Arabs and Jews in the year 2000. Cleared cases refer to those cases in which the police were able to find a suspect or suspects responsible for the crimes committed. The number of cleared cases is influenced by the type and severity of the felonies as well as the police’s willingness to carefully investigate these offenses, which included, both offenses that are easy to clear, such as crimes of violence, and those that are hard to clear, such as property crimes. The number of cleared cases is derived from the sum of actively open cases, and, therefore, in order to remain consistent in our comparison between Jews and Arabs, we will use the initial ratio of 3:1 in criminal cases filed and compare this number to that of the — 93 —

Badi Hasisi

25,000

Number of files

20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0 Arabs

Jews

Figure 6.4 Number of cleared files in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000.

cleared cases. From the above comparison, it is clear that the number of cleared cases among Arabs (about 10,000) is higher than expected (6,000 according to the 3:1 ratio). Out of all of the criminal cases filed among the Jewish population, suspects were found in only 45 percent of the cases. Compare this to the Arab population where in 65 percent of the criminal cases filed, suspects were found.8 This finding demonstrates that a higher percentage of suspects are found among Arabs as opposed to Jews. In their research, Mesch and Talmud have also found higher rates of cleared cases among Arab communities as opposed to the Jewish communities (Mesch and Talmud 1998: 237). It may be that the difference in the number of cleared cases between Jewish and Arab communities stems from the difference in the population’s criminal features. The next part of the paper will take an in-depth look at the type of felonies committed (property, violence, drugs) among Jews and Arabs. Figure 6.5 shows the number of property crimes filed in the Northern District’s police stations according to type of community. The crimes refer to breaking and entering a house, a business, or an institution, the unauthorized use of a vehicle, theft of auto parts or contents of a car, and other property crimes. When comparing property crimes committed in Arab and Jewish communities, a significant difference is noticeable. Figure 6.5 shows that in Jewish communities property crimes constitute 56 percent of all criminal cases filed (42,600 cases) as opposed to 30 percent of all criminal cases filed (15,400 cases) in Arab communities. The data indicate that only a few property crimes cases are filed in police stations serving the Arab sector as opposed to ones serving the Jewish sector. If the general ratio between Arab and Jewish communities in regard to criminal cases filed in the Northern District was 1:3, then, when it comes to property crimes, the ratio climbs to 1:6, meaning that for

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Number of files

30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0 Arabs

Jews

Figure 6.5 Number of property felony files opened in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000.

every property crime case filed in Arab communities, six cases are filed in Jewish communities. This finding can be explained by the strong informal mechanisms of social control that are at work in the Arab community. The labeling of a community member as a thief is accompanied by harsh social sanctions such as banishment and exclusion from the community for the thief and his family (Cohen 1990: 55). Moreover, as shown in Figure 6.4, the rate of felonies cleared in Arab communities is substantial and therefore the high price of social deviation and communal penalization dissuades criminals from committing felonies, especially property crimes in Arab communities (Cotterrell 1984). Another explanation is that property crimes are committed in areas where the population is economically established. Since most of the Arab population belongs to the working class in a middle-class society, the rate of property crimes is low since there “is nothing to steal” in their own communities. This finding is evidence of a low rate of property crimes in Arab settlements, but one shouldn’t rush to the conclusion that there are only a few Arab property criminals; I will expand on this later. Research has also shown that correlations exist between unemployment and crime. Some researchers claim that as levels of unemployment in the population increase, so does crime, and especially property crimes (Danzinger and Wheeler 1975; Chiricos 1987; Witt, Clarke, and Fielding 1999). The unemployment rate among Arabs in Israel is one of the highest in Israeli society, and yet the rate of property crimes is relatively low. This finding challenges and contradicts the research noted above. Other studies have claimed that in neighborhoods or communities where levels of unemployment are high, a low crime rate was observed, especially property crimes, due to the simple fact that many of the unemployed remained at home and their presence served indirectly as a means — 95 —

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of guardianship (Cantor and Land 1985, 2001). In regard to Arabs in Israel, as mentioned earlier, the unemployment rate is high and residential dispersion is based on patrilocal practices, i.e., members of the extended family reside in a concentrated geographical area (Al-Haj 1985). This situation can indirectly lead to an increase in the control over and protection of property in Arab communities. These reasons therefore encourage Arab felons to commit property crimes in Jewish communities, where there is more property to steal, a lower risk of penalty, and where there are no social sanctions such as are imposed in Arab communities. Furthermore, in light of the estrangement between the Arab and Jewish communities and the sense of deprivation and antagonism among Arabs in Israel, property crimes committed by Arabs in Jewish communities can also be a result of revengeful motives. Figure 6.6 relates to the number of cases filed in Northern District police stations on account of violence committed against the person. Crimes against the person refer to: severe bodily harm, assault, kidnapping and false imprisonment, attack of a public official while on duty, burning tires, setting roadblocks, throwing Molotov cocktails (petrol bombs), and other crimes against the person (Statistics Department of the Israel Police 2004). It would be expected that crimes of violence committed in Arab settlements would not exceed 1,500 cases and that this figure would correspond with the 1:3 ratio of filings in Arab and Jewish communities as presented earlier. However, as Figure 6.6 demonstrates, the number of cases filed is twice the expected number. Violence committed against the person constitutes 11 percent of all cases filed in the Jewish sector, as opposed to 21 percent of all cases filed in the Arab sector. This finding indicates that there is an overrepresentation of violent crimes in the Arab sector. The research literature shows that violent crimes tend to be reported and cleared more than any other type of crime (such as victimless crimes) due to their severity (for example, see Black 1980: 70–72). However, this explanation is not sufficient in accounting for Arab crime rates in Israel. The prominence of the family clan (hamula) in the social order of Arabs in Israel also has an effect on involvement in crime. For example, from time to time, a quarrel might break out among members of different families who reside in the same community. The reasons may be a border dispute among neighbors or differences over the division of power in local politics. These types of conflicts may set in motion a dynamic of divisiveness (often into opposing camps), ending up in a mass confrontation involving men from the two families (or groups). Such an event leads to ongoing hostility and recurring outbursts of violence between both sides that eventually will require police intervention and the filing of charges of assault (Ginat 2000). In addition, clauses under the heading of crimes committed against persons also refer to violent contact with public officials on duty such as the police. Hence, it can be assumed that the tense relations between Arabs and the police force give rise to violent confrontation that is expressed in persons crimes in the statistics. These types — 96 —

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5,000 4,500

Number of files

4,000 3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 Arabs

Jews

Figure 6.6 Number of violence against the human body files opened in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000.

of crimes include actions that are common in Arab protests in Israel, such as burning tires, setting up roadblocks and throwing Molotov cocktails. Nearly 10 percent of all cases filed in Arab and Jewish communities are associated with drug offenses. The evidence shows that police actions in relation to drug crimes fits the 1:3 ratio, meaning that for every drug case filed in Arab communities, three are filed in the Jewish communities (see Figure 6.7). Unlike property and violent crimes, drug offenses are crimes of “exposure” and involve two aspects. The first is the police work and allocation of funds (such as manpower) for dealing with this type of offense. The second aspect refers to the cooperation between the community and police in resolving and preventing drug crimes. With regard to police activity, the high rates of police drug exposure in the Jewish sector (three times more than in the Arab sector) can be attributed to the locations where these offenses are perpetrated. Among the Jewish population, drug felonies are more common among youth and the police are more inclined to raid clubs and parties (such as “acid parties”) where there are many young participants, and to subsequently conduct numerous arrests of both dealers and users (from an interview with Borovsky, Northern District inspector, Yediot Haifa, August 27, 2004). The recreational patterns of young Arabs are different than those of their Jewish counterparts who tend to engage in drug use in clubs and parties (Bar-Hamburger, Levi, and Cohen 1999). Drug use among young Arabs also takes place in Jewish cities or in the privacy of their own home or backyard. This cultural distinction in patterns of drug use among young Arabs makes it harder for the police to locate and apprehend dealers and drug users. Regarding the second aspect, drug offenses are “exposure” crimes that often require the local population’s cooperation with the police. Because of their — 97 —

Badi Hasisi 4,500 4,000 Number of files

3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 Arabs

Jews

Figure 6.7 Number of drug files in Arab and Jewish settlements in the year 2000.

tense relationship with the police, Arabs in Israel are less likely to cooperate with the police in reporting dealers, users, or locations where drugs are sold. However, these explanations do not change the fact that police activity in exposing drug offenses among Arabs in Israel is relatively low (1:3) in comparison to the Jewish population, thus apparently ref lecting the insufficient allocation of resources and means for drug enforcement among Arab settlements. In summary, according to the above data, the rate of reported crime (consisting of the number of cases filed, the number of cleared cases and other data) of Arab residents in the Northern District is lower than their proportion of the district population. This raises the question whether this finding is due to the low crime rates among Northern District Arab residents or whether there is another explanation. The literature provides a persuasive explanation which refers to crime rates, report, and crime enforcement in traditional societies (Okereafoezeke 2003). The main argument of this research is that the influence of strong and informal mechanisms of social control deters people from defying the social norm and therefore lowers the rate of reported crime (Cohen 1990; Ginat 2000). Moreover, reported crime rates are dependent on the cooperation of citizens with the police in the reporting and preventing of crime. It may be that the low rates of reported crime are a result of the limited cooperation between Arabs and the police in Israel. Another likely explanation of the low rates of reported crime in Arab settlements could be the relatively curbed presence and activity of policemen in Arab settlements. This will be explained later. The data show that there are relatively less property crimes committed in Arab settlements than in Jewish settlements. This could be a result of social control in the settlements as well as the fear of informal social sanctions: a — 98 —

Police–minority Relations in Israel

property crime is perceived as trespassing and considered an assault, which therefore deserves a severe penalty of the offender, sometimes without being reported to the police (Cohen 1990: 52, 98). Furthermore, the relatively high report rate of property crimes in the Jewish sector is a result of the need to substantiate that such an offense was committed in order to file an insurance claim. Since the Arab population rarely insures its property, there is no need to report such crimes to the police (Gideon 1998). Another reason for the low rate of Arab property crimes may be that the motivation for committing such crimes is higher in Jewish settlements basically because they are economically more established and more material goods can be found. A high frequency of violent crimes to persons was found in Arab settlements. Generally, this finding can be attributed to the intermittent mass brawls between family clans or groups on matters such as local politics, conflicts between neighbors on property boundaries, or brothers vying for inheritance, etc. (Cohen 1990: 54–55).9 Findings clearly show that the percentage of cleared cases is higher among Arab communities than Jewish communities. This could be a result of the overrepresentation of violent crimes to persons, which have a high rate of clearance (Black 1980: 83). In Arab settlements, informants from the police force and national security agencies work undercover in order to expose threats to national security but they also report common (that is, not political) felonies and this contributes to the higher rate of cleared cases (Shipler 1987: 429; Cohen 1990: 26, 149). Even though findings show there is very little reported crime in Arab settlements, this does not mean that there is an underrepresentation in the Arab share of overall crime rates in Israel. When the numbers of Arab and Jewish felons in the Northern District are examined, disregarding the place where the crime was committed, we discover that both Arab and Jewish felons are represented accordingly.10 This finding proves that a significant percentage of Arab criminal actions in Israel takes place outside their residential communities.

B. Attitudes of the Arab Public toward Police Performance and Contact with Police Officers In order to assess the influence of Arab–Jewish cultural differences on relations with the police, a telephone survey was conducted and questions dealing with police–community relations in Israel were asked. The survey population was defined as adult Arab (over the age of 18) in Israel residing within the jurisdiction of the Israeli police force’s Northern District. This area ranges from Wadi Ara in the south to the Lebanese border in the north. In order to enable a comparative perspective between Jews and Arabs, the sample also included participants from the Jewish population. The Jewish population was restricted — 99 —

Badi Hasisi

to northern Israel in order to resemble the Arab population. Thus, the focus was on the “04” telephone area code whose geographical area resembles that of the police’s Northern District. The sample included 510 Arab respondents and 250 Jewish respondents. Public attitudes on a number of issues associated with law enforcement and police relations are portrayed in Table 6.1. The data show that for all statements, Arab respondents expressed views that were more negative than those of Jewish respondents. The largest difference between Jewish and Arab respondents was evident in the statement referring to the respondent’s feelings that the police were not desirable in their place of residence. Arab respondents supported this statement (2.73) as opposed to the Jewish rejection (1.82) of the statement. Regarding people’s willingness to cooperate with the police, a difference was also found between Jewish and Arab respondents. Arab respondents supported the position that reporting felons to the police was the same as informing on them (2.55), while their Jewish counterparts rejected this perception (1.87). Regarding the inclination of respondents to join the police force, Arabs were more reluctant in comparison to Jewish respondents (3.06 as opposed to 3.65, respectively). As for police performance in events related to the public order, again, a noticeable difference existed between Jews and Arabs. While Arabs respondents felt the police used excessive force in public protests, Jewish respondents were more reserved in their agreement (3.39 as opposed to 2.98, respectively). Table 6.1 also indicates that Arab respondents agree with the statement that the police violate civil rights while Jewish respondents were less inclined to accept this position (3.09 as opposed to 2.87, respectively). Moreover, in a general evaluation of police force performance, Jewish respondents were more positive than their Arab counterparts (3.36 as opposed to 3.16, respectively). With regard to respondents’ feelings of security upon seeing a police officer, Arabs felt less secure than Jews (3.19 as opposed to 3.38, respectively). In short, in reference to all of the statements regarding the police, Arab respondents expressed more negative positions than Jewish respondents. However, it should be pointed out that in regard to one statement, there was agreement between Jewish and Arab respondents. Both sides similarly view the need for a police presence in their communities (4.54 in comparison to 4.52, respectively). On reviewing Arab respondents’ attitudes according to ethnicity, it seems generally that Druze and, to a lesser extent, Bedouins positively appraise the police force’s performance, whereas both Muslims and Christians regard the police’s work in a negative manner. The greatest disparity was evident in the different Arabs’ inclination to enlist in the police force. Druze were more willing to enroll than their Muslim (non-Bedouin) counterparts (4.35 as opposed to 2.65, respectively). Furthermore, Druze Arabs felt more secure at the sight of a police officer than non-Bedouin Muslim respondents (3.77 as opposed to 3.11, respectively) and Druze respondents tended less to agree with non-Bedouin — 100 —

— 101 —

1.82*** (1.38) 1.87*** (1.36) 3.65*** (1.55) 2.98*** (1.32) 2.87*** (1.20) 3.36*** (1.10) 3.38*** (1.37) 4.52 (0.98)

You feel the police are not wanted in your community Reporting criminals to the police in my view is informing on them You are willing that a member of your family be a police officer The police use too much force against demonstrators In many cases, the police violate civil rights The police perform their duty in a capable manner When you see a police officer, you feel more secure Police services should be provided in every community

Arabs in general 2.73*** (1.60) 2.55*** (1.63) 3.06*** (1.78) 3.39*** (1.52) 3.09*** (1.40) 3.16*** (1.34) 3.19*** (1.58) 4.54 (1.09)

Non-Bedouin Muslims 2.83 (1.61) 2.53 (1.64) 2.65*** (1.71) 3.40** (1.59) 3.13 (1.41) 3.13 (1.35) 3.11 (1.58) 4.47 (1.18) 2.68 (1.52) 2.35 (1.53) 3.35 1.76) 3.64* (1.29) 2.95 (1.29) 3.01 (1.27) 2.88 (1.63) 4.77 (0.82)

Christians 2.42 (1.60) 2.78 (1.74) 4.35*** (1.33) 2.91* (1.43) 3.14 (1.42) 3.58* (1.32) 3.77* (1.48) 4.98 (0.97)

Druze 2.54 (1.53) 2.74 (1.62) 3.69 (1.72) 3.54 (1.43) 2.92 (1.47) 2.92 (1.28) 3.46 (1.46) 4.56 (0.91)

Bedouins

The average ranges from 1 to 5; 1 = lack of agreement; 5 = full agreement * < .05 ** < .01 *** 1,2,3 3>1 ***21.86 4>3,2,1 3>1,2

F (Tucky)

The Role of “Threat Perception” in Xenophobia

E. Halperin, D. Canetti-Nisim, and A. Pedahzur

strengthens our earlier findings that the influence of the level of education on xenophobia is higher than influence of the employment status. Xenophobic attitudes to labor migrants were significantly higher (t = –3.01, p < 0.01) in the nonacademic-employed group (M = 3.02, SD = 1.38) than in the academic-unemployed group (M = 2.44, SD = 1.35). The same findings were obtained for the differences (t = –4.49, p < 0.001) in xenophobic attitudes to Palestinian citizens of Israel between the nonacademic-employed (M = 3.58, SD = 1.39) and the academic-unemployed (M = 2.66, SD=1.54). On the other hand, no significant differences between these two groups were found in their attitudes to FSU immigrants. In sum, as expected, after deduction of the joint effect, the influence of employment status on xenophobia seems negligible. In contrast, level of education is a crucial aspect in the evolution of these attitudes. To find the origins of these differences and obtain a deeper understanding of the comprehensive developmental model of xenophobic attitudes, we investigated the exact role of the perception of threat in any plausible explanation. To test H4 and H5 in an advanced manner we conducted three steps of regression equations for each minority group. The three equations follow the three conditions suggested by Baron and Kenny9 to test mediation. In the first equations (Table 7.3, column 1) the perception of threat is predicted as a function of the level of education, employment status, and the major background variables. Column 2 presents a prediction of xenophobia as a function of the same set of independent variables. In equation 3 (column 3), the perception of culturaleconomic threat is added to the set of predictors of xenophobic attitudes. The coefficients shown in column 1 suggest that threat perception is affected in all cases by the level of education, in the expected direction: threat is likely to decrease as education level is higher. On the other hand, no association was found between employment status and the perception of threat from any of the minority groups. These findings imply the absence of significant differences between people who work and who are unemployed in their perception of competition and threat. This may be a very important and meaningful argument in the challenge to understand the logic of the potential influence of SES factors on xenophobic attitudes. The integration of columns 2 and 3 of each model was aimed at testing the hypothesis that perceived threat intervenes between individuals’ SES and their xenophobic attitudes (Raijman, Semyonov, and Schmidt 2003). The results in column 2 reveal that level of education, political position, and religiosity exerted significant effects on xenophobia against all minority groups. In contrast, employment status and income level10 did not affect xenophobia in either of the minority group models. These two variables are known in the literature (Oliver and Mendelberg 2000), being the natural “partners” of education level, as the main components of the SES variable. Column 3 reveals that the perception of threat partially mediates the influence of education level on xenophobic attitudes. Therefore, the results — 130 —

— 131 —

–.01 (–.20)

.07 (1.22)

–.30*** (–5.43)

.07 (1.25)

Employment status

Religiosity

Political stand

Income

361

N

p < .05*, p < .01**, p < .001***

.17

R2

Threat perception

–.17** (–3.30)

Education level

1 Threat

361

.25

–.01 (–.11)

–.31*** (–5.98)

.16** (3.13)

–.00 (–.04)

–.20*** (–3.94)

2 Xeno’

.14** (2.87)

.00 (.04)

–.14** (–2.91)

3 Xeno’

361

.35

.34*** (7.13)

–.03 (–.59)

–.21*** (–4.16)

Labor Migrants

360

.20

–.11* (–2.00)

–.21*** (–4.01)

.14** (2.71)

.05 (1.01)

–.17** (–3.30)

1 Threat

360

.17

–.05 (–.86)

–.16** (–3.01)

.13* (2.45)

.06 (1.21)

–.23*** (–4.28)

2 Xeno’

360

.42

.55*** (12.12)

.01 (.18)

–.04 (–.95)

.05 (1.19)

.03 (.68)

–.13** (–2.96)

3 Xeno’

Immigrants from FSU

359

.29

–.02 (–.37)

–.42*** (–8.40)

.08 (1.63)

.03 (.59)

–.15** (–3.10)

1 Threat

359

.35

.03 (.62)

–.44*** (–9.21)

.11* (2.22)

–.03 (–.71)

–.22*** (–4.61)

2 Xeno’

359

.58

.57*** (13.81)

.04 (1.05)

–.20*** (–4.73)

.06 (1.56)

–.05 (–1.26)

–.13** (–3.42)

3 Xeno’

Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Table 7.3 Regression equations coefficients predicting threat perception and xenophobic attitudes to the three minority groups

The Role of “Threat Perception” in Xenophobia

E. Halperin, D. Canetti-Nisim, and A. Pedahzur

suggest that xenophobic attitudes to Palestinian citizens of Israel, labor migrants, and FSU immigrants derive from two parallel paths: the direct influence of the level of education on xenophobic attitudes, and the influence of education level on perceptions of economic-cultural threat, which amplify xenophobic attitudes. Employment status, which had no direct effect on xenophobic attitudes, did not have an indirect mediating effect either.

Discussion The primary objective of the study was to provide a general overview of the relations between socioeconomic and psychological factors, on the one hand, and xenophobia against minorities, on the other. Generally, threat perception played a key role in the translation of socioeconomic factors into xenophobia. The findings also highlighted the very potent impact of threat perception on xenophobic attitudes, as a mediating variable but also on its own. Unlike education level, employment status played only a minute role in explaining xenophobic attitudes toward minorities. Put differently, less educated people were more xenophobic because of their high threat perception. Yet surprisingly enough, although unemployed people proved more xenophobic than employed ones, due to the lack of meaningful correlation between employment status and threat perception, the effect of employment status on xenophobia was found to remain fairly marginal. The main theoretical argument that this study challenged is the assertion that low socioeconomic status leads to higher levels of xenophobic attitudes to minorities (Quillian 1995; Espenshade and Hampstead 1996; Dustmann 2000; Esses et al. 2001). The unique study design enabled us to create a more focused analysis of the impact of education level and employment status on xenophobia. The findings show that out of an array of socioeconomic indicators, only education level had an effect on xenophobic attitudes via threat perception. Furthermore, the impact of the level of education on xenophobia regarding all groups was much higher than that of other SES variables (employment status, income), and held true even after controlling for political position and religiosity.11 We submit that perception of threat and competition may occur mainly when individuals are worried about deterioration of status, and not merely as a result of lower socioeconomic status (Scheepers, Gijsberts, and Coenders 2002). Socioeconomic factors will foster xenophobia only when people’s status leads them to feel that the outgroup creates competition that may endanger their current status (Oliver and Mendelberg 2000). The perception of threat and competition basically relies on similarity of skills and qualifications (Quillian 1995), which depends mainly on education level, not on current, and sometimes temporary, employment status. Hence, our findings lend credence to the theory — 132 —

The Role of “Threat Perception” in Xenophobia

of “labor market competition” (Esphenshade and Hampstead 1996), which claims that individuals tend to be more suspicious of external competitors who have similar skills to their own and who might thereby endanger their position in the labor market. No substantial differences, then, exist in the perception of threat experienced by an unemployed person and by a “nonskilled” employed worker. In some situations the latter might even feel more threatened due to the lack of stability of his/her labor market position. So it is not surprising to find that employment status alone affects neither perception of threat nor xenophobic attitudes. Consequently, for both employment status and education level, threat perception serves as critical in determining which factors may affect xenophobic attitudes. Understanding the mediation role of perceived threat in the development of xenophobic attitudes emphasizes the necessity of future investigation of more situational variables as exogenous in the same “mediating” model. The theoretical logic for the inf luence of economic, political, or demographic variables on xenophobia via threat has been tested in previous studies (e.g., Scheepers, Gijsberts, and Coenders 2002; Raijman, Semyonov, and Schmidt 2003), but it needs further development. In addition, this study design might inspire future investigators who are interested in evaluating the specific impact of psychosocial factors on xenophobia. In sum, our findings might have some influence on the development of research in the field of intergroup relations. First, we argue that the study of the origins of xenophobic attitudes to minorities should not focus on socioeconomic status in general but on education level, particularly academic education. The meaning of this argument is that even a poor individual who has the opportunity for academic education will have a better chance of developing more tolerant attitudes to minorities. Second, it cannot be ruled out that it is not necessarily the objective socioeconomic situation that impacts xenophobic attitudes, but rather subjective threat perceptions. We are not suggesting that changing perceptions is easy, but it definitely is worth a try …

Notes 1. The semantic meaning of “xenophobia” is fear of foreigners/strangers, so a few recent studies have argued that threat perception and hate (xenophobia) are in fact the same concept (Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior 2004). Nevertheless, a number of empirical examinations of this argument have yielded two distinct independent variables (Luedemann 2000; Scheepers, Gijsberts, and Coenders 2002; Raijman, Semyonov, and Schmidt 2003) and accordingly we adopt this attitude in our study. 2. As a by-product of the study design, approximately 50 percent of the participants were academics. 3. All measures were tested in a pilot study carried out among Israeli students. Where necessary, modifications were made according to the findings. — 133 —

E. Halperin, D. Canetti-Nisim, and A. Pedahzur 4. The scale consisted of the following four items: (1) Are you willing to invite (a Palestinian citizen of Israel/an FSU immigrant/a labor migrant) to a social event at your home? (2) Are you willing to accept (a Palestinian citizen of Israel an FSU immigrant/a labor migrant) as your boss? (3) Would you approve of a member of your family becoming romantically involved with (a Palestinian citizen of Israel/an FSU immigrant/a labor migrant)? (4) Would you agree to live in the same neighborhood as (a Palestinian citizen of Israel/an FSU immigrant/a labor migrant)? 5. Security and physical threats are of major importance in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and because of our wish to focus on the socioeconomic area we deliberately chose to test attitudes to minority groups relevant (Palestinian citizens of Israel) and not relevant (labor migrants and immigrants from FSU) to the conflict. For the same reason we decided to use a scale of economic-cultural threat. 6. The scale consists of the following six items: (1) (Palestinian citizens of Israel/FSU immigrants/labor migrants) cost us more money than they bring in themselves. (2) Where qualifications are equal, (Palestinian citizens of Israel/FSU immigrants/labor migrants) should have the same chance in the job market as Israelis. (reversed) (3) (Palestinian citizens of Israel/FSU immigrants/labor migrants) burden the already stressed job market in Israel. (4) (Palestinian citizens of Israel/FSU immigrants/labor migrants) should adopt the Israeli way of life. (5) (Palestinian citizens of Israel/FSU immigrants/labor migrants) enrich the cultural diversity of our everyday life (reversed). (6) (Palestinian citizens of Israel/FSU immigrants/labor migrants) are causing a decline in Israeli culture and everyday life. 7. The confirmatory factor analyses reported in this section represent only the final stage of comprehensive prior treatment to establish the validity and reliability of each measure. To be more accurate, the first (not rotated) factor analysis yielded three factors: (1) xenophobia, (2) cultural threat, (3) socioeconomic threat. Only after limiting the number of potential factors to two were the two distinct, expected scales discovered. 8. To insure that the effect on the endogenous variables was obtained strictly from the SES variables that we chose for that study, income level, political stand, and religion definition were all measured as background variables. 9. According to Baron and Kenny (1986), a variable will serve as a mediator only if the following three conditions are met. First, the variance of the “potential” mediating variable is explained by the independent variable. Second, the “potential” mediating variable significantly explains the variance in the dependent variable. Third, when the “potential” mediating variable is imported into the regression equation of the dependent–independent variable, the effect of the independent on the dependent disappears (full mediation) or moderates (partial mediation). 10. Income level was measured as one of the main background variables. 11. In the Israeli arena, political position and religiosity are generally important determinants of attitudes to minorities (Pedahzur and Yishai 1999; Raijman, Semyonov, and Schmidt 2003).

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E. Halperin, D. Canetti-Nisim, and A. Pedahzur Horowitz, Dan and Moshe Lissak. 1990. Troubles in Paradise. Tel Aviv: Am-Oved. (Hebrew) Horowitz, Tamar. 1999. “Determining Factors of the Vote among Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union.” In The Elections in Israel 1996, ed. Arian Asher and Michal Shamir. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 117–35. Hoskin, Marylin. 1985. “Die öffentliche Meinung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die ausländischen Arbeitnehmer.” In Ausländische Arbeitnehmer und Immigranten – Sozialwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Diskussion eines praktischen Problems, ed. Marita Rosch. Weinheim: Beltz-Verlag, pp. 31–60. Kahn, Samuel and Alan Lambert. 1998. “Ingroup Favoritism versus Black Sheep Effects in Observations of Informal Conversations,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 20(4): 263–69. Legge, Jerome S. 1996. “Antiforeigner Sentiment in Germany: Power Theory Versus Symbolic Explanations of Prejudice,” The Journal of Politics 58(2): 516–27. Levine, Robert A. and Donald T. Campbell. 1972. Ethnocentrism: Theories of Conflict, Ethnic Attitudes, and Group Behavior. New York: Wiley. Linder, Wolf. 1993. “Migrationswirkungen, Institutionelle Politik und Politische Öffentlichkeit.” In Migrationen aus der Dritten Welt Ursachen – Wirkungen Handlungsmöglichkeiten, ed. Walter Khlin and Moser Rupert. Berne: Haupt, pp. 64–147. Lubbers, Marcel and Peer Scheepers. 2001. “Explaining the Trend in Extreme RightWing Voting: Germany 1989–1998,” European Sociological Review 17(4): 431–49. Lüdemann, Christian. (2000). Die Erklärung diskriminierender Einstellungen gegenüber Ausländern, Juden und Gastarbeitern in Deutschland: Ein Test der allgemeinen Attitüdentheorie von Fishbein. In Deutsche und Ausländer: Freunde, Fremde oder Feinde, ed. Richard Alba, Peter Schmidt and Martina Wasmer. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag: pp. 373–400. Meijerink, Frits, Cas Mudde, and Joop V. Holsteyn. 1998. “Right-Wing Extremism,” Acta Politica 2: 165–78. Miller, Lawrence W., Jerry L. Polinard, and Robert D. Wrinkle. 1984. “Attitudes toward Undocumented Workers: The Mexican American Perspective,” Social Science Quarterly 65: 482–94. Moore, Dahlia. 2000. “Intolerance of ‘Others’ among Palestinian and Jewish Students in Israel,” Sociological Inquiry 70: 280–312. Mudde, Cas. 1995. “Right-Wing Extremism Analyzed: A Comparative Analysis of the Ideologies of Three Alleged Right-Wing Extremist Parties,” European Journal of Political Research 27: 203–24. ——— 1999. “The Single-issue Party Thesis: Extreme Right Parties and the Immigration Issue,” West European Politics 22(3): 182–97. Oliver, Eric J. and Tali Mendelberg. 2000. “Reconsidering the Environmental Determinants of Racial Attitudes,” American Journal of Political Science 44: 574–89. Olzak, Susan. 1993. The Dynamic of Ethnic Competition and Conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Palmer, Douglas L. 1996. “Determinants of Canadian Attitudes toward Immigration: More than Just Racism?” Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science 28: 180–92. ——— 1998. “A Detailed Regional Analysis of Perceptions of Immigration in Canada.” Unpublished Manuscript. Citizenship and Immigration. Canada, Ottawa: Ontario. — 136 —

The Role of “Threat Perception” in Xenophobia Pedahzur, Ami and Yael Yishai. 1999. “Hatred by Hated People: Xenophobia in Israel,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 22: 101–17. Quillian, Lincoln. 1995. “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60: 586–611. Raijman, Rebeca and Moshe Semyonov. 2004. “Perceived Threat and Exclusionary Attitudes towards Foreign Workers in Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27(5): 780–99. Raijman, Rebeca, Moshe Semyonov, and Anat Yom-Tov. 2002. “Labor Market Competition, Perceived Threat, and Endorsement of Economic Discrimination Against Foreign Workers in Israel,” Social Problems 49(3): 416–31. Raijman, Rebeca, Moshe Semyonov, and Peter Schmidt. 2003. “Do Foreigners Deserve Rights? Determinants of Public Views towards Foreigners in Germany and Israel,” European Sociological Review 19(4): 379–92. Scheepers, Peer, Merova Gijsberts, and Marcel Coenders. 2002. “Ethnic Exclusionism in European Countries: Public Opposition to Civil Rights for Legal Migrants as a Response to Perceived Ethnic Threat,” European Sociological Review 18(1): 17–34. Shamir, Michal and John Sullivan. 1985. “Jews and Arabs in Israel: Everybody Hates Somebody Sometimes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 29(2): 283–305. Sherif, Muzafer. 1967. Group Conflict and Co-Operation: Their Social Psychology. Oxford: The Alden Press. Sherif, Muzafer and Carolyn W. Sherif. 1967. “Attitudes as the Individual’s Own Categories: The Social-Judgment Approach to Attitude and Attitude Change.” In Attitude, Ego-Involvement and Change, ed. Carolyn W. Sherif and Muzafer Sherif. New York: Wiley, pp. 105–39. Smith, Edward R. 1993. “Social Identity and Social Emotions: Toward New Conceptualizations of Prejudice.” In Affect, Cognition, and Stereotyping: Interactive Process in Group Perception, ed. Diane M. Mackie and David L. Hamilton. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 297–315. Smooha, Sammy. 2002. “The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State,” Nations and Nationalism 8(4): 475–503. Sniderman, Paul M., Louk Hagendoorn, and Markus Prior. 2004. “Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant’s Minorities,” American Political Science Review 98: 35–49. Stephan, Walter G. and Cookie W. Stephan. 2000. “An Integrated Threat Theory of Prejudice.” In Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination, ed. S. Oskamp. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 225–46. ——— 2001. Improving Intergroup Relations. Dubuque, IA: Brown and Benchmark. Stephan, Walter G. and Lausanne Renfro. 2003. “The Role of Threat in Intergroup Relations.” In From Prejudice to Intergroup Emotions, ed. Diane M. Mackie and Eliot R. Smith. New York and Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 191–208. Sullivan, John L., Michal Shamir, Patrick Walsh and Nigel S. Roberts. 1985. Political Tolerance in Context: Support for Unpopular Minorities in Israel, New Zealand, and the United States. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Verberk, Genevieve, Peer Scheepers, and Albert Felling. 2002. “Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions toward Ethnic Minorities: An Empirical Test of Several Theoretical Explanations for the Dutch Case,” Journal of Ethnic and Migrant Studies 28: 197–219.

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E. Halperin, D. Canetti-Nisim, and A. Pedahzur Watts, Meredith W. 1996. “Political Xenophobia in the Transition from Socialism: Threat, Racism and Ideology among East German Youth,” Political Psychology 17: 97–126. Wimmer, Andreas. 1997. “Explaining Xenophobia and Racism: A Critical Review of Current Research Approaches,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 20: 17–41.

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Chapter 8

A MULTIMEDIA LEXICON AS A TOOL FOR INCREASING SOCIETAL TOLERANCE

Oz Almog and Tami Almog

The Two Façades of Israeli Multiculturalism Beneath the veneer of Israel’s mainstream culture lie numerous groups whose world views, beliefs, desires, and lifestyles are far removed from those shared by the majority of Israelis. In effect, Israeli society is a variegated gallery of subcultures differentiated by patterns of taste, tradition, and behavioral conditioning. This is evinced, among other things, by their language, clothing, food, housing, entertainment, music, and education. Moreover, they are distinguished by economic criteria, such as income, profession, savings, and property, as well as by demographics (country of origin, family size, geographic distribution, and education). They differ in their political, religious, and ideological outlook, their self-image, the degree of exposure to outside influences, and their impact on other groups in Israeli society. The multiculturalism phenomenon creates a colorful and vibrant society, which allows an exchange of cultural products and lifestyles. But multiculturalism opens fissures and creates conflict, which can evolve into discrimination, oppression, and violence. These negative phenomena are usually a result of prejudice and stereotyping.

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From Prejudice and Stereotypes to Cultural Ignorance The term prejudice literally means pre-judging (Plous 2003). In the present context it refers to a common phenomenon among people, where a position, opinion, or feelings (usually toward a person or group) are consolidated without examination of facts. The lack of precise and encompassing information causes people to generalize and accept a wrong and usually negative opinion. Prejudice may take several forms. It can be against behavioral patterns that differ from societal norms (such as homosexuality), diseases (such as AIDS), races (such as Blacks), nations (such as Jews), ethnic groups (such as Gypsies), and sexes (such as women). The perceptions that generate prejudices are called stereotypes. This is a superficial perception (usually of a person or group) based on a small number of features and traits that are usually exaggerated, spurious, and negative. Common examples of such expressions are “Romanian thief,” “stingy Scot,” “stupid Black,” and so forth. A stereotypical perception expresses a person’s inability to see a fellow human being as an individual who is unique and a tendency to perceive him or her as part of a collective entity (race, nation, gender, etc.). A stereotype is not just a cognitive pattern or a social label; it is also a perception where strong feelings, beliefs, and opinions provoke an association of good and bad, appealing and repulsive, permitted and forbidden. These emotional perceptions create definitions and labels within us that allow us to exaggerate and highlight the differences between “them” and “us.” Social psychological.l studies have proven time after time that prejudice and stereotypes are common, and deep-rooted in human beings (Plous 2003). Moreover, prejudice is a difficult subject to research since people tend to mask their ideas for fear of punishment or defamation. Often people are not aware that such sentiments even exist in their minds. The sources of prejudices and stereotypes are many and diverse, and it is usual to divide them into two types: emotional and cognitive. From the emotional aspect, prejudice is explained as a human tendency to create a personal identity that gives us a sense of pride and supremacy. We do this on account of our need to define ourselves through the distinction between “us” and “others,” even to the extent of humiliating other people. Anger and frustration can also be the cause of prejudice and stereotypes. We often assuage frustration and stress through acting in a hostile manner toward other groups. Research shows that during an economic recession escalation occurs in expressions of discrimination. An example is the escalation of antiSemitism in post–World War II Germany due to the humiliation and severe economic hardships felt by German citizens. From the cognitive aspect prejudice is explained by people’s need to simplify the world and shorten thinking processes. Stereotypes create a sum or generalization of traits, which allows us to create a label for people such as — 140 —

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“stingy Scotsmen,” “absent-minded professors,” “clinging women,” and the like. People tend to overemphasize the similarity of members of a group that is not their own (e.g., all Chinese look the same) as well as indicating how they themselves differ from other groups. Another cognitive explanation states that prejudice is tied to the way we relate explanations to actions. People have a tendency to attribute the reason for a person’s actions to his or her nature and not the given situation. For example, we may ascribe a person’s failure on a test to his or her stupidity rather than to poor learning conditions. This phenomenon occurs commonly in the way men judge women. A man will say, “She’s crying because she’s a crybaby” and not “She’s crying because she lost her dear friend.” Researchers and philosophers have debated over whether prejudice and stereotypes are an inevitable phenomenon, or if they can be eliminated from society. Psychological studies indicate that prejudice is most likely inescapable; however, it can be minimized by four main methods: (a) developing awareness of human weakness; (b) education in democratic values of tolerance and sensitivity to others; (c) promoting daily contact between different populations in order to create positive emotions; (d) broadening people’s knowledge of others. In sum, this means that the more a person knows of other cultures and societies, the more real and less superficial his or her perception becomes, and the more the tendency to apply negative labels diminishes (Jones 2002).

Stereotypes and Prejudice in Israel In Israel only a few studies have been conducted to test the frequency and nature of prejudice and cultural stereotypes among the country’s citizens. Most research since the 1970s has focused on prejudice and stereotypes commonly found among Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, among Arabs and Jews, and among veteran Israelis and immigrant Jews from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. The Israeli media are aware today of the worsening cultural pollution concealed in prejudice and stereotypes; educational, legal, and artistic attempts have been made to eradicate this phenomenon. Nevertheless, surveys attest that in Israel stereotyping and prejudice against ethnic, religious, and other groups are still common in all groups and social strata (New Israel Fund News 2005). Studies and polls have shown that the stereotypes most common and persistent over time in Israeli society concern Arabs and Jews. Smooha (2001), a leading scholar in this area in Israel, summed up his findings as follows: Both Jews and Arabs in Israel hold negative stereotypes. Some of the Arabs perceive the Jews in Israel as people indifferent to their personal and family honor, as exploiters and racists, who treat Arab life as if it were without any value. These stereotypes reflect the way Arabs grasp the permissiveness, materialism, the generally informal social ties, the devotion to Zionism, and the ongoing Jewish involvement in wars in — 141 —

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which Arabs are killed. For their part, the Jews perceive the Arabs as faltering, lacking the potential to attain the development level of the Jews, poor workers, dirty, violent, and believing that Jewish life has no value. “Arabs are also believed to have a greater tendency to criminality … their distress and traditions are perceived as the ‘oriental mentality’ embedded in them and unchangeable. … these stereotypes express the positive image Jews have of themselves as a modern people who are culturally and morally superior to Arabs” (Smooha 2001: 304). The tension that exists in Israel between Arabs and Jews is a result of many factors such as religion, politics, ideology, etc. Because of the long conflict each side has amassed a stock of grave accusations against the other. Our impression is that most researchers who tackle this ongoing tension in Israeli society do not take into consideration the importance of educational factors in diminishing the existing animosity. Research conducted around the world has proven that an inverse correlation exists between education and prejudice (Brown 1995). The more education (academic, not religious) a person has, the less likely he or she will be to treat another person stereotypically. This is because it is known that the acquisition of knowledge, including cultural knowledge, reduces prejudice and stereotypes. This theoretical notion underlies the cultural lexicon project now to be described: the more we know of others the fewer the prejudices and stereotypes, and the greater the tolerance and mutual appreciation, that will exist. To verify the correlation between the absence of cultural knowledge and the existence of stereotypes in Israel, and also to increase the pedagogical validity of the project, a pilot study was conducted in April 2005 to assess how much young Jews and Muslims in Israel know of each other’s religion. The research assumption was that prejudices and stereotypes that relate to Muslims and Islam, as well as to Jews and Judaism, are common in Israel since the youth of each faith suffer from cultural ignorance about the other. The research examined the relation between religious origin (Jewish/Muslim) and familiarity with the other faith. The research tool was an open-ended questionnaire with thirty informative questions: fifteen questions on Judaism and fifteen on Islam. It was presumed that the completed questionnaires could suggest an answer to the question, “Are young Israelis acquainted with the basic elements of the two major religions in their country?” The results more than implied that there was a pedagogical need to provide extensive and accessible information on the different cultures in Israeli society.

Research Pilot – Methods and Findings A Research goal: To ascertain the level of familiarity of young Israeli Jews with Islam, and of young Israeli Muslims with Judaism.

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B Research hypothesis: Israeli Jews and Israeli Arab Muslims have little knowledge of the each other’s religion. C Definitions of variables: 1. Independent variable: Nominal definition – Religious affiliation Operative definition – This is a nominal variable defined by one of the demographic questions on the questionnaire. Participants were asked to answer the following question: “I was born into the _________ religion” and choose among four possible answers: (a) Islam (b) Judaism (c) Christianity (d) Other. A variable referring to each participant’s religiosity was added to the questionnaire: “I define myself as (a) religious (b) traditional (c) secular.” This was done to eliminate religious diversity within the homogeneous groups (Jews among themselves and Muslims among themselves). 2. Dependent variable: Nominal definition – Knowledge of Judaism and Islam Operative definition – The term “knowledge” is vague and subjective. No single truth defines what knowledge is. For example, if a person is familiar with the Jewish festivals but knows none of the prayers is he or she knowledgeable in Judaism? The problem was solved by defining knowledge as “being familiar with the basic components of religion,” such as the Scriptures, the Prophets, the festivals, and ritual ceremonies. A questionnaire was composed relating to the basic components of both Judaism and Islam. D Defining the sample: The research sample included 86 undergraduate students: 66 Jews and 20 Muslims (men and women were not counted separately) in the departments of education and teaching at the University of Haifa. The sample reflected the existing ratio of Jews and Muslims at the university. This sample is not representative of the entire Israeli population. As stated, this study was meant to be a research pilot and it was presumed that if the results were clear-cut they could intimate the actual state of affairs in Israeli society. The rationale for the choice of the research participants was that students (aged 18–25 years) meet the definition of “young”. To ensure that this was the general age range participants were requested to write their age on the questionnaire. Furthermore, university students are graduates of the education system, having recently completed their high school studies. Also of major importance was the fact that these students perceived themselves as future educators. We chose students from the University of Haifa since this population was accessible to us.

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E The Questionnaire: It consisted of two parts. The first part contained questions eliciting the participant’s definition of his or her personal identity: age, religion, and religiosity. The second part was open-ended questions on knowledge of Judaism and Islam (see Appendix 4). The questions, based on the information supplied by introductory books such as Religions Today (Hinles 1992), were open-ended so as to avoid any clue as to the right answer, as in the case with multiple choice questions. A question left unanswered was marked as answered wrongly. The questions dealt with a variety of topics but were not too difficult in order to keep to basic knowledge. To guarantee this, and to ensure an even level of the questions, several experts in Judaism and Islam were asked to review and correct the questionnaire. After their amendments the final questionnaire contained 15 open-ended questions on Judaism and 15 on Islam. Clearly, 15 questions can cover only a small part of the precepts, customs, and perceptions that define each religion. Yet they could convey a picture of the participants’ basic knowledge of the other religion. We believed that 15 questions would not burden the participants, and would still give us a clear notion of their present knowledge. F Research Process: 1. The questionnaires were distributed to two undergraduate classes in the department of Education and Teaching at Haifa University. The students were told that this was a pilot study on knowledge on existing cultures in Israeli society. All the students approached readily agreed to participate. The questionnaires were handed out at the beginning of the session. 2. Students were given 20 minutes to answer the questionnaire. None complained that time was insufficient, and all completed the questionnaire in less than 20 minutes. Many indicated, while answering the questionnaire, that they were embarrassed by their ignorance, and asked if they would be given the correct answers later. They were assured that the correct answers would be publicized on the course internet site. 3. Of the 96 questionnaires completed, six were filled out by Druze and four by Christians; these were eliminated from the final sample, which consisted of 86 questionnaires in all. G Findings: Due to the small sample, the data were analyzed by basic statistical parameters such as frequencies, averages, and medians. 1. General knowledge of young Israelis (Jews and Muslims) about the two religions: Out of the 30 questions presented (15 each on Judaism and Islam) the number of correct answers fluctuated between 7 (minimum) and 23 (maximum) per participant. The average of correct answers was 14.5, median 14. Most participants correctly answered 11–20 questions (out of 30). Between one-third and two-thirds of the answers were wrong. — 144 —

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2. Knowledge of the other religion (a) General knowledge of Jews on Islam: Out of 15 questions presented to Jewish participants the number of correct answers fluctuated between 0 (minimum) and nine (maximum). The average of correct answers was 3.6 (24 percent), median 3. Participants hardly differed in the number of correct answers they gave, which were generally few. The lowest number was 0 (or no correct answers) and the highest was 3 out of the 15 questions. (b)General knowledge of Muslims on Judaism: Out of the 15 questions presented to young Muslims on Judaism the number of correct answers fluctuated between 0 (minimum) and 11 (maximum). The average of correct answers was 2 (13.3 percent) and the median 1. Almost all the participants answered correctly a minimal number of questions, 0 to 2, out of the 15 questions. 3. Participant’s general knowledge of own religion: To assess whether the evident ignorance of the other religion derived from general religious ignorance, or if it was specific to a religion that was not their own, participants were asked to answer the questions about their own identified religion. (a) Young Jews’ knowledge of Judaism: Out of the 15 questions on Judaism presented to the Jewish participants, the number of correct answers fluctuated between 7 (minimum) and 15 (maximum). The average of correct answers was 11.3 (75.3 percent), median 12. Half of the participants had very good knowledge of Judaism (more than 12 correct answers) and half possessed medium knowledge of their religion (7–11 correct answers). (b)Young Muslims’ knowledge of Islam: Out of the 15 questions presented to Muslim participants, the number of correct answers fluctuated between 9 (minimum) and 13 (maximum). The average of correct answers was 11.3 (75.3 percent), median 11. Participants did not differ significantly in the number of their correct answers, which was mostly 11–13. H Conclusions: 1. The research findings supported the initial research hypothesis stating that Jews and Muslims know very little about each other’s religion. The findings were surprising regarding the depth of ignorance that was revealed, and the fact that the average correct answers of the young Jews on Islam was 24 percent. The similarity between the average and the median ref lects a normal distribution of participants’ answers and strengthens the notion that Jewish ignorance of Islam is common. The young Muslims likewise displayed ignorance of the Jewish religion. Only 13.3 percent of the Muslim participants answered questions on — 145 —

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Judaism correctly. Moreover, the fact that almost all the participants answered a maximum of two correct questions (out of 15) reinforces the conclusion that Muslims’ ignorance of Judaism is widespread. The Muslim and Jewish participants had a good knowledge of their own religion (the average of correct answers in both groups was 75.3 percent). This leads us to the conclusion that the Jews’ lack of knowledge of Islam, as well as the Muslims’ lack of knowledge of Judaism, is a result of the animosity that exists between the two groups. This may have created a vicious circle, where alienation led to ignorance (“We don’t want to know”) and ignorance exacerbated animosity and alienation. A survey of Judaic and Islamic studies in the Jewish and Arab national education systems indicates that neither system incorporates enough information or studies of the other religion (Al-Haj 1996; Zarzur 1999; Davidovitz 2004; Open University 2005; Ministry of Education 2005a, 2005b). 2. Do these findings ref lect reality? In general we believe that they do portray the situation in the general Israeli population. However, the sample was not representative of the Israeli Jewish population and did not distinguish different types of Jews (e.g., veterans versus immigrants) or Muslims; nor did it differentiate the men from the women. Furthermore, the questionnaire contained a small number of questions, and to obtain a more precise picture more encompassing questions must be added. Finally, the questionnaire was reviewed by only two experts (one in Judaism and one in Islam), and it must be validated by more specialists. 3. Can the research findings be generalized to other populations? We assume that if the participants’ general knowledge had been tested on other religions, such as Christianity or the Druze faith, we would have received similar results, and possibly an even starker picture of ignorance. Moreover, this research studied only one cultural domain, that of religion; presumably, ignorance of the other would prove similar or even worse in respect of other cultural domains such as family, education, leisure, domicile, and the like. The cultural ignorance revealed by the pilot study intensifies the need for an efficient tool to document and educate people on Israeli cultures in a pleasant and interesting way. To fill this evident void, three years ago the multimedia cultural lexicon project was initiated.

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The Multimedia Cultural Lexicon Project General Goal Our goal was to set up a virtual, dynamic, multimedia database using text, pictures, film, and sound, to document (with the assistance of the users) the cultural mosaic that Israeli society constitutes. This documentation will incorporate the institutions, traditions, and lifestyles that make each culture unique. The database can serve as an updated source of information and a pedagogical tool for individuals, businesses, and public institutions. Its innovative software can also serve as a model for building advanced electronic scientific lexicons on the internet.

General Description of the Software and Data The software, along with inserted updated sociological data, will enable users to attain valuable, user-friendly information on the main subcultures in presentday Israeli society. The sociological data are classified – in an index of the main social spheres of daily life – as economy, politics, family, religion, education, etc. The information in each category is presented as text with links to multimedia sources (photos, video clips, audio recordings, etc.). The links will play an important role in illustrating and elaborating specific issues in the text. The project is executed by a server at the University of Haifa. Full access to it is afforded only to authorized visitors and editors.

Specific Objectives (a) Scientific Objective: There are numerous scholarly and nonscholarly books on Israeli society, but no single book (hard copy or electronic) supplies full information on all the subgroups, cultures, and lifestyles or all (or most) of their respective social characteristics. Yet cultures should be documented, presented, and learned about not only through texts but also by visual means and sounds that more vividly convey a complex reality. So far, sociologists and educators have not taken full advantage of the computer’s wonders to learn and teach about cultures and lifestyles. In developing this computerized tool we intended to meet that challenge. The information entered into this lexicon derives from scholarly materials collected and catalogued from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, geography, history, nursing, linguistics, literature, and education, as well as from our own research in the field, conducted by diverse collection means and analytic methods (see Appendix 3). In fact, this new tool is one of the first computerized technologies — 147 —

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to dispense and sell scientific sociological knowledge in Israel. In the process it also promotes interdisciplinary knowledge and methods such as: Social Studies and Computer Science. (b) Pedagogical-academic objective: The interactive multimedia updated lexicon may also serve as a pedagogical tool in courses given at institutions of learning across the country. (c) Moral objective: Tolerance and respect for others are contingent, among other things, on familiarity with the cultural world of the other. Stigmas and stereotypes are usually bred by ignorance. Hence, a tool that presents the cultural world of diverse groups within Israeli society is likely to help bring people together. Furthermore, the in-depth treatment given to each “tribe” in the database transmits the symbolic message that everyone is of equal social status and everyone has a place in Israel’s cultural space. Consequently, this tool supplies a new method (in practice and as a model) for social organizations promoting peace and understanding between cultural groups. It can also be used in the future as an effective socialization agent in diverse educational spheres.

Structure, Character, and Pedagogical Rationale of the Lexicon On the opening page of the lexicon, which includes general information and a demonstration film, the user/student is asked to identify himself/herself (Figure 8.1) and then he/she is allowed to enter the “Communal Israeli House” that symbolizes Israeli society (Figure 8.2). In each apartment of the communal

Figure 8.1 The opening page of the cultural lexicon. — 148 —

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Figure 8.2 The culturally communal Israeli apartment building.

cultural house one subculture resides; altogether, seventeen Israeli subcultures dwell in the apartment building (see Appendix 1). The sociological typology (dividing Israeli society into major cultural groups) is based on the classic typology of Israeli sociologists, that is, on six parameters: ethnic origin; place of birth; place of residence; religious orientation; political orientation; socioeconomic status (mainly income and formal education). The large category of the Jewish-Veteran-Secular/Traditional Upper-Middle Class and the category of the Arabs were sliced into six subdivisions, based on differences in lifestyles (the empirical ground and explanation to this division is supplied in Almog 2004). “Ringing the doorbell” (by clicking on the mouse) of each cultural apartment yields the opening page of each subculture (e.g., Figure 8.3 – the Druze culture opening page). This page for each culture includes nineteen different societal links (see Appendix 2). Each link is a cultural variable that leads to subvariables. For example, the “Residence” link is divided into the subvariables of settlement, neighborhood, street, house (as can be seen in Figure 8.3). Clicking on a subvariable leads to a detailed page with relevant information. For example, clicking the subvariable “Kitchen” listed under the main variable of “Food” in the Druze culture produces a page of information on the kitchen’s size, structure, design, workspace, appliances, etc. (see Figure 8.4). The text has headings at the beginning of each page which take the user directly to the desired information. Thus, on the page on “House” in the Druze culture the following headers can be found: building and construction, market value and — 149 —

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Figure 8.3 Cultural variables of the Druze culture.

Figure 8.4 Subvariable “Kitchen” in the Druze culture.

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Figure 8.5 Subvariable “House” in the Druze culture.

finance, architecture, the living room, the bedroom, bathroom and toilet, courtyard and garden, and living patterns (see Figure 8.5). To facilitate matters and make the lexicon more user-friendly, lengthy passages of text were eschewed. Instead, the information presented in the lexicon is organized in paragraphs. Each paragraph (with its first sentence highlighted) deals with a different aspect of the subject. The text includes relevant links (keywords colored orange) that lead the user to the desired information. This is offered as a gallery of pictures, video clips, articles in different formats (PDF, Word), and addresses of relevant internet sites. For example, the information portrayed when the link to “Hospitality” (on the “Kitchen” page, which is a subvariable of “Food”) is pressed, is five photographs taken in Druze homes when guests were being entertained, two articles (one from an academic journal and one from a daily newspaper), a video segment documenting hospitality that was filmed inside a Druze home, a recorded interview with a Druze religious authority who explains the importance of hospitality in the Druze culture, and a link to a Druze internet site (“Druze Heritage”) that has information on the hospitality customs of this ethnic group (see Figure 8.6). From the “Hospitality” page it is possible to see the same subject in other cultures. For example, from the “Kitchen” page in the Druze culture the user can go directly to “Kitchen” pages of such other cultures as Russian, Arab, and Ethiopian. This possibility makes it easier to compare the different cultures (reading across) (see the left section of Figure 8.4). — 151 —

Oz Almog and Tami Almog

Figure 8.6 The information portrayed under the keyword “Hospitality.”

Summary The term multiculturalism has become a mantra of sorts in the Western world, including Israel, and intercultural encounters in a multicultural society have developed into a hot topic in politics, the media, education, and art. Yet a paradox emerges. Although continually talking about multiculturalism, many people are not actually familiar with the cultures. Even when we teach about different cultures the information imparted is often superficial and concentrates on conflicts and hostility between groups and cultures. Interesting subjects that are important for understanding the similarities and differences between ourselves and others, such as dwellings, food habits, leisure activities, religious dress, and educational activities, are not properly documented or studied in the education system. This results in cultural ignorance and produces fertile soil for prejudice and stereotypes. To help to change this situation in Israel today, we initiated the Multimedia Cultural Lexicon Project. For the first time in Israel, and to our knowledge throughout the world, an internet tool offers users comprehensive information on the major cultures and lifestyles in the State of Israel. We believe that in order to understand life patterns, traditions, and customs it is important not only to read about them but to see and hear as well. That is one of the main reasons for the choice of a multimedia virtual tool, one that makes it possible to illustrate text through thousands of pictures, video clips, and voice recordings. The virtual dimension suits our purposes because it allows teaching and educating — 152 —

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interactively: internet surfers can correct or provide new information for the lexicon (text, photography, or sound), either electively or as part of their studies. From our experience in the field of education, we have learned that the young generation prefers to learn through the computerized medium, which suits their active environment. This lexicon, which is stored in the University of Haifa server, creates a new dimension for documenting and teaching about cultures in Israel and can serve as a model for other countries as well. The donations to the project of $10,000 from UNESCO and $15,000 from the Israeli Council for Higher Education have strengthened our belief that such a project is truly needed.

Appendix 1: Subcultures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Yuppies Veteran bourgeois Zionists Kibbutzniks New middle class Religious Zionists (knitted skullcap) Poverty-stricken periphery (disadvantaged groups) Shas party supporters Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Immigrants from the former Soviet Union – Christian states Immigrants from the former Soviet Union – Muslim states (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) Arab bourgeoisie Arab working class Bedouins Druze Ethiopians Foreign workers Small subcultures (Circassians, Samaritans, Armenians, etc.)

Appendix 2: Classification Variables 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Historical background Population Residence Family Economic attributes Education and schooling Mobility — 153 —

Oz Almog and Tami Almog

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Information and communications Religion and faith Law and order Power and politics Army, security, and national service Entertainment and leisure Food culture Music Clothing Health and hygiene Language and speech Ethnic folklore

Appendix 3: Data Sources 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

Scholarly articles and books. Encyclopedias, lexicons, and atlases. Articles and stories appearing in magazines, journals, and the daily press. Publications and reports issued by organizations, institutions, and government and private research institutes (government ministries, municipal and local authorities, Central Bureau of Statistics, etc.) Archives, libraries, and computerized databases. Internet sites and databases. Museums and private collections. Informant interviews: researchers (anthropologists, historians, linguists, researchers in the fields of art and education, etc.), people from within the subculture itself, service providers who come into daily contact with the subculture. Documentary films. Area photographs.

Appendix 4: The Questionnaire University of Haifa A research questionnaire on the subject of “Cultural Familiarity” Prof. Oz Almog and Dr Tami Almog Personal details: 1. Age: _________

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2. 3.

I was born into the ___________ religion (a) Islam (b) Judaism (c) Christian (d) Other ____________ I define myself as: (a) Religious (b) Traditional (c) Secular

Judaism 1. How many commandments exist in the Jewish religion? ________________ 2. The Tanach [Hebrew for bible] is the acronym of the names of three books, which are: _______________________________________________________ 3. In what Jewish ritual is the foreskin removed? _________________________ 4. At what age do boys celebrate Bar-Mitzvah? ___________________________ 5. What is the name of the canopy that the rabbi, bride, and groom stand under in the Jewish marriage ceremony? ______________________________ 6. On what three festivals does the Torah command a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem? ______________________________________________ 7. On what festival do we bless the seven species? ________________________ 8. What festival is called in the Torah “Shmini Atzeret”? ___________________ 9. On what Jewish holy day is it forbidden to wear leather shoes? ___________ 10. What is the name of the prayer said over the grave at a funeral service? ____ 11. What three prayers (morning–noon–night) are said on weekdays? _________________________________________________________________ 12. What is the professional name of a person who hand-writes the Torah? ________________________________________________________________ 13. What is the name of the black box with a leather strap attached that Jewish men bind on their right arm during the Morning Prayer? _______________ 14. What is the name of the flax strings attached to the hem of the talit (prayer shawl) worn during worship and on the garment that only men are required to wear? __________________________________________________ 15. On what Hebrew date, which is an annual day of mourning for Jews, were the two holy temples destroyed? _____________________________________ Islam 1. Islam has two divisions. What is the main division that includes 90 percent of Muslims? ______________________________________________________ 2. What is the name of Islamic law that guides the followers in all kinds of behaviors? _______________________________________________________ 3. What color symbolizes the Islamic religion? ___________________________ 4. What month (in numbers), according to the Islamic calendar, is Ramadan? _________________________________________________________________ 5. How many times a day must a Muslim pray? __________________________ 6. To what city must each Muslim make the pilgrimage at least once during his life? __________________________________________________________ 7. In what city is the prophet Mohamed buried? _________________________ — 155 —

Oz Almog and Tami Almog

8. What day during the week is the holy day for Islam? ____________________ 9. What is the name of the festival at the end of the Ramadan fast? _________________________________________________________________ 10. What is the title of the Muslim sages who teach the followers the principles of Islam? _________________________________________________________ 11. Towards which city do worshipers in the mosque turn? _________________ 12. What is the name of the “rinsing of the face, hands, and feet” ceremony that a Muslim performs before every prayer? ______________________________ 13. What is the name of the cantor who leads the prayer at the mosque? __________________ 14. What event requires Muslims to refrain from drinking, eating, intercourse, and smoking? ____________________________________________________ 15. What is the name of an interpreter and adjudicator of Islamic law who also serves as a judge of Islamic law? _____________________________________

References Al-Haj, Majid 1996. Education, Empowerment and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel. Jerusalem: Magnes. (Hebrew) Almog, Oz 2004. “One Middle Class, Three Different Lifestyles: The Israeli Case,” Geography Research Forum 24: 37–57. Brown, Rupert 1995. Prejudice: Its Social Psychology. London: Basil Blackwell. Davidovitz, N. 2004. “Students’ Knowledge on Israel’s Culture and Legacy,” Moreshet Israel 1 (November): 110–21. (Hebrew) Hinles, J.R. 1992. Religions Today. Jerusalem: Keter. (Hebrew) Jones, Melinda 2002. Social Psychology of Prejudice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Ministry of Education. 2005a. Available at: http://www.education.gov.il/yesodi/ MIVNE1.HTM (October 2005). Ministry of Education. 2005b. Available at: http://www.education.gov.il/ EducationCMS/Units/ (October 2005). New Israel Fund News 2005. The Results of the Survey on Prejudice in Israel (the survey was carried out by Geocartographia research center and commissioned by the headquarters of the Organization against Prejudice for the National Day commemorating the struggle against prejudice held in the Knesset on March 22, 2005) (in Hebrew). Available at: http://www.nif.org.il/feature.asp?ID=97 (October 2005). Open University. 2005. Available at: http://www.openu.ac.il/Library/whatisnew/ 38056.html (October 2005) (in Hebrew). Plous, Scott (ed.). 2003. Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination. New York: McGrawHill. Smooha, Sammy 2001. “Jewish–Arab Relations in Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State.” In Trends in Israeli Society, ed. E. Yaar and Z. Shavit, vol. I. Tel Aviv: Open University. (Hebrew) Zarzur, S. 1999. “Arab Education, Current Status and Future Outlook.” In Fiftieth Anniversary of the Israeli Educational System, ed. A. Peled. Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, pp. 1061–83. (Hebrew) — 156 —

Chapter 9

WHEN GENDER DIFFERENCES SURPASS CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN PERSONAL SATISFACTION WITH BODY SHAPE IN ISRAELI COLLEGE STUDENTS 1

Marilyn P. Safir, Shimrit Flaisher-Kellner, and Amir Rosenmann

How we perceive and experience our bodies is a significant component of the way we relate to ourselves (Mahler and McDevitt 1982; Hutchinson 1994). A central component of personal self-evaluation and self-acceptance is one’s satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with one’s body. Body image is a subjective and complex set of perceptions of and attitudes to the size, shape, aesthetics, and experience of one’s own body (Cash and Pruzinsky 1990; Thompson 1996) produced by inter- and intrapersonal dynamics. It is not to be confused with the actual physical body or with an outsider’s impression of it (Cash and Pruzinsky 1990; Hutchinson 1994). Dissatisfaction with one’s physical appearance is widespread in many Western societies (Wood, Becker, and Thompson 1996). Cash, Winstead, and Janda (1986) measured the extent of dissatisfaction with different aspects of appearance and found weight-related concerns substantial and a potential source of dissatisfaction. Other studies have established that being overweight or obese is highly stigmatized in many Western societies (Cash 1990; Crandall — 157 —

M. Safir, S. Flaisher-Kellner, and A. Rosenmann

1994; Rothblum 1994). The widespread negative stereotyping of the obese (as lazy, lacking self-discipline, less attractive) begins early in childhood, and is harsher toward overweight women than men (Tiggemann and Rothblum 1988; Tiggemann and Wilson-Barrett 1998). How individuals classify their weight bears closely on their attitudes to their bodies, their eating behavior, and their psychosocial well-being (Cash and Hicks 1990). Dissatisfaction with one’s body was also found to be connected with attempts to control eating behaviors (Thompson 1996; Cash and Deagle 1997). In clinical as well as nonclinical populations, negative attitudes are highly correlated with dieting behaviors. Cash and colleagues’ (1986) Body Image Survey revealed that 55 percent of women and 41 percent of men expressed dissatisfaction with their body weight. A striking difference was that men were equally divided in their weight-related dissatisfaction between those who thought that they were too heavy and those who thought that they were too thin, whereas women almost always saw themselves as too heavy. Women were also more likely than men to equate self-worth with how they perceived their physical attributes and what they believed other people thought of their appearance (Fallon 1990). A meta-analysis of 222 studies revealed that the percentage of women among individuals with a poor body image has risen dramatically over the past 50 years (Feingold and Mazzella 1998). Fallon and Rozin (1985) asked men and women participants to rate different aspects of their body image on a set of nine figure drawings, which ranged from very thin to very heavy. All participants were instructed to indicate which figure most closely resembled their current figure, which figure was the ideal, which figure they thought was most attractive to the other sex, and which the most attractive of the other sex. Their current, the ideal, and the most attractive figures were almost identical for men. Women’s current figure was heavier than their most attractive figure, which was heavier than their ideal figure. The discrepancy between the figure which represents current body size and that which represents the ideal figure has been used as an indicator of level of dissatisfaction with one’s body (Thompson, Penner, and Altabe 1990). Culturally bound and consensually validated definitions of what is desirable and attractive play an important part in the development of body image (Fallon 1990). Western societies’ body ideals have increasingly emphasized thinness in recent decades (Feingold and Mazzella 1998). Garner et al. (1980) studied cultural expectations of women’s thinness and documented a shift toward a thinner ideal shape for American women. They examined data from Playboy magazine centerfolds and Miss America contestants and found decreasing bust and hip measurements over a 20-year period. Over that period there was also a significant increase in number of diet features in six popular women’s magazines. Despite cultural similarities in various Western societies, body ideals are not identical. American students have reported greater frequency of dieting, more concern about weight, and more body consciousness than have Australian — 158 —

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students (Tiggemann and Rothblum 1988). Cross-cultural research such as that of Furnham and Baguma (1993) demonstrated that major cultural differences occur in ratings of extreme figures. Ugandan participants rated very heavy female and very thin male figures as more attractive than did British participants. Given cultural influences on body image and evaluation, nonWestern societies, where female heaviness is associated with positive attributes of wealth, fertility, and femininity, would appear to be relatively impervious to risks of eating disorders. Yet attitudes seem to be changing, as recent research has demonstrated an increasing prevalence of body image dissatisfaction and eating disorders in some non-Western societies. The spread of eating disorders has been hypothesized to result from increased exposure to American culture, as is evident, for example, in the popularity of American movies and TV shows around the world (Nasser 1997). An example of this influence follows the introduction of television into Fiji. “Traditionally, Fijians … preferred robust body shapes, ref lecting the importance placed on generous feeding and voracious eating” (Reynolds 1998). However, Becker, who surveyed women in 1998, 38 months after TV came to Nadroga in Fiji, reported that high scores on a test indicating risk for disordered eating were significantly more frequent among schoolgirls in 1998 compared with 1995. In 1998, 74 percent of the girls reported feeling “too big or fat” at least sometimes. Those who watched TV at least three nights per week were 50 percent more likely to see themselves as too fat, and 30 percent more likely to diet, although the more frequent TV watchers were not more overweight. And 62 percent of Fijian high school girls in 1998 reported dieting in the past month, a comparable or even higher proportion than reported in American samples (Reynolds 1998). Nasser (1994) reported that the prevalence of problematic eating attitudes among secondary school girls in Cairo was similar to that found in the United Kingdom. She concluded that Egyptian girls’ susceptibility to eating disorders might result from exposure to Western body ideals and values as represented in the Egyptian media. Another Egyptian study (Ford, Dolan, and Evans 1990) that replicated Fallon and Rozin’s study (1985) at the American University in Cairo showed that gender differences were similar to those reported for the American sample. In both studies women students rated the ideal figure as significantly thinner than their current figures, whereas men did not. These results were seen as confirming cultural influences: the study’s participants attended an American-style university with English as the language of instruction. This cultural exposure resulted in adoption of “American” attitudes to the body. Conversely, although the current figure of Arab women students was similar to that reported elsewhere for American women, they indicated a smaller discrepancy between their ideal and their current shapes, which indicates less overall dissatisfaction. In a similar cross-cultural study (Apter et al. 1994) of different Jewish and Arab subcultures in Israel, most groups of adolescent schoolgirls showed body— 159 —

M. Safir, S. Flaisher-Kellner, and A. Rosenmann

and eating-related attitudes comparable to those found in the United States. Of the four Arab subcultures studied, in three (Muslim, Christian, and Bedouin) attitudes resembled American data. The one exception was girls of Circassian descent, presumably because Circassian society is more isolated and conservative, hence less receptive to cultural influences than the other ArabIsraeli subcultures. Among Israeli Jewish adolescent schoolgirls recruited from kibbutz (communal rural collective), moshav (cooperative village of family farms), city, and boarding schools, or girls hospitalized with anorexia nervosa, kibbutz girls were most similar to the anorexic group. The researchers concluded that healthy adolescents’ attitudes to food resemble those of anorexics when they reside in affluent, cultural-ethnic settings that are more Americanized. This results in role conflict between traditional and modern images of women. The highest feminine gender role stress was found among kibbutz girls, who identified with a more feminine role but did not have homemaker as a career choice. Although both major ethnic groups in Israel (Arabs and Jews) show considerable Westernization in body- and eating-related attitudes, their cultures are sufficiently dissimilar to suggest a possible difference. Jewish society identifies as part of the “Western” world and emulates American values. However, Israel is more family oriented, has a 25 percent divorce rate, 2.7 children per family, and only 6 percent of people over age 40 have never been married (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2000). These statistics are more similar to developing societies than to the United States. Arabs constitute approximately 18 percent of the total Israeli population. Arab society in Israel is more traditional because of its continuous subjection to national, political, social, and cultural oppression, which has resulted in an intensification of the patriarchal/traditional nature of this society (Hassan 1993). As a result of these forces, feminist values of gender equality have been less influential for Arab women than for Jewish women in Israel. Within Arab society feminist influences are greater in mixed cities (where both Arabs and Jews reside) than in Arab villages or homogeneous Arab cities (Abu-Baker 1985). According to Al-Haj (1995), Arab society is a developing society coping with changes associated with modernization and with the constraints that stem from the Arabs’ status as a national minority in a Jewish state. This minority has undergone a conspicuous process of individual modernization, which has caused several effects. This process includes a rise in the level of education, improvements in living standards, wide exposure to mass media and mass communication, and the development of a nationwide leadership. However, these processes are inhibited by several factors, the foremost being the rural nature of this society: some 75 percent of Israeli Arabs live in villages. Another important aspect of this process is the question of Israeli Arab national and ethnic identity. Arabs are considered a nonassimilating minority by the state; they view themselves as an integral part of the Arab world, in particular the — 160 —

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Palestinian people. This identity structure is juxtaposed to Jewish identification with American society (Al-Haj 1995). Attitudes to marriage and family can serve as an example of cultural differences between Arabs and Jews in Israel (Buss et al. 1990). The most significant difference between these cultures is their (traditional vs. modern) stance on mate selection (Khazan 1993). Arab participants put greater emphasis on chastity, home and children, domestic skills, and religiosity. Jewish participants emphasized more contemporary traits such as industriousness, similar education, and intelligence. This study is a cross-cultural comparison and extension of the paradigm developed by Fallon and Rozin (1985). Participants (Jewish and Arab students from an Israeli university) were asked to indicate their current figures, their ideal figures, the figures most attractive to the other sex, and the figures of the other sex they found most attractive. In addition to the figure scale, participants were asked whether they had actively attempted to change their weight within the past year. They completed a demographic questionnaire, containing selfreports of height and weight, to enable us to determine a Body Mass Index (BMI) (Stunkard, Sorenson, and Schulsinger 1983). Using previous research (Fallon and Rozin 1985; Ford, Dolan, and Evans 1990; Feingold and Mazzella 1998), several hypotheses could be made. Participants’ gender would influence body-image evaluation and perception of ideal body shape, so that differences between their current, ideal, and attractive figures would be smaller for men than for women. We also expected that men would be more accurate than women in their evaluation of how they were viewed by the other sex (Fallon and Rozin 1985). Because body image appears to influence behavior (Pruzinsky and Cash 1990), it was hypothesized that dissatisfaction with one’s body would be associated with reports of dieting (weight-change behavior). As beauty ideals are influenced by social and cultural norms, we hypothesized that the ideal and the attractive figure ratings would differ according to the participants’ social and cultural background; Jews were expected to score closer to American norms, i.e., to show more dissatisfaction with their body image, than Arabs.

Method Participants The study surveyed 104 male and 96 female university students, aged between 18 and 45 years (M = 23). Jews constituted 56 percent and Arabs 44 percent. The majority of both groups indicated that they were secular; 18 percent indicated that they were traditional, 2 percent religious. As the numbers of Arab students from the different religious groups were not large enough to perform data analysis, it was decided to compare the two major ethnic-cultural groups in Israel: Arabs and Jews. — 161 —

M. Safir, S. Flaisher-Kellner, and A. Rosenmann

Measures The Figure Rating Scale Participants were asked to indicate several aspects of their body-related attitudes on this visual tool, which is a nine-point scale for both female and male figures ranging from very thin to very heavy (Stunkard et al. 1983). Specifically, participants were asked to indicate: (a) the figure that approximated their current figure (current); (b) the figure that they would like to look like (ideal); (c) the figure that they thought would be most attractive to the other sex (attractive); (d) the figure of the other sex which they found most attractive (other attractive).

Demographic Questionnaire After completing the figure rating scale, participants were asked to complete a demographic questionnaire, including self-reported height and weight, as well as to indicate whether they had attempted to change their weight in the past year by changing diet, engaging in sports, joining Weight Watchers, or using special dietary products (pills, drinks, other). Participants could indicate whether their attempts were to decrease or increase weight. Quetelet’s Body Mass Index (BMI = kg/m2) was calculated based on self-reports of height and weight.

Procedure About one-half of the questionnaires were distributed to students during classes at the university. The rest of the questionnaires were distributed from booths on campus to students passing by who completed the questionnaires on the spot. Participation was completely voluntary and anonymous. Specific instructions were written on the top of every page of the questionnaire, which took approximately 10 minutes to complete. The first author’s office telephone number was supplied and students were informed that they could contact her with any questions and that they could receive information about the study’s results at the beginning of the next academic year.

Results Female Arab students were somewhat younger (M = 22.28; SD = 3.68) than female Jewish students (M = 23.92; SD = 3.24), t(92) = 2.8, p < .05. No significant difference was found between Jewish and Arab women and between Jewish and Arab men for height and weight. BMI was significantly — 162 —

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higher for Jewish than Arab women (t(88) = 2.3, p < .05), but there was no difference for men. However, when we controlled for age and examined differences in BMI in young Arab and Jewish women, and in older Arab and Jewish women, no significant differences between the groups were found (see Table 9.1). As hypothesized, a significant difference was found between men (M = –0.058, SD = 1.1) and women (M = –0.347, SD = .896) in discrepancy between current and ideal figures, t(192.7) = –2.02, p = .05, Kruskal–Wallis Chi Square Approximation p = .05: women were less satisfied than men with their body image (see Table 9.2 and Figure 9.1). Fifty-two percent of male students and 40 percent of female students were satisfied with their current figures; 28 percent of men and 44.2 percent of women were not satisfied with their current figures because they thought they were too heavy, and 19.4 percent of men and 15.8 percent of the women were dissatisfied because they thought they were too thin. These differences were significant, Fisher’s Exact Test p < .01 (see Table 9.3). As predicted, men were more accurate than women in their evaluation of how they were viewed by the other sex. A significant difference, Kruskal–Wallis Chi Square Approximation p < .01, was found between women’s ratings of what they thought was the most attractive figure to men (M = 2.98) and men’s actual rating of the most attractive figure in women (M = 3.55). Men’s rating of the most attractive male figure to women was not significantly different from the figure women rated as most attractive. As predicted, dissatisfaction with one’s body was associated with reports of attempts to change weight. A significant difference, Kruskal–Wallis Chi Square Approximation p < .001, was found in satisfaction with their figures (difference between current and ideal figures) for participants who reported attempting to lose weight (mean difference = –0.54) as against those who did not (mean difference = –0.07) and those who reported attempts to gain weight (mean difference = 0.78.) Women, who were generally less satisfied with their bodies than men, had made significantly more attempts to change their weight: 41.7 percent of women and 25.2 percent of men had attempted to lose weight, and 6.3 percent of women and 1.9 percent of men had attempted to gain weight, Kruskal–Wallis Chi Square Approximation p < .05 (see Table 9.4). Contrary to our hypothesis, no differences were found between Jewish and Arab men on any of the measures. However, although no significant difference was found between the current rating of Arab and Jewish women, and while the two groups agreed on women’s ideal figure, Jewish women were significantly less satisfied with their current figure than were Arab women, Kruskal–Wallis Chi Square Approximation p < .01. A marginally significant difference was found between younger and older women in dissatisfaction with body in general, t(93) = –1.95, p < .10: older women (M = –0.53; SD = 0.84) were more dissatisfied than younger women (M = –0.18; SD = 0.91). As there were significantly older Jewish women in the samples, we again controlled for age. No — 163 —

23.92 164.36 56.41 20.94

3.24 5.37 6.87 2.60

SD 56 56 54 54

n

SD

26.19 4.34 177.9 7.75 74.05 12.43 23.36 3.55

M

Men

62 62 61 61

n 22.28 166.5 54.68 19.72

M 3.68 7.03 6.97 2.18

SD

Women

38 36 37 36

n

— 164 —

Current Ideal Attractive Other attractive Current–ideal

3.35 3.01 2.98 3.84 –0.35

M

0.94 0.64 0.76 0.82 0.9

SD

Total M

96 3.46 95 2.91 94 2.80 93 3.78 95 –0.56

n 1.06 0.67 0.68 0.74 0.92

SD

Jews

Women

M

56 3.18 55 3.13 65 3.26 54 3.92 55 –0.05

n 0.73 0.58 0.79 0.94 0.80

SD

Arabs M

38 4.22 38 4.15 38 4.05 38 3.55 38 –0.06

n

1.17 1.11 1.11 0.92 1.11

SD

Total M 104 4.31 103 4.21 104 4.11 103 3.74 103 –0.10

n

Table 9.2 Means and standard deviations of participants’ figure ratings for Jewish and Arab women and men

Age Height (cm) Weight (kg) BMI

M

Women

Jews

Table 9.1 Age, height, weight, and BMI for Jewish and Arab women and men

M

1.22 1.26 1.15 0.97 1.29

SD

Jews

Men

62 62 62 62 62

n

25.12 177.65 75.60 23.97

Arabs

4.10 4.05 3.83 3.33 0.0

M

1.11 0.85 0.70 0.66 0.78

SD

Arabs

5.86 6.13 11.50 3.52

SD

Men

41 40 41 40 40

n

41 40 40 40

n M. Safir, S. Flaisher-Kellner, and A. Rosenmann

Satisfaction with Body Shape amongst Men and Women

Figure 9.1 Means of men’s and women’s figure ratings. Women’s choices in bold; Men’s choices in italics. Source: Stunkard, Sorenson, and Schulsinger 1983: 119. Copyright 1983 by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. Adapted with permission.

significant difference was found between the groups when we examined differences in satisfaction for younger Arab and Jewish women, t(27.5) = –1.39, p > 0.1, and for older Arab and Jewish women, t(8) = –1.3, p > 0.1. However, Jewish women made more attempts to change their weight than did Arab women, Fisher Exact 2-Tailed Test, p < .01, which lends tentative support to our hypothesis about culture. Earlier we suggested that Israeli society is generally more traditional than American society. Therefore, we employed a post hoc test of Critical Intervals, and compared our results with a recent study which employed the FRS (Gluck and Geliebter 2002). The mean difference between current and ideal figures was smaller for Israeli women (M = 0.35; SD = 0.82), indicating less body dissatisfaction, than for the Caucasian participants in Gluck and Geliebter’s (2002) study (M = 0.79; SD = 0.59). A confidence interval analysis for difference of mean dissatisfaction showed these two samples to differ significantly, p < .00. — 165 —

M. Safir, S. Flaisher-Kellner, and A. Rosenmann

Table 9.3 Number and percentages of the differences between current figure and ideal figure, by sex Men

Thinner No difference Heavier

Women

n

%

n

%

29 54 20

28.16 52.43 19.42

42 38 15

44.21 40.00 15.79

Table 9.4 Attempts to change weight in the previous year, by gender and ethnic origin Women Jews % To lose weight 51.79 No attempt 44.64 To gain weight 3.57

Men Arabs

Jews

Arabs

n

%

n

%

N

%

n

29 25 2

28.95 60.53 10.53

11 23 4

31.15 65.57 3.28

19 40 2

17.07 82.93 0

7 34 0

Discussion The main goal of this study was to explore cultural differences between two ethnic groups in Israel. We proposed that cultural dissimilarities would affect their respective attitudes to body image. Our data, however, suggest that there is a striking similarity between the two groups, regardless of other cultural differences. Jewish women reported higher BMI and were less satisfied with their bodies than were Arab women, although the Arab women were on average about a year and a half younger (M = 22.28) than the Jewish women (M = 23.92). The majority of Jewish women serve in the army for about 20 months before beginning their university studies, whereas Arab women usually begin their studies directly after completing high school. When we controlled for age and examined differences in BMI and satisfaction with body shape in young Arab and Jewish women, and in older Arab and Jewish women, no significant difference was found in either analysis. However, differences between the groups did emerge regarding behavioral aspects of these attitudes: Jewish women made more efforts to change their weight than did Arab women, even when age differences were controlled. In our opinion, this finding lends tenuous support for the predicted cultural — 166 —

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difference between Israeli Arabs and Jews. A great deal of research in social psychology has demonstrated the complex link between attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Backman et al. 2002), which introduces a host of intervening factors and alternative explanations that were not controlled for in this study i.e., the perceived control over and perceived social support for the behavior. No difference was found between Jewish and Arab women regarding the ideal female figure. No significant differences were found between Jewish and Arab men concerning satisfaction with their current body shape, their ideal body shape, and attractive body shapes. Note that although some of our hypotheses regarding differences between Jews and Arabs in Israel and in comparison with Western findings were supported, we are struck more by the similarities than by the differences between the two Israeli cultural groups. Nasser (1997) suggested, and Becker (Reynolds 1998) demonstrated, that cultures are becoming increasingly similar, through identification with universal values (such as Western norms in relation to weight and shape preferences) that are widely disseminated through the media. To frame our findings in a wider cross-cultural context, we were interested in the differences in body satisfaction between Israeli and American college students. In a post-hoc Critical Interval analysis, the suggested cultural influences on body image were significant; American women showed greater body dissatisfaction than Israeli women. We may hypothesize that the more traditional family orientation in Israeli cultures mediated these effects. Gender differences in body image satisfaction received unequivocal support from our findings. Women were significantly less satisfied than men with their bodies. This gender difference was much more pronounced than were the ethnic differences. Other studies have also demonstrated that gender influences are stronger than ethnic or racial differences (e.g., Mintz and Kashubeck 1999). Like women in the United States, those in our study exaggerated the magnitude of thinness that they thought men desired, believing men to prefer them thinner than men actually liked. Fallon and Rozin (1985) suggested that there might be a firm basis for this discrepancy because they found that men desired women who were thinner than women currently perceived themselves to be. But in Israel men rated the attractive female figure as heavier than the women’s average rating for “current” figure. Furthermore, the widest discrepancy was between women’s ratings of “attractive” (the female figure that women rated as most attractive to men) and men’s actual rating of the most attractive female figure. Men’s rating of the most attractive male figure to women was not significantly different from the figure women rated as the most attractive. In general contrast with findings from the United States (e.g., Gluck and Geliebter 2002), 16 percent of Israeli women participants indicated dissatisfaction with their bodies because they thought that they were too thin in comparison with their ideal body shape. In addition, 6.3 percent of the women in this study indicated that they had tried to gain weight. These — 167 —

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findings challenge the Duchess of Windsor’s famous quote that “women can’t be too rich or too thin.” Gender role idealization and the emphasis on thinness in women is evident throughout American media (Kilbourne 1994). Women’s magazines were found to contain 10.5 times more advertisements and articles on weight loss then men’s (Anderson and DiDomenico 1992). Numerous studies have documented the negative psychological impact (such as higher levels of self-consciousness, higher state anxiety, and greater dissatisfaction with body) of viewing pictures of extremely thin models (e.g., Hamilton and Waller 1993; Ogden and Mundray 1996; Kalodner 1997). An examination (Petrie et al. 1996) of men’s fashion magazines (articles, advertisements, and male models’ body sizes) over a 32-year period revealed an increase in articles about health and fitness. However, there was a decline in messages about weight and beauty. Remarkably, male models’ body size measures have not changed over time. These findings contrast strongly with media messages addressed to women in this time frame (Garner et al. 1980; Wiseman et al. 1992) and may have contributed to men’s relative satisfaction with their bodies, in contrast with women’s dissatisfaction. There is some indication that in recent years objectification of the muscular male body in the media seems to be contributing to an increase in men’s dissatisfaction with their bodies (e.g., Harvey and Robinson 2003). Israel is a limited media producer. Therefore, the majority of films and television programs, and even some commercials, are directly imported from North America. This ubiquitous exposure to American media, and the adoption of American values by Israelis, make American findings relevant to our Israeli sample. Content of 3,223 advertisements on an Israeli commercial channel were reviewed in a recent study (Goodich-Avram 1998). In contrast to similar American media representations, the average weight of the main character was rated as average in most of these advertisements. Even though the images in Israeli advertisements were less extreme than American advertisements, 14 percent of female main characters were very thin compared with only 1 percent of male characters, and a significant relationship was found between the character’s sex and weight. Israeli media may well convey much of the same gender double standard regarding weight, and thus contribute to greater body dissatisfaction in Israeli women than men. This double standard is also reflected in attempts to change weight: women were more likely than men to translate dissatisfaction into action. This is consistent with Fallon and Rozin’s (1985) suggestion that women’s dissatisfaction with their current figure is probably related to higher incidence of eating disorders in women, which was found by Thompson and Psaltis (1988). The implications of our findings, and of the many studies cited above, have increased our concern about the effects of generalized dissatisfaction with body shape on women’s psychological well-being and physical health. Our study — 168 —

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demonstrates that this dissatisfaction plagues women even of peripheral and rural origins. Western body-image ideals are becoming globally ubiquitous, overriding less thinness-oriented local ideals. These unrealistic ideals are beyond the reach of the vast majority of women. In fact, in a contest held by the Ford Modeling Agency designed to select new models, out of approximately 40,000 applicants, only three were judged to have “suitable” model’s body shape (Direct Cinema Limited 1991). Additional research is needed to explicate further the reasons for and implications of the spread of this phenomenon globally. Identification of contributing factors should enable us to develop general preventive programs, rather than relying on treatment procedures for those women who are already afflicted with eating disorders and body dissatisfaction.

Note 1. This paper was published under the same title in Sex Roles 52 (5–6): 369–78

References Abu Baker, Khawla. 1985. “The Impact of Cross-cultural Contact on the Status of Arab Women in Israel.” In Women’s Worlds: From the New Scholarship, ed. M.P. Safir, M. Mednick, D. Izraeli, and J. Bernard. New York: Praeger, pp. 246–50. Al-Haj, Majid. 1995. “Kinship and Modernization in Developing Societies: The Emergence of Instrumentalized Kinship,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 3: 311–28. Anderson, Arnold E. and Lisa DiDomenico. 1992. “Diet vs. Shape Content of Popular Male and Female Magazines: A Dose Response Relationship to the Incidence of Eating Disorders?” International Journal of Eating Disorders 11: 283–87. Apter, A., M. Abu Shah, I. Iancu, H. Abramovitch, A. Weitzman, and S. Tyano. 1994. “Cultural Effects on Eating Attitudes in Israeli Sub-populations and Hospitalized Anorectics,” Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 120: 85–99. Backman, Desiree R., Ella H. Haddad, Jerry W. Lee, Patricia K. Johnston, and Georgia E. Hodgkin. 2002. “Psychosocial Predictors of Healthful Dietary Behavior in Adolescents,” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 34: 184–93. Buss, David M., Max Abbott, Aalois Angleitner, Armen Asherian, Angela Biaggio, Angel Blancovillasenor, M. Bruchonschweitzer, Chu’U Hai-Yuan, Janusz Czapinski, Boele DeRaad, Bo Ekehammar, Noha Ellohamy, Mario Fioravanti, James Georgas, Per Gjerde, Ruth Guttman, Fatima Hazan, Saburo Iwawaki, N. Janakiramaiah, Fatemeh Khosroshani, Shulamith Kreitler, Lance Lachenicht, Margaret Lee, Kadi Liik, Brian Little, Stanislaw Mika, Mariam Moadelshahid, Geraldine Moane, Maritza Montero, A. C. Mundycastle, Toomas Niit, Evaristo Nsenduluka, Ryszard Pienkowski, Anne-Maija Pirttila-Backman, Julip Ponce Deleon, Jaques Rousseau, Mark A. Runco, Marilyn P. Safir, Curtis Samuels, Rasvid Sanitioso, Robert Serpell, Nico Smid, Christopher Spencer, Meri Tadinac, Elka N. Todorova, Kari Troland, L. Vandenbrande, Guus Van — 169 —

M. Safir, S. Flaisher-Kellner, and A. Rosenmann Heck, L. Vanlangenhove, Kuo-Shu Yang. 1990. “International Preferences in Selecting Mates – A Study of 37 Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 21: 5–47. Cash, Thomas F. 1990. “The Psychology of Physical Appearance: Aesthetics, Attributes and Images.” In Body Images: Development, Deviance and Change, ed. T.F. Cash and T. Pruzinsky. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 51–80. Cash, Thomas F. and Edwin A. Deagle. 1997. “The Nature and Extent of Body Image Disturbances in Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa: A Meta-analysis,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 22: 107–25. Cash, Thomas F. and Karen L. Hicks. 1990. “Being Fat versus Thinking Fat: Relationships with Body Image, Eating Behaviors, and Well-being,” Cognitive Therapy and Research 14: 327–51. Cash, Thomas F. and Thomas Pruzinsky (eds.). 1990. Body Images: Development, Deviance and Change. New York: Guilford Press. Cash, Thomas F., B.A. Winstead, and L.H. Janda. 1986. “The Great American Shapeup,” Psychology Today (April): 30–37. Crandall, Christian S. 1994. “Prejudice against Fat People: Ideology and Self-interest,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66: 882–94. Direct Cinema Limited. 1991. The Famine Within (video recording). Santa Monica, CA: Direct Cinema Limited. Fallon, April 1990. “Culture in the Mirror: Sociocultural Determinants of Body Image.” In Body Images: Development, Deviance and Change, ed. T.F. Cash and T. Pruzinsky. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 80–110. Fallon, April and Paul Rozin. 1985. “Sex Differences in Perception of Desirable Body Shape,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 94: 102–5. Feingold, Alan and Ronald Mazzella. 1998. “Gender Differences in Body Image Are Increasing,” Psychological Science 9: 190–95. Ford, Kathrin, Bridget M. Dolan, and Chris Evans. 1990. “Cultural Factors in the Eating Disorders: A Study of Body Shape Preferences of Arab Students,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 34: 501–7. Furnham, A. and P. Baguma. 1993. “Cross-cultural Differences in the Evaluation of Male and Female Body Shapes,” Psychological Medicine 13: 829–37. Garner, David M., Paul E. Garfinkel, Donald Schwartz, and Michael Thompson. 1980. “Cultural Expectations of Thinness in Women,” Psychological Reports 47: 483–91. Gluck, Marci E. and Allan Geliebter. 2002. “Racial/ethnic Differences in Body Image and Eating Behaviors,” Eating Behaviors 3: 143–51. Goodich-Avram, C. 1998. “The Portrayal of Women in Advertisements on Israeli Television.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Haifa, Israel. (Hebrew) Hamilton, K. and G. Waller. 1993. “Media Influences on Body Size Estimation in Anorexia and Bulimia,” British Journal of Psychiatry 162: 837–40. Hassan, Manar 1993. “Growing up Female and Palestinian in Israel.” In Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel, ed. B. Swirski and M.P. Safir. New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 66–75. Harvey, Jeffrey A. and John D. Robinson. 2003. “Eating Disorders in Men: Current Considerations,” Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings 10: 297–306. Hutchinson, Marcia G. 1994. “Imagining Ourselves Whole: A Feminist Approach to Treating Body Image Disorders.” In Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, ed. P. Fallon, M.A. Katzman, and S.C. Wooley. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 152–70. — 170 —

Satisfaction with Body Shape amongst Men and Women Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2000. Statistical Abstract of Israel. No. 51 Available at: www.cbs.gov.il/shnaton51/st02_19.pdf (October 2000). Kalodner, C.R. 1997. “Media Influences on Male and Female Non-eating Disordered College Students. A Significant Issue,” Eating Disorders 5: 47–57. Khazan, F.S. 1993. “Change and Mate Selection among Palestinian Women in Israel.” In Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel, ed. Swirski and M.P. Safir. New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 82–90. Kilbourne, Jean 1994. “Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising and the Obsession with Thinness.” In Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, ed. P. Fallon, M.A. Katzman, and S.C. Wooley. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 395–418. Mahler, Margaret S. and John B. McDevitt. 1982. “Thoughts on the Emergence of Self, with Particular Emphasis on the Body Self,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 32: 827–48. Mintz, Laurie B. and Susan Kashubeck. 1999. “Body Image and Disordered Eating among Asian American Women and Caucasian College Students,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 23: 781–95. Nasser, M. 1994. “Screening for Abnormal Eating Attitudes in a Population of Egyptian Secondary School Girls,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 29: 25–30. ——— 1997. Culture and Weight Consciousness. London: Routledge. Ogden, Jane and Kate Mundray. 1996. “The Effect of the Media on Body Satisfaction: The Role of Gender and Size,” European Eating Disorders Review 4: 171–82. Petrie, Trent A., Laura J. Austin, Barbara J. Crowley, Annette Helmcamp, Courtney E. Johnson, Regan Lester, Rebecca Rogers, Jett Turner, and Kevin Walbrick. 1996. “Sociocultural Expectations of Attractiveness for Males,” Sex Roles 35: 581–602. Pruzinsky, Thomas and Thomas F. Cash. 1990. “Integrative Themes in Body Image Development, Deviance and Change.” In Body Images: Development, Deviance and Change, ed. T.F. Cash and T. Pruzinsky. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 337–47. Reynolds, T. 1998. “Sharp Rise in Disordered Eating in Fiji Follows Arrival of Western TV.” FOCUS, News from Harvard Medical, Dental and Health Schools (May 29, 1999): 1. Rothblum, Esther D. 1994. “I’ll Die for the Revolution but Don’t Ask Me Not to Diet: Feminism and the Continuing Stigmatization of Obesity.” In Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, ed. P. Fallon, M.A. Katzman, and S.C. Wooley. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 53–76. Stunkard, A.J., T. Sorenson, and F. Schulsinger. 1983. “Use of the Danish Adoption Register for the Study of Obesity and Thinness.” In The Genetics of Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders, ed. S. Kety, L.P. Rowland, R.L. Sidman, and S.W. Mattthysse. New York: Raven Press, pp. 115–20. Thompson, Kevin 1996. Body Image, Eating Disorders and Obesity: An Integrative Guide for Assessment and Treatment. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Thompson, Kevin, L.A. Penner, and M.A. Altabe. 1990. “Procedures, Problems and Progress in the Assessment of Body Images.” In Body Images: Development, Deviance and Change, ed. T.F. Cash, and T. Pruzinsky. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 21–44. Thompson, Kevin J. and Kay Psaltis. 1988. “Multiple Aspects and Correlates of Body Figure Ratings: A Replication and Extension of Fallon & Rozin (1985),” International Journal of Eating Disorders 7: 813–17.

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M. Safir, S. Flaisher-Kellner, and A. Rosenmann Tiggemann, Marika and Esther D. Rothblum. 1988. “Gender Differences in Social Consequences of Perceived Overweight in the United States and Australia,” Sex Roles 18: 75–86. Tiggemann, Marika and Elise Wilson-Barrett. 1998. “Children’s Figure Ratings: Relationship to Self-esteem and Negative Stereotyping,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 23: 83–88. Wiseman, Claire V., James J. Gray, J.E. Mosimann, and Anthony H. Ahrens. 1992. “Cultural Expectations of Thinness in Women: An Update,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 11: 85–89. Wood, Katherine C., Judith A. Becker, and J.Kevin Thompson. 1996. “Body Image Dissatisfaction in Preadolescent Children,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 17: 85–100.

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Chapter 10

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM, THE POLITICS OF IDENTIFICATION, AND THE LIBERAL BARGAIN

Amalia Sa’ar

In 1988, Deniz Kandiyoti introduced the term the patriarchal bargain, to explain how women living under patriarchy strategize in order to maximize security and optimize their life options. She showed that women’s responses to male dominance vary widely, according to the objective opportunities available under each particular variant of patriarchy. Such responses range from eager collaboration, whereby women act as devout guardians of patriarchal mores and values, through skillful maneuvering to make gains while avoiding overt conflict, to different levels of passive and active resistance. Kandiyoti thus sought to distinguish among different degrees and forms of patriarchal oppression, on the one hand, and to convey the complex positioning of women with respect to power/disempowerment, on the other. She argued that within the system that by and large works against women, some of them stand to benefit from the unequal gender arrangements, depending on their stage in the life cycle or on their particular familial status. Such women are more likely to strike a bargain with patriarchy than to resist it. This was identified as a major source of women’s acquiescence and accommodation to existing gender orders. Recently, Cynthia Cockburn (2004) proposed applying the concept of the patriarchal bargain, along with some other related concepts from gender theory, — 173 —

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to the ethnic context. Cockburn suggests the term ethnic order, paraphrasing what Jill Julius Mathews (Cockburn 2004) called the gender order. The ethnic order represents the power relations in any given society, which establish an initial social differentiation by ethnicity, which then permeates and underpins all other distinctions. Certain members of disadvantaged groups are likely to sign up for an ethnic bargain, that is, to provide services to the dominant ethnic group in exchange for patronage or protection. I want to continue in the analytical direction of Kandiyoti and Cockburn, and expand the notion of the bargain to include a broader political-economic perspective. There is, I would suggest, also a liberal bargain. Some members of marginalized groups internalize liberal epistemology in order to maximize security and optimize their life options. They strategize in order to materialize whatever limited benefits they may extract from their disadvantaged position in the liberal order. Like patriarchal and ethnic bargains, liberal bargains may have many variations, and they include different levels of commitment, namely action, discourse, and meaning-making. Accordingly, attitudes and behaviors tend to range from internalizing and actively promoting liberal authority, through working with it for short-term gains while avoiding conf lictive emotional investments, to passive and active forms of resistance. The concept of the liberal bargain refers to a particular process whereby members of disadvantaged groups become identified with the hegemonic order, at least to a degree. Despite the hierarchical and selective character of liberal orders, quite a few members of marginalized groups stand to gain some benefits from them, or seem to believe that they do. Many of those who face exclusion because of their demographic attributes (notably their ethnic or racial background, and their gender in the case of women), may at the same time enjoy some advantages, thanks to their education, occupation, or to other ascribed traits that are less stigmatized. Not coincidentally, they often adopt a liberal epistemology. Local discourses on the politics of identity are quick to condemn such tendencies as forms of “sellout,” or see them as forlorn attempts to deny the barriers imposed by “skin color.” However, I suggest that the process of mental response, in the sense of adopting modes of knowing, by people on the fringes of the liberal order who face a complex of blockades and partial opportunities is important to ponder. The concept of the liberal bargain facilitates a consideration of cultural attributes, social identities, and social consciousness that admits intermediate and dynamic states. It therefore allows a nuanced reading of prevalent world views and behaviors among people living under oppressive conditions. This is doubly relevant to women. For them, liberal ideologies hold particularly promising prospects of liberation from primordial oppressions at the same time as actual liberal regimes perpetuate their subordination (Barriteau 1998). I will exemplify the notion of the liberal bargain with the case of Palestinian women citizens of Israel. As I elaborate below, although Israel’s liberal elements are significantly weakened by the state’s ethno-national agenda, it still offers some — 174 —

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relevant opportunities even to its most marginalized citizens. Among the Palestinian citizens of the state, local practices tend to combine a firm political awareness of national exclusion and a keen drive to preserve cultural authenticity, with celebrations of modernity, liberalism and, indeed, Israeliness. This complex aspect of the lives of a national minority, which by its very definition is identified with its state’s most immediate enemy, has eluded the local and much of the professional discourse on Israeli Palestinians.1 Israeli-Palestinian women are particularly confusing for formalistic framings, as they simultaneously face multiple oppressions but also enjoy important advantages. The notion of the liberal bargain addresses precisely this type of situation. It holds up a mirror to diverse modes of thinking, knowing, and behaving among members of marginalized categories with respect to the dominant order, offering a way out from treating actors solely on the basis of their ethnic (national, racial…) affiliation or structural positioning. As will be discussed in the closing part of the paper, the concept also makes a particular contribution to some ongoing debates within feminism. Because the liberal bargain admits and in fact anticipates disjunctions between social location and social consciousness, it can serve as a useful tool to move from a politics of identity, which is focused on the impossibility of joint action by women of diverse social and ethnic backgrounds, to a politics of identification, which focuses on the opposite. I start by outlining the theoretical framework that underlies the analysis, so the next section is dedicated to the interconnectedness of liberalism, ethnicity, and patriarchy. I then move on to explore liberal or “white” consciousness and its embedding in dominant masculinities, offering to treat women who adopt dominant ways of thinking according to their specific positioning with respect to the liberal bargain, rather than to their skin color or gender alone. This will form the basis of my analysis, first of Israeli-Palestinian women as an exemplary case study, and then of the applicability of postcolonial feminist politics across the color lines.

Multiple Articulations of Ethnicity, Patriarchy, and Liberalism This paper approaches gender, class, and ethnicity as interconnected and mutually informing. This theoretical position has been extensively formulated by several scholars (e.g., Anthias and Yuval Davis 1992; O’Connor 1993; Allen and Macey 1994). In a comprehensive theoretical article, Floya Anthias (1998: 527) writes that while gender, ethnos [sic], and class may be analytically separated for heuristic purposes, their ontological domains intersect and become constitutive of each other. Bringing gender into the analysis of racial and ethnic exclusion is pertinent to reversing the tendency of much of this literature to adopt a one-dimensional focus. At the same time, incorporating into the analysis of gender oppression the complex intersections between other — 175 —

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major exclusionary mechanisms is promoted by postcolonial feminists as critical to making feminism relevant to women of marginalized, colonized, and otherwise oppressed categories. Patriarchy, ethnicity, and liberalism are very broad terms. The archetypes themselves are diverse, and their historically specific implementations much more so. Ethnicity, for one, is almost always intertwined with additional exclusionary mechanisms, notably race, religion, and nationalism. Accordingly, I will use it as a generic term, to indicate various possible forms of exclusion, whose common denominator is that they produce essentialized differences and naturalized domination. Patriarchy, likewise, is far from monolithic (see, e.g., Kandiyoti 1988; Hardwick 1998; Miller 1998; Lee and Clark 2000; Anzilotti 2002) and it too will be used here in a generic sense. Finally, there are many liberalisms, as Nanette Funk (2004) has shown recently in the case of postcommunist Eastern and Central Europe (ECE), and the former Soviet Union (FSU). In ECE and the FSU, for example, concepts of liberalism have differed from the AngloAmerican versions in nearly all the components with which feminists usually take issue, namely individualism, disembodiment, the virtue of independence, the public–private divide, or the claim to gender neutrality. Accordingly, feminist struggles in the region have had to address its specific forms of gender oppression. Interestingly, Funk’s use of the term “liberalism” is rather loose, as she applies it to both state socialism and postsocialism. In this article, I too will be using liberalism liberally, as an umbrella term for political orders that promote the idea of civil society, where people are entitled to certain freedoms, rights, and protection from arbitrary power. Although in practice civil liberties are often granted or withdrawn according to collective affiliations, their universal character remains a fundamental value and consequently they never cease to exist entirely, even in the margins. Within these ideological contours, liberalism means commitment to the rule of law, to the limitation of political power, and to some degree of private property. Within this general outline, the particular contents of liberalism vary, and so do the particular bases of inclusion and exclusion. The case study that I present below, of Palestinian women citizens of Israel, exemplifies a situation in which liberalism is relevant to bargain with even when, due to its intertwining with Zionism, its gains for members of the national minority seem minimal. Israel’s self-definition as a liberal democracy has come under serious challenge, as the state-supported ethnic order grants Jews privileges over Palestinians and as the Zionist Westernization project has generated further ethnic stratifications within each of the two main national communities. To this criticism feminist authors have added the direct discriminatory implications that militarization and the lack of separation between state and religion mean for women within and across the ethno-national lines. Critical social scientists therefore reject the definition of Israel as a liberal democracy, and instead debate over the terms “ethnic democracy” (Smooha 2002), “ethnic state” (Ghanem 1998), and — 176 —

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“ethnocracy” (Yiftachel 1999). For the purpose of the present discussion it is pertinent that its exclusionary character and racist practices notwithstanding, Israel is not an apartheid state as regards the Palestinians inside it. While it oppresses them collectively, the state furnishes its Palestinian citizens with an array of rights and opportunities that are important in the lives of families and individuals. It is the limited character of their liberal entitlements that renders their case suitable for an examination of the operation of the liberal bargain. Beyond an aggregate of political norms, liberalism constitutes a symbolic system that is intertwined with world historical processes of capitalism and globalization, and with modernity. Within these grand projects, the concept of the liberal bargain is oriented to lived, localized experiences (see Foster 2002). Local discourses, especially in postcolonial situations, often use “liberalism” and “modernity” interchangeably, the latter representing what Eudine Barriteau (1998) has called “the enlightenment promise.” This promise of a better quality of life assumes a linear view of progress, a rational approach to human affairs, and persistent blindness to ethnic tracking, as part of a more general inclination to compartmentalize complex reality. The evident link between these elements and familiar characteristics of modern masculinity is hardly surprising. By and large, modernity has perpetuated patriarchal arrangements, with liberalism providing some of the major conceptual and political tools for the realization of such outcomes. Within this universal process, local receptions of modernity have been immensely diverse (see, e.g., Miller 1994; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Abu-Lughod 1998; LiPuma 2000; Kanaaneh 2002), with paradoxical results. “On the ground,” the powerful drive to modernize has frequently been bound up with forces that seem to contradict its very essence, notably nationalism (Chatterjee 1986; Dirks 1990) and religious fundamentalism (Hefner 1998).2 All too often, these ideologies buttress highly hierarchical and explicitly patriarchal regimes, which nevertheless, being modern, insist on imagining themselves as progressive and gender neutral. A working assumption of this paper, then, is that liberalism, in its diverse implementations, exists in articulation with male domination. Feminist arguments about the gender-specific character of liberal rights and the patriarchal basis of the liberal state are well known and will not be repeated here. Among the main issues, cursorily, are the bolstering, within modern bills of civil rights, of men’s exclusive right to women’s sexuality, through the institutions of marriage, prostitution, or pornography (Pateman 1988; MacKinnon 1989, 1993; Walby 1990); the deeply masculine character of modern political thought, particularly the notion of the person as individualistic, independent, and existing in separation from others (Di Stefano 1991; Kittay 1999); the gendered nature of state mechanisms and procedures, and of state capitalism (Eisenstein 1984; Walby 1986; Connell 1990); and the axiomatic status of sexual difference, hence the centrality accorded to the political entities woman and man (Okin Moller 1991; Wittig 1992; Connell 1996). — 177 —

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Together with its various patriarchal phases, liberalism is also ethnic and racist (e.g., Davis 1981). Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1999) notes that under advanced capitalism the consumer is created as the citizen. This citizenconsumer is made possible and legitimate through the cheap and often invisible labor of racialized, noncitizen or lesser-citizen minorities. Mohanty exposes the role that ideologies of heterosexual femininity, domesticity, and docility play in channeling Third World women to substandard jobs in a variety of national economies. The civil rights of these overworked, underpaid, and unrecognized workers (unrecognized in the sense that their work is constructed as “help,” “temporary,” “merely supplementary,” and generally nonwork) are severely restricted if not denied altogether, effectively leaving the sphere of civil society to the ethnically dominant groups. Since class, ethnicity, and gender mutually constitute systems of oppression, the liberal bargain that operates at their conjuncture is necessarily also ethnic and patriarchal. Racism and sexism exist outside liberal orders also, but liberalism does not operate in ethnic- or gender-free zones; and it actively reproduces the other forms of domination. Yet liberalism has a powerful ability to naturalize its ethnic and gendered aspects, which leads to sublimating or whitewashing much of the violence of the dominant groups. The image of openness and inclusion tends to remain captivating despite the overwhelming structural barriers that surround the liberal order, through consumer culture, celebrated against-all-odds success stories, or the dazzling comfort of massmedia entertainment. Liberalism promises ever-expanding opportunities to ever-expanding numbers of individuals. It offers an escape from the grip of primordial ties, and the freedom to choose and change affiliations. It also seems to offer tangible returns for acquirable human capital, notably education, rational handling of other resources, and excellence generally, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. To reiterate, these promises are far narrower than they pretend to be, but they are not entirely unfounded. The middle class, while gendered and ethnicized, does include women and ethnic minorities. It is demographically inclusive at the same time as it is structurally exclusive. This acts as an important source of legitimacy to liberal ideology, both because it keeps alive the grand dream of the self-made man, and because, however small the gains that most members of marginalized groups stand to get from liberalism, in concrete-life situations partial profits are significant. Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 164–65) describes this process as follows: “Social categories disadvantaged by the symbolic order, such as women and the young, cannot but recognize the legitimacy of the dominant classification in the very fact that their only chance of neutralizing those of its effects most contrary to their own interests lies in submitting to them in order to make use of them …” To be accepted, those who do manage to pull out of the invisible margins and assume civility, who obtain different measures of what Marnia Lazreg calls “situational power” (2000: 32), need to traverse varying cultural and social — 178 —

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distances, according to their relative social positioning with respect to ethnicity and gender. On the way to converting their acquired capital into economic and social success, they habitually adopt liberal epistemology. The mental and cultural process of learning to “think white”/“think male” is often quite necessary, with the actual meanings of whiteness and maleness of course being diverse and context bound. It helps the successful accrual of symbolic capital and, as I discuss below, such mental accommodation greatly facilitates the daily handling of racism and sexism. The internalization of modes of thinking and knowing is central to the working of the liberal bargain.

Complicating Whiteness, Complicating Maleness Third World feminism, in its urge to incorporate ethnicity into the analysis of gender oppression, has forcefully integrated the color metaphor into feminist debates. This narrative names and rejects the superior approach to “women of color” within Western feminism, claiming that the latter tends to reduce “brown” women to one dimension of their lives (such as reproduction and housework), and ignore their diversity, agency, and complex history (e.g., Lazreg 1988; Mohanty 1991). Such one-sided emphasis on difference, the argument goes, often duplicates biases against women generally, which academic feminists have denounced in conventional social science. Further, through the discursive objectification of colorized women, “white” feminists constitute themselves as liberated subjects. While I adopt this critical position, I nevertheless want to redirect the emphasis on women as complex and historically situated agents back to the center, and apply it to “white” women and to colorized women who “go white.” My attempt, more generally, is to complicate whiteness. I want to argue that the color metaphor, while valuable for its expressivity, is too general and therefore analytically insufficient. Instead of the category “white women,” it would be more useful to consider the specific positioning with respect to the liberal bargain, of women within or on the fringes of dominant groups. At different historical moments over the past hundred years or so, women’s and human rights activists have regarded the term “feminism” with suspicion (Johnson-Odim 1991). There are at least two major reasons for this. One is the persistent inclination of mainstream, Western feminists to focus their struggle exclusively on gender discrimination, while eschewing other forms of struggle, notably ethnic struggles in gender-mixed settings. As a result, the version of feminism that has become most widely acknowledged, documented, and popularized is linked with women who are relatively well off, well educated, and “white,” that is, fairly well positioned vis-à-vis the liberal order. Leaving out the interests and life experiences of women from marginalized or oppressed groups means that the exclusive focus on gender discrimination has made feminism an exclusionary practice and ideology. A second source of discomfort with feminism — 179 —

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is its historical identification, rightly or not, with colonialism and cultural imperialism. “Feminism” became widely construed as a form of ideological imperialism, despite the fact that indigenous feminisms sprang up throughout the colonized world as long ago as the early twentieth century. Historian Leila Ahmed (1992) documented this process in the case of the Muslim world. In Egypt, Turkey, or Iran, for example, local and colonial versions of modernism alike framed Muslim culture as the major obstacle to progress, and regarded the state of women as the prototypical litmus paper for testing the level of cultural development. The discursive link between political disempowerment, culture, and women, which originated in the particular historical juncture of modernity and colonialism, quickly gained the status of an ahistorical truism. As such, it was uncritically adopted also by the major counternarratives, notably postcolonial nationalism, pan-Arabism, and political Islam. Third World feminists have poignantly dwelled on the inability of mainstream feminist theory to accommodate women living outside the core of liberal society. Chela Sandoval (1991), for example, outlines a four-phase feminist history of consciousness, consisting of “liberal,” “Marxist,” “radical/cultural,” and “socialist” feminisms. She contends that despite the seemingly serious differences between these phases, they are unified and hegemonic in their exclusion of US Third World feminism. Although “socialist” feminism does address racial and class divisions among women, the argument goes, it too is still locked within the same all-knowing hegemonic logic. It incorporates feminists of color mainly at the level of description, but disregards their original contribution to theory. Likewise, normative accounts of the Second Wave feminist movement in the U.S.A. inaccurately depict it as primarily white and middle class. The intense engagement of women of color in feminist work during the 1970s is largely ignored, and women’s consciousness-raising groups, the founding of the National Organization for Women, or debates on the predicament of suburban wives became the exclusive landmarks of this wave. Largely, this has had to do with the fact that the work of women of color extended beyond women-only spaces. As Becky Thompson (2002) documents, feminists of color have worked with white-dominated feminist groups; they formed women’s caucuses in existing gender-mixed organizations, and they also developed autonomous Black, Latina, Native American, and Asian feminist organizations. Similar invisibility affected feminists from nondominant groups outside the U.S.A., where multiple gender and ethnic allegiances resulted in their intensified marginalization. The example of Mizrahi feminists in Israel is a case in point. Mizrahis are Jews of Arab descent, who are considered “Black” in Israeli culture. They have been historically subordinated within Israeli-Jewish society, and the Arab components of their culture have often been regarded as impeding their modernization. Concomitantly, mainstream Israeli feminism persistently overlooked the intra-Jewish ethnic agenda and tended to marginalize Mizrahi activists (Damary Madar 2002). — 180 —

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Notwithstanding their transparency in feminist circles, ethnicized women and men are not necessarily absent from the core of liberal society. Liberalism does admit individuals from marginalized groups, despite its clear class element. It also admits women from the dominant groups (“white” women) despite its clearly patriarchal nature. Indeed, with all its limitations, modern society does allow upward mobility for people from structurally disadvantaged backgrounds, through education, occupation, and related achievements. In and of themselves, such achievements are not sufficient to undo the working of discrimination and structural exclusion. Still, openings, in small measure, do exist for a trickle of people from the margins inwards. But there is a price. Those who succeed are expected to leave their histories behind. These histories are ignored, or at best framed as local, thus colorizing the boundaries of the white-transparent heart of civilization, which is framed as global (see Lazreg 2000: 32). Should local histories be incorporated into the canon, they would defy the unilinear and singular character so central to white historiography. They would disrupt the ideal of a neutral civil zone, free of so-called primordial elements. They would also sully the “analytical cleanliness” imperative to positivistic methodology. To strike a good bargain with liberalism, members of disempowered backgrounds have to adopt its modes of thinking and knowing. This is crucial in facilitating success for women and minority men who, through access to the right cultural capital, are in positions to share the liberal dividend. Adopting liberal epistemology reduces the friction that their “particularistic” traits are constantly in danger of igniting, although this is not necessarily a conscious strategy. It enables people from subordinate groups, who encounter symbolic forms of sexism or racism, to mitigate such offenses by reclassifying them as harmless background noise, or as tolerable expressions of bad taste. They may even become totally blind to them. Popular discourse refers to such acculturation as “going white.” Significantly, then, “whiteness” (the liberal bargain), is largely about subjective consciousness, and it operates among the dominant and the subordinate alike. In that it is a form of consciousness, whiteness also entails maleness. Adopting a hegemonic liberal epistemology often involves embracing a masculine outlook. Beside attitudes and understandings that are explicitly related to gender, masculine outlooks include cultural elements such as taste, logic, or morale, that appear gender neutral, but whose gendered character is in fact hidden or implicit. They likewise dominate most local paradigms of modernity, ethnicity, and liberalism. Not that masculinity is a fixed entity or a monolithic phenomenon. As several scholars have demonstrated, multiple models of masculinity tend to coexist in given cultural settings (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994; Connell 1995). Rather, the seeming convergence of maleness and whiteness represent the close interrelations of gendered and ethnic domination within liberal regimes. — 181 —

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Maleness and whiteness, then, are decidedly matters of historical consciousness, not sex or skin color. Yet in practical experience they assume a formidable and unchanging character, because they are anchored in robust regimes of power. Liberal orders are particularly amenable to exposing the tensions between essentialist and constructionist aspects of social identities. Being at once exclusionary and inclusive, they render white-male prerogatives not entirely out of reach also to individuals normatively classified as nonmales and nonwhites. As dominant identities and epistemologies, maleness and whiteness govern the thought and conception of many people from minority backgrounds. This tends to be particularly so among those closest to the core of the liberal order, such as highly educated upper-middle-class career women. But it affects people positioned farther from the center too. “White women” are not automatically individuals of the ethnic majority, since members of excluded minorities may become white in certain important respects, even as they continue to face oppression on the basis of their ethnicity. Likewise, individual females of the dominant group cease to be “white women” in the popular descriptive sense, when they become critically aware of their privileges. While they are still likely to derive benefits from their “whiteness,” political awareness, especially when accompanied by action, reduces their sense of belonging and entitlement, and may well also have a marginalizing effect on them. The effects within feminism of the process I have described here have been paradoxical. On the one hand, feminism, even in its most conservative branches (liberal feminisms), has inculcated oppositional consciousness and exposed the limitations of the liberal order. On the other hand, the version that has gained the widest popularity is that which focuses narrowly on amending gender discrimination, while leaving unchallenged the normative construct of the “woman,” and which refuses to link gender issues with larger forms of oppression. Fighting against gender discrimination is vital and, moreover, it is getting results and affecting the lives of significant numbers of women. Very importantly, it challenges liberal regimes using their own logic; for better or worse, these regimes embrace it. Here of course lies the irony. Hegemonic feminist discourse invokes familiarity with and affinity to the dominant culture. Such invocations make it easier to identify with and disseminate, partly because they produce an epistemological, and sometimes also a practical affinity to power. All too often, they produce “whiteness” in the process. I mentioned Chela Sandoval’s (1991) contention that all four major phases of feminist history are, despite themselves, hegemonic. To overcome this trap, she argues, would take a paradigm shift, and she points to the mode of consciousness that Third World feminists have enacted over the last thirty, now forty, years. This fifth mode, which Sandoval calls “differential,” is profoundly antithetical to the others. It is not historically organized, and it does not privilege one oppositional enactment (equal rights, revolutionary, supremacist womenare-better-than-men, and separatist) over any other. Instead, it recognizes the — 182 —

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potential effectiveness of all of these enactments, and therefore incorporates them. Through making movement possible between seemingly very different attitudes and strategies, the differential mode transforms them out of their hegemonic versions. In glaring contrast to the dominant Western preoccupation with what Christine Di Stefano (1991: 60) in Configurations of Masculinity, calls “the need for singular identity,” the subjectivity that Sandoval advocates is a tactical one. It is a political version, anchored in the life experiences of people who struggle to survive in the face of poverty and exclusion, which denies any one ideology as the final answer, therefore allowing people to constantly recenter, depending on the kinds of oppression that need to be confronted. To illustrate my arguments thus far, I turn now to discuss some practical attempts by Palestinian citizens of Israel to cash in on the benefits that the liberal-Zionist order offers them as individuals, and the limits that their collective exclusion as a national minority sets to such attempts. Notwithstanding their proud national identification and resentment against the state, as they claim liberal entitlements members of the Palestinian community in Israel tend to grow increasingly comfortable with the dominant cultural manners and ways of thinking. While they do not deny their ethnicity or gender, and may even celebrate them, the liberal bargain reduces the power of these identity components to shape a critical social consciousness. Importantly, state racism and the highly antagonistic Israeli–Palestinian conflict produce, beside liberal bargains, segregation and diverse forms of resistance; these lie outside the scope of the present discussion.

The Liberal Promise and its Limitations for Women from Marginal Backgrounds Israeli-Palestinian women, with whose situation I’m acquainted through my anthropological research and political activism,3 suffer from triple marginalization: ethno-national, class-based, and gendered. Although their Israeli citizenship grants them certain rights and opportunities, notably through education, welfare, the right to vote and appeal to the courts, and through access to plentiful consumerism, they are at the same time structurally discriminated against, and treated with endemic suspicion.4 Israeli Palestinians are overrepresented in poverty and in the lowest socioeconomic echelons. Their residential areas suffer from underdeveloped infrastructure, unemployment, housing shortages, and high levels of crime and communal violence. To extenuate these multiple oppressions, Palestinian women are frequently exposed to severe measures of domestic and sexual oppression (Glazer and Abu-Ras 1994; Haj-Yahia 1995; Espanioly 1997; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999). By and large, the state acts as a passive or active preserver of patriarchal control and male domestic violence (Hasan 2002). However, over the years women’s organizations have — 183 —

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challenged the state to provide protection for women under death threats and women who suffer domestic abuse, and for general promotion of women’s rights, mostly through the court system and through legislation. In postcolonial terminology, the location of Israeli-Palestinian women in the ethno-national-class order makes them racialized or colored. As inhabitants of this cultural space, they recreate and delimit the transparency of the liberal-civic space that excludes them. However, the implications of liberal, in this case Israeliliberal culture, for people who are ostensibly its very negation, are complex, as Israeli-Palestinian women also derive positive meaning from the liberal order. Deniz Kandiyoti writes: “Patriarchal bargains do not merely inform women’s rational choices but also shape the more unconscious aspects of their gendered subjectivity” (1988: 285). This characterization is applicable to liberal bargains also. Although the Zionist component of Israeli culture is outright exclusive, the modern-liberal component is not. Rhoda Kanaaneh (2002), in an ethnography of Palestinian women’s lives in Galilee (northern Israel), documents practices and desires of modernity, and how they feature in a nuanced and complex jigsaw of national and ethnic identities. From a different angle, Hanna Herzog (2004) ponders why only eighteen out of 108 educated Israeli-Palestinian women interviewed for her research used the term “racism” in their life stories, which were replete with instances of blunt discrimination, hostility, exclusion, and other offenses that they suffered directly because they were Arab. This puzzling avoidance of the explicit term “racism” in a racialized society, she argues, reflects the absence of legitimacy for the term in the dominant discourse in Israel and a strong tendency to construct the discourse about the relations between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in national rather than civil terms. Moreover, it indicates how the dominated women adopt and thus reproduce the language of the dominant group as well as dominant knowledge (Herzog 2004: 61). While in Herzog’s interpretation the dominated women adopt the language of their domination, in Kanaaneh’s presentation they claim it, the language of modernity, as their own. However, from the perspective of the liberal bargain, the reports of these two authors have more in common than may seem at first glance. The myriad, often fleeting, and sometimes more substantial points where Palestinian women touch Israeli culture, constitute potential entrances to the privileged civil space. Although formidable ethno-national segregation prevents such excursions from turning into permanent, large-scale acceptance, the benefits that they yield in concrete-life situations cannot be underestimated. A woman of forty-odd from a village in Galilee, who participated in my research, made the following comment on the nearby city of Karmiel: Regardless of what the Arabs here in the village say about Karmiel having taken our lands, for me it’s a great break. I can go there and have coffee all by myself, go to the shopping mall, or get my hair done. And I know that there’s always a possibility for me to start up a business there. I have many Jewish clients from there, who come to my hair salon in the village. (Sa’ar 2000: 334) — 184 —

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Along similar lines, an interviewee in Herzog’s study said: “Today, like it or not, I am in the Israeli society and I have no doubt that I took and absorbed things from it … my life experience is partly Israeli” (Sa’ar 2000: 76). Well versed in the local essentialist discourse on national identities, this particular woman, a highly educated political activist, took deliberate steps to ensure that her Israelization did not weaken her Palestinian-ness, and she carefully verbalized this to the interviewer, repeating phrases such as “I am not assimilating” and “I make sure … not to lose what I have.” The women represented in Kanaaneh’s ethnography did just the same, but mostly without the explicit identity terminology. They consumed, desired, planned when to have babies, or kept healthy, with a specific vision of modernity in mind, which was combined with a vivid sense of minority. Similar depictions emerge in my own ethnographic work (Sa’ar 2000; 2005). Another expression of the contradictory situation of Israeli Palestinians is the combination of increasingly localized concerns and identities, on the one hand, and strong national, regional, and global orientations, on the other. This was lucidly brought home to me one day in May 2004, when, in the midst of a large Israeli-launched military operation in the occupied city of Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip, which destroyed tens of residential buildings, turned hundreds of families into refugees yet again, and killed several dozens of people, the Arab soccer team Abna’ il-Sakhneen (from the town of Sakhneen, inside Israel) won the state cup. The military operation in occupied Palestine provoked a series of demonstrations inside Israel. These demonstrations tended to be highly emotional, using slogans that accused Israel of committing genocide and war crimes. Many Israeli Palestinians expressed a sense of outrage and despair. One of these demonstrations, staged on the far-southern border of the Gaza Strip, took place the same day that the Sakhneen team won the cup. Hearing the score on their bus trip back north, the demonstrators’ mood changed dramatically. One of the participants, a radical feminist called Salwa (a pseudonym), told me, “We traveled there sad and returned happy. It was a tremendous sense of elation.” Israeli television that night broadcast pictures of Palestinians celebrating in the streets of Sakhneen, weeping with joy. For a brief moment, Abna’ il-Sakhneen, the underdog of Israeli soccer, did the impossible. It is plausible that the frantic festivities at the height of the humiliating Rafah operation conveyed more than a fraction of symbolic revenge. But it also conveyed the possibility of succeeding against all odds, of shortcutting the laborious course of the organized leagues, and of breaking right through to the top. The tearful men in the street who said on Israeli television that the victory was a proof that coexistence was possible, were not merely trying to appease Jewish-Israeli public opinion. They were enjoying the sweet victory, the respect gained for a hard-won battle, and a rare moment of getting positive attention from the mainstream media. Although some took the opportunity to demand a proper soccer stadium in Sakhneen, more explicit political statements were consistently avoided. — 185 —

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In seemingly contradictory moves, then, Israeli Palestinians enthusiastically pursue practices of modernity, individualistic mobility, and local patriotism, while engaging in political discourses of historical justice, which defy and blame Israel’s self-declared liberalism. Localization is happening despite salient discursive moves to emphasize the national unity of Palestinians within and outside Israel, and to relate internal divisions to a Zionist scheme to divide and rule. Partly, the various ethnic, religious, and regional historical divisions among the Palestinians reinforce this orientation. But mostly it reflects the liberal condition, where temporary or partial gains provide powerful incentives to relax into the promising face of liberal ideology. To tie together the gendered, ethnic, and class components of the liberal bargain I turn to one last example, that of Yara, who at the age of 32 got a Master’s degree in education from one of the major Israeli universities. I met Yara through my research on unmarried Palestinian women, and over the seven or so years of our acquaintance I have come to appreciate her wisdom and courage in handling her prolonged nonwedded status. Like many other unmarried women in her community, Yara was preoccupied with her aberrant status, keen to get married, and frustrated at the conservatism of bachelors and their fear of independent women. At the same time, she was also strongly careeroriented and determined to continue her education, despite popular convictions that advanced education and a career would impede even further her chances of marrying. Hard-working and ambitious, she was therefore employed, throughout her academic studies, as a school teacher and in different administrative jobs at the Ministry of Education. Yara is an apt example of the liberal bargain, as she combines a strong modernist world view and a strong Islamic identity, without being religiously observant. Despite her potential exposure to critical theories at the School of Education (Erdreich and Rapoport 2002), Yara’s engagement in knowledge production, as a student and research assistant, revolved consistently around conservative, functionalist analyses. Further, her parallel experience doing a graduate degree in education, with its potentially critical outlook, and developing new curricula for Arab students at the Israeli Ministry of Education, did not seem to create any dissonance. In her work and professional thinking, Yara focused entirely on the universal-liberal goal of modernizing Arab public schools, and consistently shunned the notion that knowledge is situated and therefore yields explicitly political implications. In this, she joined a mainstream narrative among the professional Arab and Jewish personnel in the educational administration and school system. This narrative habitually identifies as the major maladies of the system the budgetary discrimination against Arab schools, and the poor human resources and general conservatism of Arab teachers. Since these problems are generally deemed correctable within the concept of liberal rights, the narrative in effect depoliticizes the discussion of the colossal failure of Arab public education. Yara’s utilitarian attitude is not — 186 —

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rare among highly educated Israeli Palestinians, who are those most likely to benefit from the liberal order. Notwithstanding the clearly discriminatory and oppressive character of state education (Al-Haj 1995), Yara’s involvement in it served as a source of personal empowerment. As a nonmarried woman from a lower-class family background, and the first generation in her family with higher education, her profession has been for her an opportunity for upward mobility, personal growth, and a ticket to the local elite. This, in turn, has entailed significant internalization of liberal epistemology. The discursive tone, of course, shifts with the context. Significantly, IsraeliPalestinian narratives are multivocal. While attitudes toward modernity are deeply ambivalent and sentiments toward Israel are often outright negative, liberal epistemology retains its hegemony in local articulations of needs and desires, despite the increasingly popular national rhetoric. The levels of acceptance of Israeli- and other available liberalisms range from internalizing and actively promoting their authority, as in the case of Yara, through working with them for short-term gains, for example through participation in formal politics, to passive and active forms of resistance (e.g., Erdreich 2003). Bargaining with liberalism does not exclude the possibility of resistance. Those who tread the liberal path may join in collective action or critical discourse, depending on the context and on their sense of the objective possibilities open to them. However, the more people have invested in liberalism, for example through celebrating images of modernity, the less likely they are to develop or to act on a critical consciousness. Cultural attributes, social identities, and consciousness, which motivate and are affected by liberal bargains, are dynamic phenomena. They are produced through the ongoing reshuffling of gender, ethnicity, and citizenship. To illustrate the complex interrelations between these systems, I end this brief case study with a note on the limitations that inhere in successful bargains, as collective exclusion hinders the private exceptions from accumulating to change the existing power relations. The winning of the state soccer cup by Abna’ il-Sakhneen provides a good case to summarize the fragility of Israeli Palestinians’ entitlements for liberal participation. For the demonstrators who were protesting Israel’s brutality in Gaza, the victory of the local team was an opportunity to savor a moment of national pride. Angry one moment then happy in the next, in that particular phase they were consumed in their national belonging. Even Salwa, the relentless feminist whom I heard several times protest publicly against gender oppression within the Palestinian community, overlooked the exclusively male character of soccer and rejoiced in the victory along with the others. Against this militant mood, the local celebrations in the town of Sakhneen, as they were broadcast on Israeli television, provided symbolic support for the state’s liberal claims that its Arab citizens can enjoy full cultural participation, regardless of the hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians. Sociologist Nuhad ’Ali, who conducted some interviews with functionaries in the Sakhneen football club and followed the — 187 —

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commentaries in the local Arab press, confirmed that the nonbelligerent tone of the supporters represented in the media was not coincidental, but part of the club’s policy to avoid politicization.5 These efforts notwithstanding, the ethnonational tone endorsed by the Palestinian political activists was soon matched also on the Israeli-Jewish side. When, a few months after the state cup victory, a Sakhneen player scored a critical goal for Israel in the World Cup preliminaries, stadiums around the country were filled with loud, racist outcries calling for the barring of Arabs from the national team. So liberal bargains seem to reach their limits, and their gains risk being lost, when they touch and expose the ethnic (or racial) nerves that underlie the liberal order. The naming of Arab players for the Israeli national team has made soccer an arena of liberal inclusion. Yet the successive victories highlighted the national difference among the players, and consequently reinforced the exclusionary components of soccer. For people from marginalized groups, this delicate balance between individual inclusion and collective exclusion is deepseated, if mostly unarticulated knowledge. Therefore, when they bargain with liberalism, Palestinians tend to keep their efforts on an individual level, and pick carefully the aspects of their “difference” to be allowed in. For example, speaking Arabic in public places may be too risky at times, or allowed and even appreciated at others, depending on the type of liberal sensibilities among the majority group at each particular scene and on the general level of ethnic antagonism at any given period. A similar rule applies to women who occupy public positions. Their femininity is allowed in, metaphorically speaking, and at times is even thought to contribute an aesthetic added value, but such tolerance may quickly be reversed when women seem to “take over” public space.6

From Identity to Identification In this article, I have argued for the need to refine the tools of assessment of the behavior and consciousness of people from disadvantaged backgrounds within liberal regimes. I have suggested that instead of focusing on actors’ ethnic affiliation or “color,” it would be more useful to look at the type of bargain that they stand to strike with liberalism. The concept of the liberal bargain, embedded as it is in ethnic and patriarchal arrangements, allows us to note the dynamic, agentive aspect of power relations without disregarding their structural character. Because in liberal regimes mechanisms of exclusion do not entirely rule out possibilities for participation and mobility for members of marginalized groups, including women within the dominant groups, actors often concentrate on the advantages, partial and selective as they may be, that they may have within the existing order. In the process, they are heavily inclined to adopt, to one degree or another, the hegemonic epistemology, which by historical default is “white” and “masculine.” — 188 —

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Common interests, according to Anna G. Jonasdottir (1988: 41), are usually thought of either in formal terms, that is, a result of objective conditions of “being among,” or in terms of individualized and group-based “needs and desires,” which are primarily subjective. For Jonasdottir, these seemingly opposing conceptions are not necessarily mutually exclusive. While formal conditions certainly play a crucial role in classifying people as a group, whose interests of civil participation and entitlement are clearly discernible, the content of the needs and desires of actual people within the category, how they view their interests, cannot be reduced to the arbitrary historical chance that placed them in it. This theorization, according to Chandra T. Mohanty, “allows us to acknowledge common interests and potential agency on the basis of systematic aspects of social location and experience, while keeping open … the deeper, more fundamental question of understanding and organizing around the needs, desires, and choices (the question of critical, transformative consciousness)” (Mohanty 1999: 378). I find this a good entry point to try to synthesize the diverse issues presented in this article. Mulling over possible mismatches between the “color of the body” and the “color of the mind,” that is, between social identities as they are produced in particular historical contexts and the degree to which persons identify with their identities, I have discussed how members of subordinate groups adopt liberal epistemology. To bring my argument about the liberal bargain to its logical conclusion, I turn now to the complementary case, of people who are “white” in the sense of “being among” (in their demographic characteristics) but not in the sense of “needs and desires.” The politics of identity, which thrives on essentialist trappings of people in fixed cultural categories, despises “brown” people who “go white” and cannot accommodate “white” people with “brown” minds. Yet these are prevalent options that need to be considered seriously. Feminist men, Jewish supporters of Palestinian rights, Ashkenazi endorsers of Mizrahi epistemology (Shohat 2001), and parallel combinations are significant for processes of social transformation. Moreover, disjunctions between (privileged) social background and (critical) social consciousness occur also outside the obvious circles of political activists. Nonpoliticized people, who are conveniently positioned to reap the liberal privileges, are also amenable to such processes. For example, highly educated, upper-middle-class career women often experience disharmony in their working environments, whether or not they articulate it explicitly. Although such women and men may be relatively safe from injury by routine sexist, racist, or classist offenses, they may be unable or unwilling to dismiss them. Critical consciousness, in other words, may develop through an experience of affluence and privilege, as much as experiences of exclusion may lead to and nurture conservative consciousness. To resist the tempting embrace of liberal hegemony, feminists from dominant groups need to colorize the structural privileges that have rendered — 189 —

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them “white,” as in the example of Adrienne Rich’s (1984) political reading of her own body/person. To comprehend their deeply contradictory situation, without reducing it to being either oppressed or oppressive, feminists located in proximity to the liberal well need to name and politicize their pain and oppression, alongside tackling their own racism. Through encounters with people who “stand outside the circle of … society’s definition of acceptable women” (Lorde 1983: 99), these feminists are challenged to see racism and classism as relevant to them personally. True, the privilege not to have to fight for material, physical survival and the comfort of liberal dividends create major distinctions between feminists of different political-economic backgrounds. However, these historical distinctions need not be reified. Instead, attuning to difference, seeing it “as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (Lorde 1983: 99), becomes a central methodology for feminist action and consciousness. The term “liberal bargain” is helpful in discerning historical privileges without, as it were, taking them too personally. Such an attitude in turn is necessary in order to move from denial and guilt to responsibility and mutual exchange (Russo 1991), and to replace an essentialist and limited politics of identity with a politics of identification. A politics of identity assumes unilinear causality between cultural attributes, social identities, and social consciousness. It urges the racialized members of society to develop a consciousness of the particular history of their exclusion, as a way to galvanize action. In popular color terminology, “blacks” should “think black” in order to liberate themselves. To “think white,” for racialized people, implies potential loss of identity. By the same logic, people in dominant categories are “white” in the dual sense of social identity and social consciousness. A politics of identity usually also implies that the class and ethnic privileges of women at the core of liberal orders outweigh their gender exclusion, leaving them more “white” than gendered. Against this line, I have argued that such hierarchical reasoning is unsatisfactory, analytically and politically. Analytically, it cannot account for nuanced combinations of social positions, cultural attributes, and social consciousness, which empirical research reveals to be more complex than identity discourses would admit. Likewise, gender oppression is not derivative of ethnic or class oppressions. If it appears to be that way, in the case of women from dominant groups, this is the result of the historical interrelations between whiteness and maleness, which leads “white” women to adopt masculine modes of knowing and thinking. Outside academia, postcolonial feminist politics will benefit from embracing people from historically privileged groups who share its critical outlook, without denouncing their particular social histories.

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Notes This paper was first published 2005 under the same title in Gender & Society, 19(5): 680–700. 1. See, for example, the scholarly debate, launched mostly during the 1990s, about whether the increasingly nationalistic rhetoric among the Palestinian citizens of Israel indicates radicalization and a weakening of their civic identity, or Israelization, namely healthy participation in democratic politics (Rekhess 1989; Smooha 1989; Landau 1993; Rosenhek 1998). 2. For a review of the duality inherent in modernity, most notably the tensions between autonomy and fragmentation, liberty and discipline, or democracy and capitalism, see Delanty (1999). 3. I did anthropological fieldwork with Israeli Palestinians in 1993–94 and again in 1997–99, with one of my major foci being women and gender issues. My primary research methodology was participant observation. I lived for more than a year in each of the two respective urban communities that I studied, and during these periods socialized intensively with local people; I visited homes as well as entertained in my own apartment, did volunteer work in three local NGOs, and attended a diverse range of cultural, social, and political activities. I also held several dozen formal and informal interviews and some focus groups. Parallel to my professional experience, I have been involved in a variety of groups working toward a peaceful solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, within and outside Israeli feminism. In 1987–88, this involvement included a year’s residence in a rural Palestinian community in the center of Israel. 4. The dual definition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state implies that its Palestinian citizens (roughly 18 percent of the population) are eligible for basic liberal rights, but they are denied most forms of collective rights (Ghanem 2000; Smooha 2002; Shaphir and Peled 2002). They are exposed to a variety of policing methods, as well as direct and indirect discrimination, while at the same time enjoying certain degrees of individual protection and opportunities. 5. Personal communication with Nuhad’Ali, summer 2004. 6. A vivid example is found in the active avoidance by female Hebrew and Arabic speakers in Israel of using feminine grammatical forms (Sa’ar, n.d.).

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1998. “Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions.” In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3–31. Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Al-Haj, Majid. 1995. Education, Empowerment and Control: The Case of Arabs in Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press. Allen, S. and M. Macey. 1994. “Some Issues of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism in the ‘New’ Europe: Rethinking Sociological Paradigms.” In Economic Restructuring and Social Exclusion, ed. P. Brown and R. Crompton. London: UCL. Anthias, Floya. 1998. “Rethinking Social Divisions: Some Notes towards a Theoretical Framework,” The Sociological Review 46: 505–35.

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Amalia Sa’ar Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval Davis. 1992. Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour, and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle. London: Routledge. Anzilotti, Cara. 2002. In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy, and Power in Colonial South Carolina. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press. Barriteau, Eudine. 1998. “Theorizing Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-century Caribbean,” Feminist Review 59: 186–210. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed Books. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2004. The Line: Women, Partition, and the Gender Order in Cyprus. London and New York: Zed Books. Comaroff, J.L. and J. Comaroff. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Connell, Robert William. 1990. “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics,” Theory and Society 19: 507–44. ——— 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——— 1996. “New Directions in Gender Theory, Masculinity Research, and Gender Politics,” Ethnos 61(3–4): 157–76. Cornwall, Andrea and Nanca Lindisfarne. 1994. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. London: Routledge. Damary Madar, V. 2002. Mizrahi Feminism. Jerusalem: Students for Social Justice. (Hebrew) Davis, Angela Yvonne. 1981. Women, Race, and Class. New York : Random House. Delanty, Gerard. 1999. Social Theory in a Changing World: Conceptions of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dirks, Nicholas B. 1990. “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2(2): 25–32. Di Stefano, Christine. 1991. Configurations of Masculinity; a Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory. New York: Cornell University Press. Eisenstein, Zillah R. 1984. Feminism and Sexual Equality: Crisis in Liberal America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Erdreich, Lauren. 2003. “Opening Identities of Change: Multiple Literacies of Palestinian Israeli Women at the University”. Doctoral Dissertation, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Erdreich, Lauren and Tamar Rapoport. 2002. “Elaborating Ethnonational Awareness via Academic Literacy: Palestinian Israeli Women at the University,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 33(4): 492–515. Espanioly, Nabila. 1997. “Violence against Women: a Palestinian Womans Perspective. Personal Is Political,” Women’s Studies International Forum 20: 587–92. Foster, Robert J. 2002. “Bargains with Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Elsewhere,” Anthropological Theory 2(2): 233–51. Funk, Nanette. 2004. “Feminist Critiques of Liberalism: Can They Travel East? Their Relevance in Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union,” Signs 29(3): 695–721. Ghanem, As’ad. 1998. “State and Minority in Israel: the Case of the Ethnic State and the Predicament of Its Minority,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21(3): 428–48. ——— 2000. “The Palestinian Minority in Israel: the ‘Challenge’ of the Jewish State and Its Implication,” Third World Quarterly 21(1): 87–104. — 192 —

Postcolonial Feminism and the Liberal Bargain Glazer, Ilsa and Wahiba Abu-Ras. 1994. “On Aggression, Human Rights, and Hegemonic Discourse: The Case of a Murder for Family Honor in Israel,” Sex Roles 30: 269–82. Haj-Yahia, Muhammad. 1995. “Wife Abuse in the Arab Society in Israel; Some Challenges for Future Change.” In Future Interventions with Battered Women and their Families, ed. J.L. Edleson and Z.C. Eisikovitz. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Hardwick, Julie. 1998. The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hasan, Manar. 2002. “The Politics of Honor: Patriarchy, the State and the Murder of Women in the Name of Family Honor,” The Journal of Israeli History 21: 1–37. Hefner, Robert W. 1998. “Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age,” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 83–104. Herzog, H. 2004. “‘Both an Arab and a Woman’: Gendered, Racialised Experiences of Female Palestinian Citizens of Israel,” Social Identities 10(1): 53–82. Johnson-Odim, Cheryl. 1991. “Common Themes, Different Contexts: Third World Women and Feminism.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jonasdottir, Anna G. 1988. “On the Concept of Interest, Women’s Interests, and the Limitations of Interest Theory.” In The Political Interests of Gender; Developing Theory and Research with a Feminist Face, ed. by K.B. Jones and A.G. Jonasdottir. London: Sage. Kanaaneh, Rhoda A. 2002. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in the Galilee. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1988. “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender & Society 2(3): 274–90. Kittay, Eva F. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge. Landau, Jacob M. 1993. The Arabs in Israel – a Political Study. London: Oxford University Press. Lazreg, Marnia. 1988. “Feminism and Difference: the Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria,” Feminist Studies 14: 81–107. ——— 2000. “The Triumphant Discourse of Global Feminism: Should Other Women Be Known?” In Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, ed. by A. Amireh and L.S. Majaj. New York and London: Garland. Lee, Rose J. and Cal Clark (eds.). 2000. Democracy and the Status of Women in East Asia. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner. LiPuma, Edward. 2000. Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lorde, Audre. 1983. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table Press. MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— 1993. Only Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, Daniel. 1994. Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Miller, Pavla. 1998. Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500–1900. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Amalia Sa’ar Mohanty, Chandra T. 1991. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ——— 1999. “Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity.” In Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology, ed. S. Hesse-Biber, C. Gilmartin, and R. Lydenberg. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, J. 1993. “Gender, Class and Citizenship in the Comparative Analysis of Welfare State Regimes: Theoretical and Methodological Issues,” The British Journal of Sociology 44: 501–18. Okin Moller, S. 1991. “John Rawls: Justice as Fairness – For Whom?” In Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carol Pateman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pateman, Carol. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rekhess, E. 1989. “Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza: Political Affinity and National Solidarity,” Asian and African Studies 23: 119–54. Rich, Adrienne. 1984. “Notes towards a Politics of Location.” In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985. London: Little Brown & Co. Rosenhek, Z. 1998. “New Developments in the Sociology of Palestinian Citizens of Israel: An Analytical Review,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21: 558–78. Russo, A. 1991. “‘We cannot live without our lives’: White Women, Antiracism, and Feminism.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sa’ar, Amalia. 2000. “‘Girls’ and Women: Femininity and Social Adulthood among Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian Women.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University. Sa’ar, Amalia. 2005. “Postcolonial Feminism, the Politics of Identification, and the Liberal Bargain.” In Gender & Society 19(5): 680–700. Sandoval, Chela. 1991. “US Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10: 1–24. Shafir, Gershon and Peled, Yoav. 2002. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. 1999. “Law, Politics, and Violence against Women: A Case Study of Palestinians in Israel,” Law & Policy 21(2): 189–211. Shohat, Ella. 2001. “Rupture and Return: The Shaping of a Mizrahi Epistemology,” Hagar 2(1): 61–92. Smooha, Sammy. 1989. Arabs and Jews in Israel, vol. I. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ——— 2002. “The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State,” Nations and Nationalism 8(4): 475–503. Thompson, Becky. 2002. “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” Feminist Studies 28(2): 337–55. Walby, Sylvia. 1986. Patriarchy at Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— 1990. Theorizing Patriarchy. Boston, MA: Blackwell. Wittig, Monique. 1992. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Yiftachel, Oren. 1999. “‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine,” Constellations 6(3): 364–90.

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Part III

THE GERMAN CASE

Chapter 11

ACCULTURATION ATTITUDES AND BILINGUAL CLASSROOMS IN GERMANY: THE PORTUGUESE–GERMAN EXAMPLE

Joana Duarte

Introduction The cohabitation of different cultures in the same geographical location originated with the discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and boomed in the twentieth century, mainly due to what nowadays is called globalization. Indeed, it was precisely in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the Portuguese started to leave their country to settle somewhere else in the world, leading to one of the biggest diasporas in history, spreading across the five continents. Since the end of World War II, these migratory movements have increased within Europe, while trans-oceanic mobility has decreased. One of the most popular destinations of Portuguese emigrants has been Germany, especially since 1964, when the first agreements were signed with Portugal in order to supplement the labor force and contribute to the reconstruction of the country. Almost forty years have passed since then and the question arises of how Portuguese immigrants and the host community coexist in Germany. In the present study the relationship between these two ethnic groups will be subjected to empirical research by means of two questionnaires. The first, based on Bourhis et al.’s acculturation scales (1994), will determine the orientation of — 197 —

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the two groups, and the second, a tentative scale designed to determine everyday intergroup experiences, has the purpose of identifying the pragmatic nature of the contacts which lead to the different attitudes. A statistical analysis will direct us to a discussion of the results and will hopefully help to define the acculturation tendencies of these two groups toward each other and provide some sort of framework to enable us to understand the choices made by Portuguese immigrants and their host community in their coexistence in Germany. Finally, it will be speculated, for the purpose of future research, upon which role bilingual schools can play in the manipulation of the acculturation attitudes of these two groups toward each other. For this, the previous acculturation orientations will be compared with a group of Portuguese parents whose children attend a bilingual classroom (Portuguese–German) in Hamburg.

Bourhis’ Acculturation Model Following up Berry and his colleagues’ research on acculturation attitudes (1989), Bourhis criticized the fact that his model did not offer an interactive view of immigrant and host community integration strategies as it did not illustrate the dynamic interplay between host community reactions to immigrants and the integration strategies used by immigrants to adjust to the host community. Based on this fact, Bourhis asserts that, “A brief review of the literature shows that the dynamic nature of immigrant and host community interactions is the most neglected aspect of existing models of immigrant adaptation to the host environment” (Bourhis et al. 1994: 26). Consequently, he would propose a more dynamic model. The first adjustment made to Berry’s model concerned the inconsistency first spotted by Sayegh and Lasry (1993), who suggested that the two questions operating as the basis for Berry’s model do not focus on the measurement of the same thing. The first dimension, i.e. the identification with the heritage culture, measures attitudes, whereas the second one, focusing on the contact with the members of the host community, assesses behavior. Bourhis’ alterations resulted in a change of the original behaviorquestion to: “Is it considered to be of value to adopt the culture of the host community?” (Bourhis et al. 1997). Accordingly, the model suffered some changes, presented in Figure 11.1. Another problem diagnosed by Bourhis was related to the lack of importance given to how the host community can influence and shape the acculturation strategies of the ethnic groups. Consequently, there is the need to articulate the dynamic interplay between the integration strategies of the host community and the immigrating groups. Sayegh and Lasry concluded that “obstacles to the social integration of immigrants, within the host society, need to be examined

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Acculturation Attitudes: the Portuguese–German Example

Is it considered to be of value to maintain the immigrant cultural identity? “YES”

Is it considered to be of value to adopt the cultural identity of the host community?

“NO”

“YES”

INTEGRATION

ASSIMILATION

“NO”

SEPARATION

ANOMIE INDIVIDUALISM

Figure 11.1 Revised bidimensional model of immigrant acculturation strategies. Source: Bourhis et al. (1994).

in the interaction between members of both the ethnic communities and the host society” (Sayegh and Lasry 1993: 107). Based on this assertion, Bourhis et al. (1997) designed a framework for analyzing immigrant integration strategies, taking into account the interaction between host community and immigrant groups, which he called Interactive Acculturation Model (IAM). Thus, the second element of this model attempts to account for the acculturation strategies of the host community. As shown in Figure 11.2, two questions were designed in order to place the host community members on the issue of immigrant integration. The different acculturation strategies from both groups are reached at through the use of questionnaires containing scales, corresponding to each orientation three to five items. For the current study, Bourhis’ scales were adapted to the Portuguese migrants, following the research previously done by Neto (1997).

Do you find it acceptable that immigrants maintain their cultural identity? “YES”

Do you accept that immigrants adopt the cultural identity of your host community?

“YES”

INTEGRATION

“NO”

SEGREGATION

“NO”

ASSIMILATION EXCLUSION INDIVIDUALISM

Figure 11.2 Bidimensional model of host community acculturation strategies. Source: Bourhis et al. (1994).

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Instruments Six different questionnaires were constructed in three different languages – English, German, and Portuguese – following the same tripartite structure. The first part comprises personal information, the second the acculturation scale, and the third question is related to everyday experiences.

Sample Collection Bourhis’ Interactive Acculturation Model and the experiential contact scale were given in the form of questionnaires to 140 participants, 73 Portuguese and 67 Germans, with ages ranging from 13 to 71. They were collected in Hamburg between May and July 2003 in restaurants, cafés, and shops, cultural and linguistic associations, the University of Hamburg, the Portuguese Consulate, Portuguese language courses, and at the entrances of two subway stations. Consequently, all the participants were randomly chosen, having only controlled that the age and gender of both samples stayed roughly equivalent during the collection of the data.

Results Groups and Acculturation Strategies As shown in Figure 11.3 (followed by Table 11.1 showing the exact scores), for all the three samples integration is the preferred acculturation strategy. The German host community and the Portuguese second generation have a very similar inclination, while the Portuguese of the first generation show a slightly lower preference. As far as assimilation is concerned, and in accordance with the means regarding integration, the German participants are the ones that show the lowest preference for this acculturation strategy. Both Portuguese samples present a somewhat higher tendency toward assimilation but no difference is significant. The biggest discrepancies arise when observing the segregation/separation strategy. Immediately it can be concluded that there is no support for segregation, as the German host community refutes this option. Also the Portuguese second generation do not consider this strategy as acceptable for the living together of the two groups. Compared to the other groups, the first generation Portuguese shows a high preference for separation. This figure is clearly lower than the one referring to integration but, nonetheless, higher than the one relative to assimilation.

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5 4.5 4 Mean

3.5

Host Community Second Generation First Generation

3 4.5 4 1.5 1 Assimilation

Integration

Segregration

Figure 11.3 Acculturation orientations of the three groups.

Table 11.1 Mean and standard deviation of the acculturation strategies for the three groups Acculturation Strategy Integration

Assimilation

Segregation

Group

Mean

Standard Deviation

N

G P1 P2 G P1 P2 G P1 P2

4.81 4.33 4.78 2.07 2.49 2.40 1.80 2.73 1.78

0.85 1.54 0.67 0.70 1.33 1.47 0.77 1.42 1.08

66 42 28 66 42 28 66 42 28

Notes: G – German; P1 – Portuguese immigrants of the first generation; P2 – Portuguese immigrants of the second generation

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Inter-scale Relationships Particularly unexpected (and not predicted either by Berry or Bourhis) was the negative correlation between integration and separation, verified here both for the whole sample and for the individual groups. These results contradict Berry’s study, for example, which compared Portuguese–Canadian immigrants to three other ethnic groups (Berry et al. 1989) – French–Canadian, Korean–Canadian, and Hungarian–Canadian. Here all the groups, except the Korean–Canadian, showed a significant positive correlation between integration and separation, in most of the cases. Berry asserts that “this pattern of correlation indicates a predominant concern for the issue of cultural maintenance” (Berry et al. 1989: 200). Once again, this interpretation stresses the fact that in Germany, at least when dealing with Portuguese immigrants, the issue of cultural maintenance does not assume such a central importance, as it is a given fact. This interpretation supports the study by Mielke (1997), in which the correlation between integration and separation was also found to be negative. A further unpredicted result derives from the positive and significant correlation existing between assimilation and separation, which also contradicts Berry’s first findings. In his study, the correlation between these two attitudes was not only negative but significantly so, particularly for the French-Canadian and Hungarian–Canadian communities. However, the curious result derives from the fact that here, too, the Portuguese immigrants seem to have a slightly different view, presenting in this regard a significantly positive correlation, very similar to the one in the current analysis. Berry concludes, “why such an extreme distribution exists among their [Portuguese–Canadian] attitudes is not clear from either the data or from other sources” (Berry et al. 1989: 199). Nonetheless, for the results of the present analysis there might be an explanation. The assimilation orientation, as defined for the current study, comprises two components – the loss of one’s own cultural habits in order to adopt those of the host community and the predominant use of the German language at school. Three of the four items involved in the assimilation orientation concern cultural habits and suggest more precisely that these should be put aside in favor of host community habits. As we have previously seen, while discussing the changes made to the integration attitude, maintenance of their own cultural identity by the immigrants is taken for granted, by both host community and Portuguese immigrants. So, it is more than natural that items related to putting aside cultural features be identified with separation attitudes, causing therefore the positive correlation. Less controversial is the inter-scale relationship between integration and assimilation. For both Berry and Bourhis, as well as for the present study, this correlation was in all samples negative. This result conforms to the model, since the integration option implies the maintenance of cultural integrity, while assimilation presupposes its renunciation. — 202 —

Acculturation Attitudes: the Portuguese–German Example

After his study, Berry concluded, in relation to inter-scale correlation, that “diagonal cross-relations are generally as predicted. However, a rather skewed distribution of attitudes among Portuguese- and Korean–Canadians in favor of integration appears to have affected the pattern of inter-scale relationships” (Berry et al. 1989: 200). In relation just to the Portuguese sample, he claims: “for the Portuguese–Canadians it is either ‘integration or nothing’ in their attitudes” (ibid.: 199). The present study also presents such an extreme preference for integration, while the other attitudes are seen to be unacceptable. This is especially true for the German host community and for the second-generation Portuguese immigrants, which, consequently, show very similar results. However, the first generation of Portuguese immigrants, with a higher preference for separation, although displaying similar results, features a much more significant negative correlation between integration and separation.

Predictors of Acculturation Strategies 1. Experiences In order to specify the sort of interaction that is actually taking place between the two groups, a scale related to experiences was designed and applied along with Bourhis’ original acculturation scales. The results might be interpreted as showing, for all groups, that positive experiences increase the desire for integration and decrease it for segregation/separation. On the other hand, the present study was not able to prove if positive experiences triggered this preference for integration or if, on the contrary, integrational preferences presupposed positive experiences between the groups. The numbers were especially higher for the first-generation Portuguese immigrants. As this group has the highest preference for separation, it may be hinted that positive experiences have an influence in this regard upon the preference for integration.

2. Language First-generation immigrants were highly susceptible and responsive to interethnic contact and the experiences deriving from it. This was also confirmed in relation to the use of the language, as it actually determines the deepness and frequency of the contacts. If an immigrant does not master the language, non-work-related contacts are likely to acquire a more superficial nature and to happen less often than if he or she holds some linguistic skills. As a consequence, for this group, the better the knowledge of the German language, the less preference was manifested toward a separation from the host — 203 —

Joana Duarte

community. As expected, no significant results were found for either host community or second-generation immigrants.

3. Educational Level For first-generation Portuguese immigrants, the higher the educational level, the lower the preference for separation and the higher for integration. Secondgeneration immigrants, who normally enter the German educational system and greatly increase their contact with members of the host community, diminish their desires for separation. In addition, the immigrants who study longer are also the ones to have less reason to want to live a parallel life.

4. Interethnic Contact As expected for the host community and for the second-generation immigrants, the amount of contact between the groups produced no significant influence. However, for first generation immigrants, an increase in contact significantly reduced the tendency toward separation. This can be explained historically, as the first guest workers to come to Germany were actually separated from the rest of society and their contacts with the German host community were determined by work-bound power relations. Many of the immigrants continued to live separately, which eventually led to problems in other areas, such as in learning the language or understanding the other as a different cultural being.

Conclusions The previous results have shown that the cohabitation of Portuguese immigrants and the German host community can generally be classified as consensual, although it may in some cases also be seen as problematic, depending on the generation and on a few sociocultural factors. These factors include the level of contact between the two communities (particularly daily experiences), as well as linguistic and educational levels. It can also be predicted that the percentage of immigrants who choose separation as their preferred acculturation strategy will decrease enormously within the next generation, judging by the attitudes demonstrated by second-generation immigrants.

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Acculturation Attitudes: the Portuguese–German Example

Looking into the Future: Bilingual Classrooms and Acculturation Strategies For the purpose of future research on the topic of acculturation, a possible connection will be suggested to bilingual classrooms in Germany. Since 2000–2001, in cooperation with other similar experiments in Germany, the Department for Multicultural and Comparative Education of Hamburg University is responsible for the scientific evaluation of four bilingual primary classrooms: one Italian–German, two Spanish–German, and one Portuguese– German, using a German monolingual class as control group. The Portuguese–German class, attending the Rudolf Roß-Schule, showed some rather peculiar results, deriving in particular from the attitudes of the parents toward the learning process of their children but also toward the school as a German institution. They formed high expectations in relation to the project and to their children’s school achievements and even put pressure on the school and students. Although the Portuguese parents are the ones with the lowest educational, professional, and social level in the whole project, their involvement and enthusiasm is among the highest: they filled out 100 percent of the evaluation questionnaires. They comment on and agree with the bilingual classroom organization, where twelve hours a week of team-teaching is practiced, coming regularly to the meetings and contributing to the organization of school events. Even the parents who have less knowledge of the German language participate actively in the project. Due to the fact that the focus of the project is language and language acquisition, meta-knowledge of both children and parents about their own linguistic practice has also proven to be extremely high. Resulting from this intensification of interethnic contact as well as from positive experiences between the groups, it can be suggested that, in relation to other first-generation Portuguese immigrants, the parents participating in this project will show a higher preference for integration, consequently lowering their separation wishes. Influences on the linguistic knowledge or the educational level as a result of their participation on the project have not yet been assessed.

References Berry, John W., Uichol Kim, S. Power, Marta Young, and Merridee Bujaki. 1989. “Acculturation Attitudes in Plural Societies,” Applied Psychology: an International Review 38: 185–206. Bourhis, Richard Y., Lena C. Moïse, Stephane Perreault, and Sacha Senécal. 1994. Immigration and Multiculturalism Issues in Canada: Towards an Interactive Acculturation Model. Montreal: Departement of Psychology, University of Québec. — 205 —

Joana Duarte ——— 1997. “Towards an Interactive Acculturation Model: A Social Psychological Perspective,” International Journal of Psychology 32: 369–86. Mielke, Rosemarie. 1997. “Multidimensional Models of Acculturation Attitudes.” In Bielefelder Arbeiten zur Sozialpsychologie: Psychologische Forschungsberichte, ed. Hans D. Mummendey, no. 181. Neto, Felix F.M. 1997. Estudos de Psicologia Intercultural. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Sayegh, Liane and Jean-Claude Lasry. 1993. “Immigrants’ Adaption in Canada: Assimilation, Acculturation, and Orthogonal Cultural Identification,” Canadian Psychology 34: 98–109.

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Chapter 12

“NOT ALWAYS PROUD TO BE AMERICAN”: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY BY AMERICANS RESIDING IN GERMANY

Inke Du Bois

Introduction On July 4, 2004, some 150 Americans celebrated Independence Day in Hamburg, Germany. As at many July 4th events in the United States, the organizers had prepared a barbeque and the tables were decorated in the national colors of red, white, and blue; the children played baseball; and the adults had soft drinks and beer. Yet, a significant difference struck the observer: usually, an abundance of national flags swinging and swaying can be seen wherever one looks on this day. Here, however, the American flag was hidden under a big, beige-colored wooden umbrella. The hiding of the national flag is deeply symbolic of the change in American expatriates’ national identity. This controversial change in what it means to identify as an American abroad is the theme of this paper. Identities are formed within limited parameters – the ideological, linguistic, and sociocultural contexts of one’s society. As these parameters differ in different societies and cultures, the identities of immigrants and expatriates who live in another country for a long time are prone to change. — 207 —

Inke Du Bois

Migration, language, and intercultural contact are no new topics in human history. Their significance, however, increases continuously in the multicultural and globalized societies of today. Research on cultural identity has been conducted throughout different fields within the social sciences and the humanities (Collier 1998; Keupp et al. 1999). The application of discourse analysis – the analysis of how language is used in conversation to convey one’s identity – has developed into many different directions since its beginnings in the 1960s (Goffman 1959; Sacks 1992).

Cultural Identity and Discourse A constructivist position in social psychology and sociolinguistics focuses on the idea that identity is formed in social interaction rather than only through inner-psychological processes (Keupp et al. 1999). Individuals do not only express, validate, and negotiate who they are, but they are also ascribed identities in discourse (Butler 1998; Antaki and Horowitz 2000). The concept of a person having multiple identities which an individual as social actor displays alternatively through face-to face interaction was introduced by Goffman (1959). In different social situations individuals might vary body language, speech style, tone of voice or the language itself, according to the situation or the person they are with, or the message they want to convey. Thus, the “fragmented self is constructed through the multiple discourses in which they are momentarily positioned” (Widdicombe 1998: 202). Accordingly, one could speak as a mother, a Mexican American, a doctor, a lesbian, or a daughter depending on the situation and participants in a conversation. However, it is argued that there are two groups of social theorists: scholars who argue that social norms and categories are preexisting and “individual behavior and conf lict or action theorists, who see human interaction as constitutive of social reality” (Gumperz 1982: 26). Thus, the accomplishment of discourse analysis has been to see that individuals in everyday social interaction are able “to alter their social personae” (ibid.: 27) according to the different social genres within the preexisting cultural, social, and linguistic norms. Discourse analysts focus further on different aspects of identity such as ethnicity, gender, age, and their linguistic expressions. Such social role negotiation has been defined as “communicative flexibility” (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 1982: 14), which could originally be observed through the study of nonverbal communication and paralinguistic cues, such as intonation and rhythm of speech. The focus in interethnic communication is also the relevance of social class and gender identity for linguistic choices such as thematic structure and rhetoric. Goffman understood situational contexts in which the self is involved in terms of face, footing (the position or stand of a speaker in discourse), framing, and participation framework. — 208 —

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Goffman’s concept of face was further developed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) to a “Politeness Theory.” This theory claims that speakers have a positive face (the desire/wish to be liked by others) and a negative face (the desire/want not be imposed upon). In everyday social interaction, social actors encounter situations in which either the positive or the negative face of oneself or another person will be threatened. For example, an imperative would be a threat to another speaker’s negative face, and a direct disagreement would be a threat to a speaker’s positive face. Thus, a speaker has the choice whether to mitigate, defuse, or avoid such Face Threatening Acts (FTAs), or whether he or she might perform an act explicitly, or “on record.” Identity is formed as a relation between the “subjective inner” and the “societal outer,” representing both the unmistakable individual and the socially acceptable aspects of the self (Keupp et al. 1999). Being a member of a cultural identity group occurs when “interlocutors demonstrate their ability to use and understand the language code, symbolic forms, and interpretations; share worldview premises and sense of history” (Collier 1998: 131).

Stigmatized and Damaged Identities in Discourse The concepts of damaged or stigmatized identities imply forms of suppression or discrimination by others through language. A stigma is not only attached to groups such as the disabled or homosexuals, but also to lower-status ethnic groups. For instance, in sociolinguistic studies on Quechua speakers in Peru (Gugenberger 1996) and Otomi Indians in Mexico (Zimmermann 1992), the damaging of Native American identities is linguistically constituted through specifically ethnic identity-damaging acts and identity-damaging acts whose victims are individuals who could be attached to specific ethnic groups (Zimmermann 1992). Linguistic communities act out classifying social and ethnic categorizations on several levels. On a lexical level, racist naming and xenophobic lexemes degrade other ethnic groups such as “Kanake,” “Spaghettifresser,” “Polacke”1 or “Ossi” in a German context. In an American context, racism is expressed through expletives such as “dot head,” “Gandhi,” or “Bombay bitch” to Asian Indian Women (Hedge 1998), or the expletive “nigger,” which has racist dehumanizing meaning if employed by members of other ethnic groups such as Whites. Even though the latest research in sociolinguistics is very much focusing on the underlying and subtle communicative mechanism of racism through the language and symbols of majority members of dominant societies, it is of note that minority members or members of less prestigious societies equally use degrading terminology, such as “Whitey” (Buchholz and Hall 2005) and “Gringo” in Latin America for White U.S. Americans or “Wessi”2 in a German context.

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The ability to reconstruct and reenact (damaged national) identities equally functions through the verbalization of narrative. The functioning of narrative is relatively structured (Labov 1972). A preface often serves as an abstract that introduces the story with a general statement. The narrative is continued with an orientation, which is a background description of the circumstances under which the events were performed. The events are then narrated in a temporal order and an evaluation of those events serves as a summary or represents the point of the story to the interaction in which it was told. statement: of general theme or point of the story; orientation: background description of where, when, why; complicating action: events narrated in temporal order; evaluation: of those events, significance for the speakers. Applying drama theory to Labov’s story structure, the complicating action can be more specified when we adopt it for identity-related narratives. The complicating action has a point of highest tension in the narrative, the climax with a denoument, also known as falling action, the solving of the problem in the narrative.

Positioning and Narrating the “I” The reflexive nature and distinction of a “narrating I” and a “narrated I” are characteristic for narrations in autobiographic interviews (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann 2002). This creates a dual temporal perspective for the narrated event, which is also called the duplication of the “I.” The “narrating I” reproduces the event or story and knows his or her former thoughts, feelings, and evaluations, but the “narrated I” has different knowledge and a different perception and perspective on the events than the “narrating I” during the time of the narration. Narratives are often filled with evaluations of the narrator, which equally need to be distinguished as internal (evaluations of the narrated I) and external evaluations (evaluations of the narrating I). Thus, within the narration of the narrating I, the self is positioned through linguistic utterances or other acts that are narrated. In a similar vein, the interactants in the story can be positioned through the description of their (linguistic) acts. This is illustrated in Figure 12.1. The positioning acts (selfpositioning [SP] and other-positioning [OP]) are narrative constructions and not a figure of real events in the past. This is represented through the dotted lines. Another sociolinguistic device used by the participants and by members of a society in everyday conversation is the categorization of oneself or another as a member of a category (Sacks 1992). Membership categories might be classifications of a person such as “woman–man and factory worker–student.” Speakers use them “as the inferences are rich in that a great deal of knowledge — 210 —

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Narrative construction of the narrating I

Positioning act of the narrating I in the story SP

OP

Positioning act of the interactants in the story OP

SP

Narrated I

Interactants in the story

Figure 12.1 Narrative construction of the narrating I. Source: Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2002; trans. Du Bois).

that members have about a society is available through these categories” (McIlvenny 1996: 18). Conversation analysts have applied these social group categories to different ethnic groups (Day 1998) as a tool to look at how members of an ethnic category negotiate their cultural identities. Further, the membership category of the interlocutor has an impact on the validity of a claim (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998). Categories such as “doctor,” “mother,” “mechanic,” and “Mexican-American” are inference rich because of the cultural connotations that are associated with them. A member of a category is then also a representative of this category; in social interaction, this coincides with expectations, rights, and obligations that a member of a category has. Similarly, a member of a category might want to resist being interpreted by another group or person through a specific category. In political debates, speakers draw on rhetorical and interactional resources to invite agreement. The identified devices which are relevant for this study are the references to a favorable “us” (FU) and an unfavorable “them” (UT) (Atkinson 1984; McIlvenny 1996). Speakers draw on rhetorical devices to position themselves in a society or distance themselves from the same, using these devices to achieve consent of the listeners. This positioning of FU and UT is a more complex process for immigrants and expatriates who identify themselves with two nations and distance themselves, for example, from American and German societies during discourse at the same time.

Quality Factors for Discourse Analysis Discourse analysis as a form of qualitative research has received major criticism by quantitative scholars. One of its major criticisms is the generalizability of qualitative findings to a broader context or population, as well as the assumption that “anything goes.” Deriving originally from conversation analysis (Sacks 1992), which analyzes the sequential order of naturally occurring — 211 —

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talk, discourse analysis has itself developed into many different directions since the 1960s. For example, discourse researchers differ widely in their opinion on how much social context has an impact on speech. Critical discourse analysts combine discourse analysis (often they analyze text and talk from media or political speeches) with postcolonial, feminist, or other critical theory. Other researchers adhere to the classical conversation analysis where the data itself is constituting social reality. This is often the case in ethnomethodological approaches, which are increasingly informed by the sequential analysis of nonverbal communication (Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2002; Norris 2004). In their paper on critiquing discourse analytic shortcomings, Antaki et al. (2002) identify six major shortcomings in discourse analytic studies and articles. These are: (1) under-analysis through summary; (2) under-analysis through taking sides; (3) under-analysis through over-quotation or through isolated quotation; (4) the circular identification of discourses and mental constructs; (5) false survey; and (6) analysis that consists in simply spotting features. Similarly, discourse analysts are in a dilemma: they are supposed to analyze the conversational data inductively, without having any hypothesis in mind or using background information. In the same vein, however, analysts do need to have background knowledge of the topic they are investigating (Deppermann 2001). The present analysis is a combination of conversation analysis and an address of ideological and outer sociopolitical factors.

Sociocultural Context of German American Relations German American Relations and Situation of Americans in Germany The interview data were inductively analyzed and the sociopolitical context information is given at this point for a better comprehension for the geographical and sociopolitical situation of Americans in Germany. In 2001, there were about 184,000 Americans officially living in Germany, of which 71,000 were members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Germany was the largest foreign military base of the United States at that time and Americans formed the seventh largest ethnic group in Germany in 2001 (Federal Statistical Office Germany 2001; Washington Headquarters Services 2001). Around 16 million American soldiers have lived in Germany with their families since the occupation in 1945 and about 46 million Americans report predominantly German ancestry (Federal Foreign Office Germany 2005). By the year 2005, however, the number of Americans in Germany had reclined significantly: only 96,642 Americans are now registered, about 17,000 less than in 2001. Of the 69,400 military personnel based in Germany in 2005, 7,200 are deployed in Iraq for OIF “Operation Iraqi Freedom” out of a total 169,200 soldiers (Defense Manpower Data Center 2005). As a result of Washington’s largest military restructuring in 50 years, half of the — 212 —

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305 U.S. military facilities in Germany were vacated in 2005, which had a significant effect on the involved communities who are partially dependent on the U.S. business (Agence France Presse 2005). In 2001, Germany comprised the fourth largest American expatriate community. Traditionally, American expatriates in Germany leaned toward Republicans, as the military is known to be more conservative in their voting practice. In the 2004 elections, however, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine predicted that Germany could be a “swing state” in the election – not because it had any electoral college votes but because the U.S. military would not be as proRepublican as in the past. For this study, no military personnel were interviewed; only expatriates who came to Germany for work, interest, or a personal relationship with a German. Most of the interviews took place in the city of Hamburg, where the general population did not decrease. While 4,154 Americans out of a total 268,600 of foreigners were registered in the year 2001, 4,322 Americans were registered in 2004 (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein 2005).

German and Global Opinion and Views of America and Americans Since the occupation in 1945, Germans have increasingly gained a fairly positive attitude towards America and Americans. This was partly due to the support of the United States after the war and American culture and products (cigarettes, chocolate, jeans, jazz, and rock music, etc.) that have been brought to Germany. However, Germany’s image of America could best be characterized as a “paradox patchwork” (Kleinsteuber 2004: 36), in which positive and negative stereotypes oppose and stand next to each other. Since 1957, the Allensbach Institute has conducted opinion polls in Germany and has revealed that up to 60 percent of all Germans would agree with the sentence “I like Americans.” This percentage would drop only in times of U.S. military operations such as the Vietnam War and the NATO Double-Track Decision. In a Heidelberg Sinus Institute study in 1986, Germans reacted positively toward aspects of American culture such as jeans (63 percent), John F. Kennedy (62 percent) and Hollywood movies (49 percent); however, Superman (15 percent) and McDonald’s (11 percent) were not looked upon favorably. This study documents that Germans’ knowledge about America is mainly informed through the media: 85 percent claimed to have their knowledge from television reports, 79 percent from magazines and newspapers, 23 percent from books about the country, 10 percent had their own experiences in the country, and 23 percent had conversations with Americans (Kleinsteuber 2004). Most importantly, more Germans have an opinion on the U.S.A. than on any other country in the world. While in 1999/2000, 78 percent of Germans had a favorable view of the U.S.A., this number dropped toward 61 percent in 2002, sank to its lowest level — 213 —

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of 25 percent shortly before the Iraq War, and finally rose to 38 percent in March 2004 (Pew Research Center 2004). The current prevailing attitude towards Americans (and being American) becomes obvious in the following citation from the public press during the Olympic Games in Athens, 2004: the US athletes were understated and respectful at a time and in a place where it was especially appropriate, given decidedly mixed opinions about their country around the planet. This time, there was no hugging and dancing during the ceremonies, no preening and posing on the medal stand, no using the Stars-and-Stripes as a fashion accessory. (Powers 2004)

Like the loud and overly outgoing behavior of American athletes described in this newspaper excerpt, Americans are often viewed as being loud, overbearing, and overly nationalistic. The athletes’ change of conduct to being more understated, less exposing, and quiet, reflects the mixed and probably negative opinions “about their country around the planet.”

The Study The Data Thirty-two biographical sociolinguistic interviews with citizens of the United States residing in Germany were conducted in the years 2003 and 2004 and then transcribed. The interviews were semi-structured. Questions such as, “What was your life like when you first moved to Germany?” or “How did you experience September 11? What were the reactions of the Germans here?”, “How do you experience going home to the U.S.?” were asked, and further interview questions resulted from the context provided by the informants. The questions asked were intended to provide informants with the opportunity to reconstruct their lives in a way that their acculturation with the host country and their connection and identification with the United States could be made. The main focus of the interviews was the experiences the Americans had had in their lives in Germany. Further, the participants answered questionnaires regarding their socio-demographic background. The interview length varied from 20 minutes to approximately 2 hours, and from 1,924 words to 15,357 words, a total of almost 200,000 words.

Content Analysis The transcribed interviews were imported into a qualitative data analysis program (MAXQDA) and then coded according to different topics with a focus — 214 —

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on the national- cultural affiliation of the participants. This means that nonrelevant topics, such as, for example, elaborations on an interviewee’s back pain, were not coded. The aspects of national-cultural identity construction in this paper represent only a few out of many different codes to date. The codes could be subcategorized into six major categories, as shown in Table 12.1. It is of note that by coding and categorizing units of meaning in the interviews, connection of ideas could not be made and the processes and fluid nature of identity construction could not be analyzed. The discourse analysis of the excerpts below however, show the development and contradiction of selfpositioning within one interview excerpt. Thus, one whole interview might have codings from all of the modes from Table 12.1. The breadth of problematic national identity and its realm for the participants was surprising and chosen for a further analysis. That is, where content analysis falls short, discourse analysis can reveal the linguistic resources with which identity construction is achieved. The questions of how something is narrated for what purpose are relevant (Deppermann 2001) in showing the dynamics of identity construction.

Participants The participants in this study are Americans who all immigrated to Germany at an adult age (from 21 to 51 years; average 31 years). The group of informants represents an extreme case sampling; the Americans interviewed have very different backgrounds in regard to their social status, ethnic background, and their length of residence in Germany (1.5 to 39 years). To provide for a large variation, they vary significantly in age (from 32 to 79 years), social status (unemployed, janitors, English teachers, former diplomats, and wealthy individuals), and ethnic background (white Christians, African Americans, and Jewish). The overall participant group has a high level of education; most of the participants have college degrees, which is a higher level than the American

Table 12.1 Coding matrix “I” in German cultural context

“I” in American context

“I” as Hybrid

Positive

Identification/ appraisal of

Identification/ appraisal of

Identification as “third culture” member

Negative

Distance from/ criticism of

Distance from/ criticism of

Marginalization, Diremption

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average. The average age is 45 years old and the average length of residence is 14 years. In thirty of the thirty-two interviews that were conducted, the informants reported in one or another way that they did not favor the current president, George W. Bush, nor the actions toward Iraq. In this last respect, the percentage of a liberal political attitude differs from citizens in the U.S.A. according to opinion polls (Pew Research Center 2004).

Transcription Symbols CAPS @ ?

(2.0) ((coughing))

Stressed syllable/lexeme Laughter High rising intonation Fast speech Pause in seconds Paralinguistic or nonverbal acts

Analysis Excerpts from informants’ interviews are analyzed according to their narrative structure and to see how the narrators’ position themselves as American nationals. Sandra ,3 who immigrated ten years before the interview, is married to a German and has a daughter she takes care of; Jonathan had lived in Germany for twelve years and has a daughter and a wife. In the excerpts the fields of action can be characterized as encounters in public spaces where the participants’ national identity or national membership comes into play in a problematic way. Excerpt 1 Sandra (Sa), 33 years, residence in Germany ten years and Interviewer (Int). (The conversation was about how the events of 9/11 and the war with Iraq thereafter had had an effect on her life in Hamburg, Germany. Sandra had put up an American flag on her balcony which her husband advised her to take down after it became public that the terror organization was based in Hamburg. She reported to always having defended the actions of her country’s politics up until two weeks before the interview, when the torture pictures against Iraqis in Guantanamo Bay had come out.) 1 Sa

in politics I don’t trust ANYbody but you know about this whole thing (-) this is AWFUL it’s a we’re we’ve put ourselves in the same ballpark with everybody else and with the BAD people bad people and I’m really ashamed of it I’m ashamed of it and I remember we were in the Central — 216 —

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13 Int 14 Sa 15 Int 16 Sa

22 Int 23 Sa 24 25 Int 26 Sa 27 28 Int 29 Sa

32 Int 34 35 Sa 36 Int 37 Sa

Station and I was talking with a friend and she was far away so you have to talk a little bit louder and I remember seeing an ARab-looking man look at me and at that moment normally if I you know saw somebody notice me speaking English I would look at them or whatever provoked a little bit but at that moment I was aSHAMed; of myself You know I thought he’s got a right ? not to be mad at me ? but to you know recognize that I’m American and I represent I represent something now whereas beforehand I didn’t Hum You know what I mean, Hum absolutely yeah And it’s I’m really ashamed of it I HATE it I HATE it of COURSE who doesn’t, and it makes everything throws everything in the toilet It doesn’t matter what anybody thought beforehand of America; or it doesn’t matter what they said nothing matters anymore? because we’re TERrorists and this whole Guantanamo Bay thing the big thing that I thought about that =Sorry I didn’t get that in Guantanamo Bay with the prisoners who were held without a trial Uhum Uhum that was always something where I was you know thinking a LITtle bit about it BUT you know nobody SAYS anything Uhum Nobody’s TALKing about it and so then you know it was like you know WHO KNOWS you know and then this thing with the pictures and we are having to deal with it not only Bush but all of us And all of these I mean these ten years that you’ve been here you’ve never HAD to feel that way No man I’m PROUD to be American Yeah and if anybody MESSED with aMERIca even if I agreed with them, I don’t like it when people mess with America

In this excerpt, Sandra’s national identity is undergoing a modification in response to political events, as they became known through the media. Sandra begins with a statement (lines 1–4) in which she provides the main point for the development of the interview excerpt: it is her feeling ashamed of being the same nationality as the American soldiers who tortured Iraqis. She underlines this point with a small narrative in which she describes the first occurrence of this emotion (lines 4–11). In lines 4–6 she provides an orientation. — 217 —

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At the central station in Hamburg, she talks loudly in English to her friend. The complicating action is described in lines 4–11 where an “Arab looking man” looks at her and in the culmination she starts to feel ashamed for being American for the first time. Sandra’s narrating I evaluates this feeling by inserting that she had acted differently before (lines 6–8). The denouement (lines 8–11) is the reasoning about and an explanation of her feeling ashamed when the Arablooking man looks at her: she is a member and a representative of a national group that cannot be looked upon favorably anymore. Through the analysis of time adverbials such as “now” and “then” and the deictic pronominal choices such as “I” and “we” it will be shown how Sandra’s identification with being American shifts from “being ashamed” to “being proud” in the same interview excerpt. It is particularly interesting to note her membership categorization, as she uses “we” Americans in a rather negative way. In lines 2–3, we can find the clauses “we’re we’ve put ourselves in the same ballpark with everybody else and with the BAD people,” in line 18 “we’re TERRORISTS.” Sandra continues in specifying why “we,” the Americans, are terrorists using the exact same expression for the group that the U.S. government is fighting against, the terrorists who potentially would attack America again. The “Guantanamo Bay thing” is where prisoners were held without a trial on the U.S. military base in Cuba, and “then this thing with the pictures,” refers to the photos that showed American soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners shortly before the time of the interview. The use of “we” in this context of controversial actions of the American soldiers and government officials is of note as Sandra identifies herself as a member of her national group and is thereby including herself in the group of all Americans having to bear responsibility for the controversial actions. Sandra uses an “unfavorable we” in her speech, in that she denotes her own national group as “terrorists” and “bad people.” The Arab-looking man in her narrative represents a member of the category “Arab,” whereas Sandra represents Americans with the negative attributes having come through the media and she is ashamed of “it” and “herself” (lines 9 and 15) in the presence of an Arab. Sandra describes her internal dialogue in that she feels this man “has a right not to be mad at but she represents something NOW whereas she didn’t beforehand.” Members of categories become representatives with all rights and obligations, which is what happens in Sandra’s narrated encounter and the following dialogue: two individuals become representatives not only of nations but the whole Arab world versus the United States. This representation and taking on the responsibility of the policies of the corresponding governments are not uncommon among the interviewees, as will be shown in the next interview. The analysis of the time adverbials further shows that there is an inherent contrast in how this representation might be perceived by others. “I represent something now whereas beforehand I didn’t” (lines 10–11) and “it doesn’t matter — 218 —

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… nothing matters anymore.” The strong distinction between before and after is very obvious in this interview excerpt. Answering the interviewer’s question about whether she had not had to feel that way before, Sandra answers with a strong statement, “no man I am proud to be American” (line 32), reflecting her attitude in the years before the most recent incidents. Sandra has a very strong positive American identity and would defend her country against accusations “and if anybody MESSED with AMERICA even if I agreed with them, I don’t like it when people mess with America” (lines 35 and 36). This interview excerpt reflects how Sandra is struggling with the fact that she had a positive national identity before the most recent political events had become public and that Americanness is now stigmatized in her view. In the next interview excerpt a strong distinction between before and after certain sociopolitical events and their effects on Jonathan’s national identity becomes obvious. Excerpt 2 Jonathan, residence in Germany twelve years 1 Int 3 4 Jo 5 6 Int 7 Jo 8 9

15 Int 16 17 Int 18 Jo 19 20 Int 21 Jo 22 Int 23 24 Jo

so yeah basically you said it already your American background has it helped you in any way or was it more hindering you? Two things I don’t remember saying anything like THAT but uh (2) I’m afraid for work and things like that or yeah yeah it’s fine I mean NOW (2) it’s strange when I first came here this was the first time that I lived in another country years ago and so it was interesting for me to see you know if you say you are American people were like ((high pitch) oh REALly bla bla bla) they were very friendly at THAT time NOW it’s completely different now you feel like you are apologizing when you say I’m American ((raising his hands and eyebrows)) I am sorry you know I’ve NOTHing to do with it @@ @@@ @@@ Very strange to see the flip flop in you know for years that’s interesting yeah when did you see the change = since BUSH quite quite very obvious this thing and he just ruined it for Americans all over the world uhm my feeling in general the way I see people reacting it’s = Can you describe incidents what happens to you if you feel you’re apologizing uhm especially uhm people that are you know that part of the world you know Afghanistan, India you know Eastern or — 219 —

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28 Int 29 Jo 30 31 32 Int 33 Int 34 35 Jo 36 38 Int 39 Jo 40 42 Int 43 Jo 44 45

Middle Eastern countries it’s like America is the big number one Evil in the world, I mean uhm for very many people I mean uh so I mean if you say that you almost have to you know get your self into a long political discussion you know uh I mean do you do you tend to do that do you tend to go into political discussions and say you know =very often yeah just because I feel so strongly about it I feel Bush is I don’t know let’s say I stand on the Michael Moore side of the fence @ @ yeah so I agree wholeheartedly with that part where he comes from I mean so yeah that’s happening and it’s for no reason other than the obvious uh you know money making and the suffering of others and things like that and I can’t be proud of it to be American in that point I mean until (?) they start being insightful again hopefully

In this dyadic interview excerpt, Jonathan describes the development of others’ reactions towards his identifying as American. The revelation of his national background has resulted in more negative responses from others in Germany with time and had a direct effect on the self-presentation of his national identity (lines 10–11). Responding to the interviewer’s question about whether his American background has helped or hindered him in Germany, he initially remarks “it’s fine” and gives a positive answer, implying, though, that it is not really good or great. He then reveals how the time has had an effect on the reception of his being American in Germany. In the reproduction of a typical dialogue he imitates others’ reaction as very positive and excited (line 9), as is marked by the high-pitched “oh really” and his external evaluation stating that people were very friendly. But Jonathan also makes a strong point in stressing the importance of temporal factors by using many time adverbials. “When I first came here” (line 7), “years ago” (line 8), “at THAT time” (line 10), reflect that the times when “they,” the Germans or other nationals, reacted positively to his identifying as an American are long gone. “Now” is the time where he feels he is apologizing (lines 10–11) and he adds that he feels that he should apologize when he reveals his nationality and distance himself from it (10–11). Humor is created with his nonverbal behavior in line 10: he imitates being accused of a crime and therefore raising his hands as if to say “I am innocent,” which is a slight exaggeration of his described situation that contrasts the possibly uncomfortable emotion of having to apologize. Notably, Jonathan does — 220 —

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not use the pronoun “I” but the general “you.” This creates a slight distancing from his own experience as he creates a generalizing statement. “It’s different now you feel like you are apologizing when you say ‘I’m American I am sorry you know I’ve nothing to do with it’ ” (line 12). Notably, the interviewer asks for more specific information, interrupting Jonathan in his statements in lines 15–16, 20–21, and 30–31, where they are not self-explanatory or immediately understood. In lines 15–16, she asks when, in lines 20–21 what specifically occurred, and in lines 30–31 how her informant acts, thus eliciting specific information from her informant and thus coconstructing what he narrates that is relevant to his national identity. For Jonathan, the historical event of change in attitude towards Americans is different from Sandra’s. He identifies clearly President Bush’s election and presidency as the “very obvious” (line 16) turning point that started the “flip flop” in attitudes. He goes on even further in that he makes the president responsible for the negative impact on all Americans: “he ruined it for Americans all over the world” (lines 16 and 17). It is important to note the perceived impact the president has on the national membership of all Americans, in Jonathan’s view. Further, it is particularly interesting to see that it is less with Germans but more with “that part of the world you know Afghanistan, India you know Eastern or Middle Eastern countries it’s like America is the big number one Evil in the world” (lines 23–24) where he feels that he has to apologize. Jonathan “feels strongly” about America’s politics and Bush. He refers to Michael Moore, the anti-Bush documentary filmmaker, as his political ally (line 33). By using the metaphor “fence” he identifies an unconciliatory division of American political views and takes a stand on “the Michael Moore side of the fence.” Clearly, Jonathan does not defend any American politics as Sandra does, but he enumerates some negative values (line 38), such as “money making and suffering of others” that are in his opinion associated with being American, and which are values he cannot be proud of. In line 39 he reasons why he cannot have a positive national identity. He concludes this excerpt in saying directly that “I can’t be proud of it to be American in that point” (line 39), but acknowledges that there is a chance that this might change (line 40) in time when “they,” the American politicians, will be “insightful” again. Thus, Jonathan acknowledges the dynamics between political events and the direct implications on his American identity in Germany in the past, future, and present.

Discussion Jonathan’s and Sandra’s interview excerpts reflect how expatriates in Germany are discursively dealing with the difficult issue of being a member of the most powerful nation in the world whose foreign politics are critically regarded in the — 221 —

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media of their home country Germany, and criticized by Germans, other nationals’, and by the Americans themselves. The combination of different analyses attempts to illuminate the discursive construction of these problematic identity reconstructions. Among these are narrative, deictic, and membership analysis and a variation of positioning analysis. The different participants report different strategies as the threat to the informants’ positive and negative face as American nationals in an international context is narrated. The analysis of the interview narratives showed that in applying Labov’s narrative structure they provide an orientation. The settings they describe are public spaces in which the events take place (Goffman 1971), and fairly anonymous relationships with the persons in their narratives (customer-salesperson; tourist-guide, pedestrians on the street or at the railway station, people one meets). In Jonathan’s and Sandra’s narrations, the exposure of the national identity had taken place and both the narrating I and the narrated I are dealing with it emotionally by defending and being ashamed for their national group, as in Sandra’s case; Jonathan feels he has to apologize for being American and cannot be proud of it. In any case, the narratives reflect a stigmatized and damaged national identity. In their evaluations, the speakers differ. Jonathan discusses his struggle with others and verbalizes not to be proud to be American and Sandra still defends America even if she is still ashamed. The American speakers in this study prove that the positioning of FU (favorable us) and UT (unfavorable them) is a more complex process for them because they identify themselves with two nations and distance themselves from the American and German societies during the same interviews. For them, there exists an “unfavorable us” (UU) even as they reconstruct aspects of their national identities in the interviews. In the analysis, it has been demonstrated how the change of pronominal choice positions them between identification with and distancing from their American nationality.

Conclusion For the Americans in Germany I interviewed, two cultural traumas occurred. The September 11 attacks and the reception and negative attitudes of Germans towards Americans in response to the U.S. foreign policys represent a trauma for Democratically oriented American expatriates. Four years ago, two of the most powerful symbols of American culture, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, had been attacked and destroyed and thousands of human beings had been killed as a result. This cultural trauma has affected Americans’ national identity in the United States (Smelser 2004); and in more complex ways it has changed American expatriates’ identities in Germany, as has been demonstrated through the analysis of the Americans’ speech. The expatriates were similarly exposed to anti-Americanism and media representation of the U.S. “War on — 222 —

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Terrorism.” Thus, Americans’ identities, it is argued, are undergoing a trauma of perpetrators (Giesen and Schneider 2004; see also Mitchell, this volume). Americans’ constructions of nationality in the discourses represented here are strongly related to the historical events and the social actions and attitudes of Germans and have obviously changed because of them. The interview excerpts reflect a development in their identification that is explicitly mentioned in Jonathan’s and Sandra’s excerpts. In the context of migrant identity construction, interlocutors usually use a variety of strategies to create a positive ethnic or national identity (Gumperz 1982). It has been shown how the participants use deictics of person, place, and time to position themselves between the contemporary historical context of their native America in the specific geographical location of their chosen home in Germany. The analyses showed how Labov’s narrative structures (1972) could be identified as inherent in narrations that reflect a negative, problematic social (national) identity. These narratives of problematic national identities are constructions that respond to other interactants in the stories, the broader society, and a struggle within the participants’ self talk. Their reconstructed struggling with their national identity is a representation of their knowledge and, in a way, acceptance of the negative image that Americans have in Germany. The wider social contexts such as the sociopolitical situation and the cultural norms of specific regions in which identities are enacted as narrative constructions are important factors that need to be acknowledged. The different analyses of the interview excerpts showed how linguistic structures are relevant in identifying the dynamics of identity construction and the changing positions the participants take in the interviews. The data revealed how theories on unfavorable outgroups and favorable ingroups (Tajfel 1974) do not hold for the case of Americans living in Germany. In the above cases, there are instances where the informants identify with their original cultures in a negative way. These aspects illuminate the need for more research on the linguistic construction of such problematic identities in the context of migration, as fixed categories are not sufficient in describing the experience of immigrants and expatriates.

Notes 1. “Foreigner,” “Italian,” “Pole,” as quoted in Zimmermann (1992) 2. “Ossi” and “Wessi” are slightly derogatory forms of “East German” and “West German.” 3. The names and initials of the participants have been changed.

References Agence France Presse. 2005. Troops to Head Home in US Military Cuts. Available at: http://www.deutsche-welle.de/dw/article/0,1564,1581992,00.html (October 4, 2005). — 223 —

Inke Du Bois Antaki, Charles, and Anthony Horowitz. 2000. “Using Identity Ascription to Disqualify a Rival Version of Events as ‘Interested’,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 33(2): 155–77. Antaki, Charles, Michael Billig, Derek Edwards, and Jonathan Potter. 2002. Discourse Analysis Means Doing Analysis: A Critique of Six Analytic Shortcomings. Available at: http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/open/2002/002/antaki2002002-paper.html (August 3, 2005). Atkinson, J. Maxwell. 1984. “Public Speaking and Audience Responses: Some Techniques for Inviting Applause.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J. Maxwell, Atkinson, and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope and Steven Levinson. 1978. “Levinson Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena.” In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, ed. Esther Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56–89. ——— 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. New York: Cambridge University Press. Buchholz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and Interaction: a Sociocultural Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585–614. Butler, Judith. 1998. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, pp. 13–31. Collier, Mary Jane. 1998. “Researching Cultural Identity. Reconciling Interpretive and Postcolonial Perspectives,” International and Intercultural Communication Annual 21: 122–47. Day, Dennis. 1998. “Handling ‘Incoherence’ According to the Speaker’s On-sight Categorization.” In Identities in Talk, ed. Charles Antaki and Sue Widdicombe. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Defense Manpower Data Center. 2005. Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country (309A). June 30, 2005. Statistical Information Analysis Division. Available at: http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/military/history/hst0605.pdf (October 4, 2005). Deppermann, Arnulf. 2001. Gespräche analysieren. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Du Bois, Inke. 2001. “From ‘Ich’ to’ I’: Reinventing German Immigrant Identities in Discourse.” Unpublished M.A. thesis, State University, San Francisco. Federal Foreign Office Germany. 2005. Relations between the United States of America and Germany. Available at: http://www.auswaertigesamt.de/www/en/laenderinfos/laender/laender_ausgabe_html?land_id=188 (July 30, 2005). Federal Statistical Office Germany. 2001. Foreign Population on 31.12.2001 by Country of Origin. Available at: http://www.destatis.de/allg/d/impr/d_impr.htm (June 2, 2003). Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson. 2002. The Language of Turn and Sequence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giesen, Bernhard und Christoph Schneider. 2004. Tätertrauma. Nationale Erinnerungen im öffentlichen Diskurs. Konstanz: UVK Verlag. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books. ——— 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.

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The Reconstruction of National Identity Gugenberger, Eva. 1996. Identitäts- und Sprachkonflikt in einer Pluriethnischen Gesellschaft. Eine soziolinguistische Studie über Quechua-Sprecher und Sprecherinnen in Peru.Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag. Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John and Jenny Cook-Gumperz. 1982. “Introduction: Language and the Communication of Social Identity.” In Language and Social Identity, ed. John Gumperz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–21. Hedge, Radha. 1998. “Swinging the Trapeze. The Negotiation of Identity among Asian Indian Immigrant Women in the United States.” In Intercultural Communication Competence (International and Intercultural Communication Annual), ed. Richard L. Wiseman and Jolene Koester. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Hutchby, Ian and Robin Wooffitt. 1998. Conversation Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Keupp, Heiner, Thomas Ahbe, Wolfgang Gmür, Renate Höfer, Beate Mitzscherlich, Wolfgang Kraus, and Florian Straus. 1999. Identitätskonstruktionen. Das Patchwork der Identitäten in der Spätmoderne. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Kleinsteuber, Hans J. 2004. “Der postmoderne Freund.” KulturAustausch. March 2004. Labov, William. 1972. “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax.” In Language in the Inner City, ed. William Labov. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 354–405. Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele and Arnulf Deppermann. 2002. Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität: ein Arbeitsbuch zur Analyse narrativer Interviews. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. McIlvenny, Paul. 1996. “Popular Public Discourse at Speakers’ Corner: Negotiating Cultural Identities in Interaction,” Discourse and Society 7(1): 7–37. Norris, Sigrid. 2004. Analyzing Multimodal Interaction. A Methodological Framework. New York: Routledge. Pew Research Center. 2004. “A Year After Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists.” Pew Research Center Survey Report. Washington, DC. Available at: http://pewresearch.org/contact.htm (December 9, 2005). Powers, John. 2004. “Greece was Game. Defying Sceptics, Undaunted Nation Delivers a Winner,” Boston Globe. Available at: http://www.boston.com/sports/articles/2004/08/30/greece_was_game/ (August 30, 2004). Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, vol. I. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Smelser, Neil J. 2004. “September 11, 2001 as Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein. 2005. Ausländische Bevölkerung in Hamburg nach Staatsangehörigkeiten. Available at: http://statistiknord.de/index.php?id=552 (October 5, 2005). Tajfel, Henri. 1974. “Social Identity and Intergroup Behavior,” Social Science Information 13(2): 65–93. Washington Headquarters Services. 2001. Active Duty Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country (309A). Department of Defense. Directorate for Information Operations and Reports. Available at: http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/military/miltop.htm (June 26, 2003).

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Inke Du Bois Widdicombe, Sue. 1998. “Identity as an Analysts’ and a Participants’ Resource.” In Identities in Talk, ed. Charles Antaki and Sue Widdicombe. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 201–206. Zimmermann, Klaus. 1992. Sprachkontakt, ethnische Identität und Identitätsbeschädigung. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag.

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Chapter 13

ORAL MISTAKE CORRECTIONS IN SECOND-LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS

Olga Visbal

Introduction Second-language classrooms have been an area in which many analyses have taken place. Some of the early observational studies in second-language classrooms examined teachers’ responses to students’ errors/mistakes and most of them show the sorts of questions teachers ask about the issue: which errors/mistakes to treat, exactly when, and exactly how. Research on how teachers treat their students’ errors show that teachers have a wide variety of techniques for the treatment of errors, but more important than this is the complexity of the decision teachers must take in order to correct an error. One of the most representative theories regarding oral mistake corrections is the one proposed by Long in 1977; this model details the different choices and steps a teacher needs to follow from the very moment an oral mistake occurs, until the feedback or evaluative manifestation is given. The issues explained in the model can be framed as a series of questions about the teacher’s role and the timing of the reaction following the student’s erroneous answer. This topic has been considered to be of great importance, because the interaction that occurs between teachers and students during a correction process can positively or negatively influence the language learning process. — 227 —

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In this study, I describe a project highlighting the process teachers and students go through during the correction of a mistake in a second-language classroom at a German school in Colombia. Furthermore, this study examines whether the reactions given by the teacher during the correction process are related to or influence the ability of the students to correct their own mistakes.

Method Subjects and Procedure In January 2003, I contacted a German school in Colombia, explaining the purposes of the research and asking for their permission to carry out fieldwork in the foreign-language classrooms at the school mentioned above. After the approval, the directors of the German Department at the school in Colombia selected two classes in which only native-language instructors were teaching, and organized the observation schedule for those foreign-language classes. The classroom observations were conducted during a period of three weeks (from March 10 to March 26, 2003). Each day one German class was observed and tape-recorded; each class was observed over 45 minutes. The convenience sample included thirty students and one native-language teacher.

Variables Initiation During the observation process I assessed how the correction was initiated. There are four combinations of initiation and repair involving self or other corrections: (a) self-initiated self-repair (SI/SK), in which the speaker him/herself both noticed and corrected the error/mistake; (b) self-initiated other-repair (SI/FK), in which the speaker noticed breakdowns and requested assistance; (c) other-initiated self-repair (FI/SK), in which either the peers or the teacher noticed and commented on the error/mistake, but the speaker him/herself was able to correct the error/mistake; and (d) other-initiated otherrepair (FI/FK), in which people other than the speaker (teacher or peers) both called attention to the errors/mistakes and provided the corrections.

Correction Was the correction made by the teacher or by other students? In this variable I assessed whether the teacher showed the student in a direct or indirect form that a mistake was made. — 228 —

Oral Mistake Corrections in Second-language Classrooms

Reaction Once the teacher decided to treat observed mistakes, he/she had a variety of methods to treat them. The teacher reacted to the student’s mistakes in different ways, both verbally and nonverbally, or else he/she decided not to give a reaction and correct the mistake. According to this, these reactions are defined as signs given by the teacher to indicate to the student that a mistake has been made.

Interruption Teacher/other students could treat errors/mistakes immediately. This often involved interrupting the student in mid-sentence or waiting until the student had finished the sentence/task. In this last case the correction was made without interruption.

Direction The teacher addressed the correction to the whole class (group correction) or to a specific student (individual correction).

Results The Decision-making Process In order to describe the different aspects, techniques, steps, and reactions present during the decision-making process, and the correction process in these foreignlanguage classrooms, frequency analyses for each of the categories were done. The results of these frequency analyses are summarized in Tables 13.1 to 13.5. Table 13.1 shows what kind of initiation/correction occurred and with which frequency. The most common behavior was the one shown in the table as FI/FK. In 121 of the cases (78.1 percent) others (peers or teacher) initiated the process of correction and corrected the mistake (FI/FK). When making a correction, the teacher has two options: either he/she makes it directly so that the student immediately notices that he/she made a mistake, or he/she makes it indirectly. The analysis of frequency shows that in these classrooms, 92.9 percent of the times (144 of the cases) the teacher made the correction in a direct form and 7.1 percent (11 of the cases) were done indirectly, (Table 13.2). In these classrooms, in 107 cases (69 percent) the teacher decided not to show any reaction, and in 46 of the cases (29.7 percent) the teacher gave a verbal — 229 —

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Table 13.1 Frequency of different kinds of initiation Frequency

Percentage %

SI/SK SI/FK FI/SK FI/FK

6 17 11 121

3.9 11.0 7.1 78.1

Total

155

100.0

Note: SI/SK: Self-initiated self-repair; SI/FK: Self-initiated other-repair, FI/SK: Other-initiated selfrepair, FI/FK: Other-initiated other-repair.

Table 13.2 Frequency of direct and indirect correction Frequency

Percentage %

Direct Indirect

144 11

92.9 7.1

Total

155

100.0

Table 13.3 Frequency of verbal and nonverbal reactions Frequency

Percentage %

Verbal Any Both (verbal and nonverbal)

46 107 2

29.7 69.0 1.3

Total

155

100.0

Frequency

Percentage %

With interruption Without interruption

50 105

32.3 67.7

Total

155

100.0

Table 13.4 Frequency of interruption

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Table 13.5 Frequency of different kinds of directions Frequency

Percentage %

118

76.1

32

20.6

Individually at the beginning and group oriented at the end

4

2.6

Group oriented at the beginning and individual at the end

1

0.60

Individually oriented Group oriented

Total

155

100.0

reaction in order to let the student know that he/she had made a mistake and to foster self-correction, (Table 13.3). Another aspect that needs to be considered by teachers is when to treat a mistake. The teacher may deal with it immediately; this implies that the teacher will interrupt the student while she is participating, or delay it until the learner finishes with the answer (without interruption). Table 13.4 shows that in 67.7 percent of the cases in these classrooms, the teacher decided not to interrupt the student and waited until he/she finished answering to correct the mistake. In the decision-making process of correcting a mistake, the teacher needs to decide whether he/she directs the correction only to the student who made the mistake (individually) or if he/she directs the correction to the whole classroom (group oriented). Table 13.5 shows that in these foreign-language classrooms 76.1 percent of the corrections were directed only to the student that made the mistake, in other words, the teacher made an individual correction. In 20.6 percent of the cases the corrections were group oriented. Furthermore, the researcher analyzed the relationship between some of the categories in order to find out if teacher reactions increase the probability of students correcting their own mistakes. Contingency analyses of some of the categories were done.

Prevention of Self-correction When a teacher or a student interrupted the correction process, especially when the student was participating, this student was not able to correct his/her own mistake. The Chi-Quadrat-Test (5.73; df = 3; n.s.) shows that there is no relationship between the kind of initiation and the immediacy of interruption by the teacher. The relevant results are presented in Table 13.6.

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Table 13.6 Contingency analysis of interruption and kind of initiation Total SI/SK

SI/FK

FI/SK

FI/FK

Interruption

1 2

0 6

3 14

5 6

42 79

Total

6

17

11

121

155

50 105

Table 13.7 Relationship between kinds of reactions and initiations Total

Reaction

Verbal No reaction

Total

SI/SK

SI/FK

FI/SK

FI/FK

6 0

15 2

3 8

83 38

107 48

6

17

11

121

155

Table 13.8 Relationship between kind of initiation and kind of correction Correction

Initiation

SI/SK SI/FK FI/SK FI/FK

Total

Total

1: Direct

2: Indirect

6 17 10 111

0 0 1 10

6 17 11 121

144

11

155

Table 13.9 Relationship between kind of content and kind of interruption

CONTENT

Total

Voc. Gram. Written Reading Oral

1: With Interruption

2: Without Interruption

Total

3 12 0 19 16

21 43 3 16 22

24 55 3 35 38

50

105

155

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Fostering a Special Kind of Correction Another method used by the teacher during the correction process was to foster the students with the help of a verbal or nonverbal reaction to correct their own mistakes. When comparing these two categories the researcher noticed that, depending on the kind of reaction (verbal or nonverbal) given by the teacher, there was a typical type of correction. The results of this analysis (Chi-Quadrat = 14,61; df = 3; n.s.) indicate that independent of the reaction of the teacher (verbal or nonverbal), the most frequent initiation is the one shown in Table 13.7 as (FI/FK).

No Relationship between Type of Direction and Outcome The results of the contingency analysis of these categories show that there is no influence or relation between the type of correction given by the teacher (direct/indirect) and the kind of initiation/correction (SI/SK, SI/FK, FI/SK, FI/FK). Regardless of the type of correction (direct/indirect), the most common behavior or type of initiation/correction were the ones corrected or initiated by others (FI/FK). The relevant contingency analyses are presented in Table 13.8.

Relationship between Content and Type of Correction The teacher used different methods depending on the type of content. For example, when grammar, vocabulary, or oral expression were being taught, the teacher preferred not to interrupt, but rather wait until the student had finished in order to initiate the process of correction. According to the significance shown by the Chi-Quadrat-Test (17.92; df = 4; p < .001) there is a relationship between these two categories (Content and Interruption). The results shown in Table 13.9 indicate that in 105 of the cases the teacher made the corrections without interruption, and in 50 of the cases the teacher made them with an interruption.

Discussion The present results, using frequency and contingency analyses, provide support for the expectation that there is no relationship between the reactions given by the teacher and the probability that students correct their own mistakes. From the first analysis it can be inferred that when a teacher or a student interrupted the correction process, especially when the student was participating, this student was not able to correct his/her own mistake. However, when the teacher decided not to interrupt while the student was — 233 —

Olga Visbal

participating and waited until the student had finished, the probabilities of self-correction did not increase. In other words, it can be stated that this method used by the teacher (giving an immediate or delayed correction) did not increase the probability of selfcorrection in these classrooms. Another method used by the teacher during the correction process was to encourage the students, with the help of a verbal or nonverbal reaction, to correct their own mistakes. When comparing these two categories I noticed that, depending on the kind of reaction (verbal or nonverbal) given by the teacher, there was a typical type of correction. Whether the reaction was verbal or nonverbal, the outcome was always a FI/FK (= other-repair). In the case of the type of direction, the contingency analysis showed that, as in the other reactions, there is no relationship between the type of direction (direct and indirect) and the outcome. This means that even if the teacher gives an indirect correction, the probabilities that the students correct their own mistakes do not increase. The most common behavior after a direct or indirect correction was FI/FK (= other-initiated/other-repair). Finally, when comparing the type of content and the type of correction (immediate or delayed), it was noticed that the teacher used different methods depending on the type of content. For example, when grammar, vocabulary, or oral expressions were being taught, the teacher preferred not to interrupt but rather to wait until the learner had finished in order to initiate the process of correction. A possible explanation for this phenomenon could be that these specific contents were of high importance for the learning process and because of this the teacher tried to avoid interruptions, because interruptions tend to inhibit or reduce the motivation of the students to participate. The results also demonstrated that the behavior explained by Long (1977) was present in these classrooms during the correction process of a mistake. However, it can be stated that each teacher has his own style and uses the most appropriate techniques to match the characteristics, level, and needs of the classroom and students. Although the theory states that students should be capable of correcting their own mistakes, in these classrooms this did not happen. The most obvious conclusion drawn from this study is that in these classrooms students were not able to correct their own mistakes. I also found strong evidence that the different reactions given by the teacher in order to promote self-correction do not influence the probability that the students correct their own mistakes. Regardless of the reactions given by the teacher, the outcome was mainly correction by others.

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Oral Mistake Corrections in Second-language Classrooms

A tentative hypothesis that could explain why this happened is that the lessons were developed under the traditional frontal instruction, in which the teacher decides who participates. Another possible hypothesis could be related to cultural aspects, since in the Colombian culture students are supposed to listen and not to talk, as a sign of respect to the teacher. As a continuation of this project it would be interesting to investigate why in these classrooms the reactions of the teachers did not help to increase the probability of the students to correct their own mistakes, even though the theory states that giving verbal and nonverbal reactions should help or challenge students to correct their own mistakes. It would also be interesting for researchers who want to follow or develop investigations in this field to study the behavior of teachers when they react to mistakes and investigate how they could manage the decision-making process in order to increase the chances that students correct their mistakes themselves. This study was accomplished in a foreign-language classroom with Spanishspeaking students and a native German teacher. It could be possible that the processes in a multilingual classroom (students with different mother tongues) would be different; therefore the researcher of this study proposes further research to develop a project in which the decision-making process in a multilingual classroom could be described and analyzed.

Reference Long, Michael H. 1977. “Teacher Feedback on Learner Error: Mapping Cognitions.” In On TESOL ‘77. Teaching and learning English as a Second Language: Trends in Research and Practice, ed. H. Douglas Brown, Carlos Alfredo Yorio, and Ruth H. Crymes. Washington, DC, TESOL, pp. 278–94.

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Chapter 14

INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE IN MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCIES IN GERMANY: DOES IT EXIST?

Melissa Lamson

Premise It is the contention of the author that the need exists to measure and develop the intercultural competence of management consultants working at management consultancies, e.g. A.T. Kearney, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers, etc. Since it is the responsibility and task of management consultants to strategically define and implement how large corporations operate and function within a global, and therefore intercultural context, it is critical to examine and gage the levels of intercultural competence within these individuals.

Introduction Within the framework of this study, definitions, perceptions, and factors of “intercultural competence” in management consultancies (henceforth referred to as “consultancies”) operating in Germany will be examined. Fourteen Management Consultants (MCs) and fourteen Human Resources Personnel — 237 —

Melissa Lamson

(HRP) working internally at consultancies were interviewed and both were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. The questions in the interviews were designed to measure self-perception and the perceptions of others with the goal of concluding levels of “intercultural competence” in the industry of consultancy, or, as it is commonly referred to today, the “business services” branch. The business services industry was chosen for this study as these firms are responsible for providing new structures and skills in management in many capacities for all other industries. One could conclude that consultancies, in fact, determine the business models for most company operations today. Additionally, consultancies are often the key drivers in international joint ventures, i.e. they are called upon to consult on acquisition, merger, and startup projects worldwide. Research has proven the effectiveness of consultancies in the transfer of “hardskills,” business structures, or technical processes. But if, as many experts say, “business is communication,” then “softskills” in people management, empathy, emotional intelligence, and an understanding of diverse approaches in communicating, negotiating, decision making, and teamwork are equally critical to the overall success of a company. Wouldn’t, then, management consultancies need to also simultaneously transfer both soft and hard skills to their clients (Adler 1991)? It is the author’s contention that consultancies operating globally must be competent in both types of knowledge and skill transfer in order to optimally provide business services to firms. This “know-how” is defined by the author in this article as “intercultural competence” and in this research project it was important to assess the levels of awareness in intercultural competence of those responsible for this transfer, i.e. those involved in the management consulting process.

Intercultural Competence First of all, a number of key terms – all of which will play an important role in the understanding of the overall analysis – must be defined.

Culture The term “culture” comes originally from the Latin word cultus, meaning “education” or “way of life.” Particularly in the languages of the Western world, this term is frequently considered to comprise meanings having to do with achievements of civilization or of the human mind, such as education, art, and literature. However, the term “culture” has a much greater meaning and significance within the framework of this thesis. — 238 —

Intercultural Competence in Germany

Culture is “the way we do things around here” (Mole 1991), or “shared ways through which groups of people understand and interpret the world. Patterns that vary from one culture to another share the behavior and expectations of that culture” (Trompenaars 1993), and “the collective programming of the mind.” Thus the behavior of every human being is inf luenced by mental patterns of thought, feeling, and action. Every human being has, of course, the possibility and the ability to react independently and individually, but mental patterns indicate the behavioral reactions which are probable (Hofstede 1991). According to Hofstede, the mental programming consists of several layers: in addition to “culture,” one differentiates between “human nature” and “individual personality.” Whereas human nature with its particular physical and psychological ways of reacting is genetically common to all human beings, the personality of each and every human being is unique and based on habits of character and personal experience. Those individuals who have collective habits and experience, therefore, make up a culture. The fine lines between culture, nature, and personality are a point of controversy among the experts. Unity reigns, however, when it comes to the fact that culture is a collective phenomenon, acquired in a group and/or a social system. Cultural differences manifest themselves in a variety of ways. There are, for instance, visible and superficial artifacts such as symbols, pictures, idols and role models, rituals and traditions. Difficult to recognize, however, for the external observer is the system of values within a culture. Values – and conceptions of what a value is – describe the tendency to put certain conditions or circumstances into categories of “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong.” These values are “programmed,” that is to say established in childhood, within the social surroundings, i.e. the environment, and are therefore often unconscious.

Intercultural The Latin prefix “inter” means “between”; thus “intercultural” refers to the interaction happening between – or among – different cultures. Interculturalists explain this as understanding the expectations of oneself in relationship to the expectations of the other, as opposed to strictly looking across at the other, as suggested by the term “cross- cultural” (Lamson 1998). Additionally, the term implies a power dynamic. An intercultural interaction is never about two cultures simply behaving in different ways toward each other. It is the complex context in which two or more cultures view and feel about each other – an interaction filled with prejudices, assumptions, stereotypes, and values which affect and determine the behavioral outcome of such an interaction.

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Intercultural Competence The term “intercultural competence” is based on the ability of a person or an organization to act in an appropriate and effective manner in an intercultural environment, which then elicits a successful outcome. As it is typically referred to as a “softskill,” it is not easy to measure by traditional means and also because intercultural competence is not static, but ever evolving. However, what does “appropriate” or “effective” or “successful” mean in this connection? In the year 2000, the Institute for Intercultural Management did a study of 328 executives employed by a large German company (IFIM 2001b). The target group here comprised German executives already working abroad at the time, either preparing for another assignment abroad or coming back to work in Germany again. Within the framework of this study, the interviewees were asked, among other things, what – in their opinion – “intercultural competence” meant. They mentioned a number of factors for successful intercultural interaction. At the top of the list of these factors were “the ability to get along with very different people,” “high learning ability and readiness to learn,” “the willingness and the ability to change one’s own style of work and leadership,” “perseverance,” “social skills,” and a “high tolerance level of frustration.” Jürgen Bolten looks at intercultural competence from another scientific perspective. He does not call intercultural competence “an individual area of competence as such” but rather the “ability to relate or to apply individual, social, professional and strategic competencies in their best possible blend or connected form to multicultural contexts of action” (Bolten 2001). Thus social competencies, to which belong team, communication, and leadership qualities and abilities, must be transferred to new contexts of action in intercultural situations, for example. Such a transfer includes the utilization of intercultural experience and knowledge of different cultures in order to be able to adjust one’s own social behavior to fit new situations. The main demand – and achievement! – here is therefore the transfer which enables the application and use of knowledge previously gained. Another approach is as follows: “Basic prerequisites (for intercultural competence) are sensitivity and self-confidence: the understanding of other patterns of behaving and thinking, just as the ability to communicate one’s own standpoint, to be understood and respected, to show flexibility where it is possible, and clarity where it is necessary …” (CICB 2002). Intercultural competence can be viewed and defined from different standpoints – for example, it can be based on the abilities and knowledge a person must have when acting or on the desired effect to be gained under certain intercultural conditions. What these three approaches explained above have in common is that they all define certain skills and knowledge. Factors relevant to success are, according — 240 —

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to them, understanding, sensitivity, ability to learn, flexibility, knowledge, and experience. The following model, developed by Brian H. Spitzberg, explains and illustrates the connection among these components and places them within a system. In his “Intercultural Competence” model the three areas of “motivation,” “knowledge,” and “abilities” are connected with each other. “Motivation” means that intercultural competence requires a certain “proactivity” from the start – in other words, one must “want” to communicate. Second, “knowledge” of the laws and conditions of communication and the environment is necessary. Thirdly, one needs particular skills. These include “softskills” in a professional context, as well as “social” skills, such as the awareness and ability to implement motivation and knowledge in one’s own actions. According to Spitzberg (1990), these are the three basic prerequisites for intercultural competence (see Figure 14.1). Among these three components – motivation, abilities, and knowledge – there is a connection of effect: The more knowledge and experience the actor possesses, the greater will be his or her motivation, because with an increase in knowledge, a successful interaction becomes more likely. The greater the knowledge of the actor, the stronger the communication skills he or she knows how to apply and utilize in a particular scenario. Additionally, the greater the motivation, the greater the need and the desire to gain knowledge and abilities. When skills are improved, self-confidence increases as well, and this in turn has a positive effect on motivation. Actor (Culture 1)

Motivation by means of reward, personal or professional goals, fear

Knowledge about laws of communication, social interaction, language, and rhetoric, intercultural experience

Context culture, place and time, type of relationship, purpose of encounter

Actor (Culture 2)

Abilities

Abilities ability to communicate (moderation, ability to express oneself, etc.) capability for empathy, adaptability, tolerance, learning ability, assertiveness, self confidence

I N T E R A C T I O N

Reception based on (a.o.t.) expectation(s), observation and selective perception

Figure 14.1 Model of “intercultural competence” Source: Model based on Spitzberg (1990). — 241 —

Motivation Knowledge

Reception

Context

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Further, intercultural competence is the central focus of examination of this article. Therefore, the following analysis of the research will grapple with the basic and prevailing conditions – and the factors of influence – in regard to intercultural interactions as perceived by MCs and HRP and examine how competence is determined and defined in the context of the business services industry.

The Acquisition of Intercultural Competence In Theory According to Intercultural Theory, a paradigm shift in cognition needs to occur in order to affect attitudinal and therefore behavioral change. Social psychologists dating back as far as Walter Lippmann (1922) found that when people’s thought process is interfered with, the attitude they hold and therefore behavior they exhibit also change. According to the well-known interculturalist Milton Bennett (1986), a person should be able to empathize with another’s viewpoint by truly feeling the other’s situation and perspective. If motivation, abilities, and knowledge exist at one level, then they can evolve and develop depending on the interference. Making one’s values apparent and explicit in order to understand why one becomes irritated or threatened in a particular situation can therefore develop intercultural competence. Seeing another experience pain and going through the pain with them, or empathizing with their feelings, can also provoke competence development. Theoretically, one can go through a training session or experience a simulated event which then allows for the further development of knowledge and abilities or development from Denial to Acceptance or Acceptance to Integration Stages.

In Practice There are some debates on how individuals acquire intercultural competence per se. But it is generally agreed upon that trainings, cultural simulations, and situations which stimulate an individual’s motivation, deliver knowledge, and teach skills will best elicit the desired development of competence. Assessments, trainings, evaluations, and other forms of feedback processes are some of the main methods used to deliver and measure skills in dealing with different cultures. In order for individuals and companies to acquire intercultural competence, a combination of proactive experiential, practical, and theoretical methods are required. As recommended above, a training course is most effective; but some knowledge can also be acquired through reading, intentional or unintentional experiences in other cultures, and the natural ability to reflect, perceive, and empathize with different people or cultures. — 242 —

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The Consulting Industry Introduction to the Subject as Such First of all, a few basic questions are to be clarified in this section – for example, what is to be understood by the term “management consulting” and how the process itself runs its course, i.e. how management consultants proceed in practice. Consulting normally follows certain patterns. Consultants are commissioned by an enterprise to carry out a particular task. The process of consulting begins with an analysis of the status quo in the company. Consultants collect data, collate information, make inquiries or investigations, and do one or more surveys. This in and of itself does not always yield new knowledge for the firm under examination, as the consultants merely make use of sources already present and already known (by means of interviews or questionnaires, for instance). After this, a compilation, assessment, and evaluation of the situation and suggestions for solutions follow as the result of analysis of the collected information. This can be done, according to the individual case, either externally or in cooperation with decision makers or employees of the organization. Finally, the firm who contracted the work makes the decision whether or not, and to what extent, the suggestions of the consultants are to be put into practice and in what time frame. There are various forms of business consulting. There are differences, for example, in the role the consultant takes or the approach a consultant utilizes in the consulting process. Depending on the request, the consultant may be given the role of a supplier of information, a problem solver, a catalyst, or a trainer. Consulting can take the form of an assessment report, an expert or process-oriented consultancy; but the focus can also be placed on the development of the organization in general (Author unknown 2001). The different approaches in consulting vary in their models and assumptions, as well as in their way of dealing with the client’s organizational structure. Which of these approaches is most suitable depends on the individual problem(s) and/or situation of the client.

When are Consulting Firms Called in For Advice? Typical situations in which they are contracted for work within a company are a time of introduction of new technology or technical upgrades, a desire for improvement of work processes, or negotiations relating to prospective mergers or joint ventures. The most common reasons for contracting a consulting firm are as follows:

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lack of expert knowledge and experience in the firm; lack of time and personnel (internal resources); solution to a conflict or need for restructuring (hiring and firing), objective opinion of an outsider; new ideas from someone who has the experience from other firms; time, speed, and effectiveness improvement.

Demand Those with the greatest demand for the services of consulting firms are in the manufacturing sector, with a figure of 25 percent, and the credit and insurance sector, with 24 percent (Biech 2001). Demand for consulting services has shifted as a result of the consolidation of markets in the last few years: demand in the sector of credit and insurance and in telecommunications has sunk slightly, whereas it has risen in the field of energy providers. According to a study of the German Manager Magazin in August 2001, which included the companies Bayer, Bertelsmann, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank and RWE, 77 percent of the 200 most important German companies commission more than three consulting projects a year (Müller 2001). The business volume of these projects was more than 3 million German Marks in more than two-thirds of the cases (BDU 2002).

Market Analysis The Consulting Market in Germany The German consulting market can be divided into large, medium-sized, and small firms. In this study, focus was placed on the consulting firms in Germany which operate internationally. For this reason, concentration will center on the so-called “top forty.” These top forty in Germany make the highest turnover and are responsible for the overall growth of the industry. According to the German Association of Business Consultants (BDU), the top forty consulting firms have a market share of nearly 50 percent. Table 14.1 shows the various figures for the three different groups.

The German Market in International Comparison The largest share of the European consulting turnover is achieved by Germany: 28.6 percent. Thus Germany stands at the top of the list, ranking in front of Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia (BDU 2001). — 244 —

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Table 14.1 Comparative figures on the German consulting market in 2001 “Top forty” Turnover in 6.36 billions (euros) Market share in percent 49.4% Growth in 2001 11.6% Number of firms 40 Percentage of total 0.3% number Number of consultants 25,200 Turnover per 252,400 consultant (euros)

Medium-sized firms 4.43

Small firms 2.08

34.4% 2.1% 4,500 31.0%

16.2% –1.0% 9.960 68.7%

29,300 151,200

15,500 134,200

Source: BDU 2001

According to a study done by the firm Lünendonk GmbH, the top twentyfive in Germany are headed by McKinsey, A.T. Kearney, the Boston Consulting Group, and Arthur D. Little; all of these corporate groups have parent companies in the U.S.A. (Lünendonk GmbH 2001). The top group in the consulting scene is therefore comprised mainly of subsidiaries of management consulting firms operating worldwide, but also of some firms based in Germany that are active internationally. The largest German corporate groups are Roland Berger and Management Engineers.

Examples of Consultancies McKinsey and Company Inc. has the most well-known name in the business services industry. It was founded in Chicago in 1926. Its founder James Oscar McKinsey wanted to offer a new and novel service: the advising of top executives of major companies. Even today, the motto McKinsey uses for itself is “top management consulting.” The firm maintains eighty-five offices in over forty countries and employs more than 7,500 consultants (McKinsey and Company 2003). Since 1995, McKinsey has seen worldwide growth of 150 percent and is to be found among the top three business-consulting firms in Germany. The overproportional growth of McKinsey in recent years seems to demand a certain tribute – the number of projects which flop is also on the increase (Author unknown 2002). Due to a number of highly publicized company failures – not only McKinsey – several consultancies have been seen in a negative light as of late. These failures are probably due to several factors, not the least of which is the increasing complexity of global business. — 245 —

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According to an up-to-date study in the German Manager Magazin, McKinsey’s market position out in front of its competitors is due to its strong image in the fields of “cost reduction” and “strategy consulting” (Author unknown 2002). An additional reason for the outstanding success of the firm is a company strategy which integrates former McKinsey staff into an alumni network. The former consultants are given the opportunity to stay in contact with each other and with the firm itself. McKinsey profits from this because many in the “old boys network” move up into top-level management of major corporate groups and bring all kinds of commissioned projects to their former firm. At Deutsche Post (the German Federal Post Office), for example, four out of eight members of the board plus the chairman are former McKinsey employees. While McKinsey offers a portfolio of all the classic consulting services, firms like Accenture and Kienbaum develop other, different strategies to position themselves in the market. Accenture, the former consulting division of the auditing firm Arthur Andersen, positions itself above all as a firm of consultants for the IT branch. Following is KPMG, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Ernst & Young and Deloitte & Touche. The firm Kienbaum Consultants, on the other hand, originally marketing themselves as competent in recruitment and human resources, has now done a repositioning, adding “Personnel and Business Consulting” to the company name. And, as a “full-service consultancy,” Kienbaum can certainly keep up with the best of them: in direct comparison with the largest consulting firms in Germany, it is in 16th place and, in comparison with the largest personnel consulting firms, it is clearly a leader (Faz.Net 2002).

The Empirical Study Aim and Method As the title of this chapter indicates, the aim of this empirical survey is to measure perceptions of “intercultural competence” in the consulting industry as perceived by Management Consultants (MCs) and Human Resources Personnel (HRP) based in Germany. In the interviews, the following questions were to be answered: ● ● ● ●

What meaning or relevance does the management of cultural difference have for the consulting industry? What experience has been gained in the association with cultural difference? How are knowledge and skills acquired? How do consultants assess their abilities in terms of knowledge, motivation, awareness, etc.? — 246 —

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How do consultants see their own “intercultural competence”? What views and expectations does the HR staff have in regard to the intercultural competence of their advisory personnel? What strategies and solutions are there for dealing with cultural differences? What role does intercultural competence play in the success or failure of a project?

This survey is meant to give an overview and point to existing tendencies. It does not claim to be a representative analysis of the consulting industry in regard to intercultural competence.

Theses Due to increasing globalization and the existing worldwide network of consulting firms, intercultural competence should be a decisive success factor for this industry and thus assessed as such by those involved in the field. Thesis 1: The importance of intercultural competence is regarded in the consulting industry as high by both consultants and HRP. The profession of consultant brings with it extreme stress and pressure to perform well, stemming from competition with colleagues as well as demands of clients. Those who want to deal with these high expectations successfully must not only present themselves as competent and self-confident, but also be convinced of their own abilities. Thesis 2: MCs consider their own intercultural competence to be high. Cultural differences which show themselves in language use, for example, or in certain concepts of values and rules, can determine an organizational culture. If a consultant wants to gain insight into a new organization, s/he must first learn and understand its language, values, and rules. Thesis 3: Cultural differences between the consultant and the organization make cooperation more difficult and can lead to problems. To guarantee intercultural competence, there are various strategies and approaches. These presumably play a role during the recruiting process, i.e. in the consideration of applicants. Thesis 4: Experience abroad or with different cultures or completion of specific intercultural training programs are the basis for intercultural — 247 —

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competence as seen by consulting firms as an important prerequisite when considering applicants for a position. Thesis 5: Particular preparation directed at an intercultural consulting project in the form of courses or training seminars is an important instrument for consulting firms to ensure intercultural competence. At the same time, it is an important indicator for the value in which intercultural competence is held within the enterprise. The interviewees have different points of view on the topic of “intercultural competence”. HRP members have a more theoretical, scientific or psychological approach, whereas the position of the consultant is determined by practical experience. Thesis 6: MCs and HRP have different ideas about what intercultural competence means. Thesis 7: The more intercultural competence a consultant has, the more competently s/he can manage intercultural problems. In order to draw as representative a picture as possible of business services firms, the empirical study is to include consultants involved in strategy consulting, auditing, and IT systems implementation. Thesis 8: The more technical and/or specialized the level on strategy implementation in which the consultant is active, the less knowledge of/experience with human interaction and intercultural communication, and therefore the lower the intercultural competence. Thesis 9: The value attached to intercultural competence depends on the size and internationality of the firm as well as the size and internationality of the clients. As stated previously, the qualitative way in which the study was carried out allows little objective judgment of the intercultural competence of the consultants. But the self-assessment of MCs and/or the more objective evaluation of consultants by HRP can give insight into this. Thesis 10: MCs, or those working in the field, and HRP, those supporting the organization and therefore providing internal services to the MCs, have differing assessments of the intercultural competence of consultants. The MCs see their own intercultural competence as significantly higher than the HRP consider it to be. — 248 —

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Analysis Framework of Interviews and Data A total of seventeen firms took part in the interviews; the participants were fourteen MCs, and fourteen HRP. Almost all were born in and grew up in Germany, and “typical” white Germans, who speak German as a native language.

Interviews with Consultants Experience with Cultural Differences Of the fourteen consultants interviewed, all – without exception – stated that they have had experience with cultural difference in their work as consultants. Four of the consultants had worked in their profession abroad for a lengthy period of time. Another four stated that they had at least lived abroad for some time. The remaining six stated that they had only a little experience abroad, but had worked in international teams and/or with international clients.

Relevance An aim of the qualitative interviews was to find out the consultants’ basic attitude towards “intercultural competence.” All consultants stated that, in principle, they considered the topic “intercultural competence” very important in the age of globalization. In answer to the question of how relevant intercultural competence was for their personal situation, however, there were divided opinions: eight consultants were of the opinion that intercultural competence was very important for their own situation, and six of the opinion that it was not relevant for them. The reason given for this was the fact that the majority of their clients were German. One consultant, for example, stated that in general the topic of “intercultural competence” was very relevant for the consulting industry, yet in the course of the conversation expressed the opinion that in everyday working life, the culture of employees was unimportant, and that one should treat all people the same – regardless of nationality – if problems occur. Interesting to point out here is that the MCs interviewed assume that “intercultural” means “international” and that if the clients are German – although Germany has more “ethnic minorities” than England – then intercultural competence is somehow not relevant to the workplace in Germany unless it is in an international context. The question is whether cultural

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diversity is seen or not seen in the German workplace or if the work environments are in fact nonculturally diverse.

Self-assessment Among other things, the consultants were asked to give a subjective estimation of their own intercultural competence. Of the fourteen, eleven gave their intercultural competence the grade of “high.” The main reason given for this was their experience living or working abroad or working in international teams in the workplace. Only three consultants saw their intercultural competence as “mediocre.” Coincidently, these three people possessed considerably less experience abroad and/or working with international clients. Among the consultants, there were only two who said that they had taken part in intercultural training during their consultancy work. Both of them have in their biographies, in comparison to the others, an above-average length of time spent abroad. The deduced conclusion is, that the high self-evaluation of the majority of the interviewed consultants does not come from theoretical courses or seminars or from knowledge gained of a scientific or academic nature; it therefore must be based on other factors. Thesis 2 can therefore be confirmed: consultants see their own intercultural competence as high.

Problems Due to Cultural Difference Of the fourteen consultants interviewed, ten stated that they had been confronted with problems due to cultural difference in the course of their consulting work. Of these ten, eight said that the problems which occurred clearly impacted their project work negatively; only two of the consultants said that they had been successful in solving the problems. The following problems in intercultural cooperation were identified: Ten said it was “language,” making this the greatest problem in the view of the consultants. As the second-largest impediment, seven consultants named “different ways of working.” It was followed by “mentality” (named by six of them), “ideas of hierarchy” and “misunderstandings“ (both received five votes), “ways of behaving” (four), the “reputation of consultant,” “body language,” and “humor” (each named by three consultants), and finally the different “ideas of time” (two) and “values” (one). Noticeable here is that it is mainly the consultants already confronted with intercultural problems during their projects who see the “mentality” as the cause of problems, in addition to language difficulties, whereas the consultants without any experience of such problems see above all the different “ideas of hierarchy” as problematic. — 250 —

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It is interesting to note here why “language” is considered the greatest barrier by the German consultants interviewed. The reason for this could be found in some particularities of German culture. Germany is among the cultures whose communication is regarded as one of the most “lowcontext” (Trompenaars 1993). The speaker in a low-context culture therefore calls “things by their names,” naming those things to be achieved or to which one is referring. A lowcontext communicator is characterized as direct, and verbal, and the written and spoken word is highly valued. Therefore, a low-context culture would then greatly prioritize “language” as a key tool for ensuring successful outcomes. Thesis 3 can be confirmed only in part: the experiences of the consultants have shown that cultural differences between the consultant and the organization – i.e. the client interaction – led to problems in the majority of cases of cooperation. There were, however, participants who met with no (visible) differences or problems despite having been involved in intercultural cooperation. The qualitative findings here unfortunately do not allow any conclusions with regard to why these interviewees did not experience intercultural problems. This could lie in individual factors such as their life or work experience, and/or their experience abroad, all of which could result in a certain competence in dealing with different situations. It could be the case of “it’s only a problem if it’s a problem” and in these cases intercultural differences haven’t been.

Proactivity The point of interest here was to find out how much energy the consultants would personally invest in order to promote intercultural cooperation. The participants were requested to enter into a fictive situation: to imagine that they would be sent to a client in another country, a country of a culture which they had never been confronted with before. The question was, “Would you do cultural preparation for this project abroad and how would you do it?” Four consultants replied in the negative: they would not prepare at all. The reason given several times was that they would prefer to “jump into the water” or “learn by doing.“ One consultant’s short response was that such a project would never come to pass. Three consultants answered that they would “familiarize themselves with the location and local customs” before going. Seven consultants showed themselves to be proactive in their fictive preparation for the trip. They said that – in addition to the regular preparation for a project – they would obtain written information on the culture and country, they would ask colleagues there for advice and tips, and they would sign up for crash courses in the language of the country, if necessary. (It is interesting to note that intercultural training was not mentioned here.)

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Situation Analysis and Need/desire Six consultants said that the present situation in their respective firm with regard to developing intercultural competence was “satisfactory.” Reasons given for this were, on the one hand, no need for intercultural training, since the majority of clients were German; in two cases, the situation was seen as “satisfactory,” because the consultants automatically assumed there were possibilities for intercultural training from their own HR or training department (in only one case was this true). Eight consultants expressed dissatisfaction with the situation in their own firm. There were four reasons named for this: 1. Low priority for the area of “intercultural competence.” 2. Lack of possibilities for the improvement of intercultural competence, due to time and costs. 3. The general attitude of consultants toward the subject: too oriented in the direction of task performance and thus no awareness of the special demands of intercultural cooperation. 4. Overall lack of interest in intercultural themes. One consultant offered the following clipped explanation: “It doesn’t interest the firm.” Another consultant said he was dissatisfied with the growing lack of interest that seems to come with increasing age: older consultants become more inflexible and sometimes less open, probably owing to their social situation, as he put it.

Interviews with HR Staff Contact with Cultural Differences The staff of human resources departments were asked to identify the areas and situations in which associating and dealing with cultural differences would be inherent. Here, two main areas were identified: 1. Work in international project teams Consultants are commissioned for projects according to their professional qualifications and availability. For the transfer of knowledge, it is often the case that experts from other countries are called in, and/or experts are sent to other countries. 2. Cooperation with international customers/clients Almost all consulting firms stated that they had a very international client structure. Some of the firms first said that they work mainly with German — 252 —

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clients, but, with further questioning, it turned out that these German clients had an international presence due to subsidiaries and branches around the world.

Value Placed on Intercultural Competence As with the consultants, the HR staff members were asked for a statement in regard to the relevance of the topic of “intercultural competence.” In the interviews, three basic attitudes crystallized. In five firms, “intercultural competence” was regarded as very relevant. “Very relevant” meant in connection to the consulting industry as well as the German economy. As a reason, the term “globalization” was mentioned above all, in addition to the increasing international presence of clients and the cultural diversity of the company’s own staff. Seven firms were of the opinion that “intercultural competence” was no real topic for discussion, as this was a prerequisite in their respective industry anyway. In these cases, intercultural competence was seen as the “quintessence” of the company or “already firmly anchored.” In another case, it was mentioned that it was no longer “a topic,” because the recruiting process considered only applicants who had already “gained” intercultural competence through experience abroad. In five companies, the opinion was that “intercultural competence” was, in principle, not relevant.

Assessment The “assessment center” was said to play a strong role when it comes to guaranteeing intercultural competence in consulting firms. Without exception, all firms emphasized that experience abroad on the part of applicants was either a prerequisite or at least a big plus for applications. In response to the question of how the intercultural competence of consultants was to be subjectively evaluated, almost all HR staff pointed out that the consultants certainly possessed this. “Experience abroad” was one of the personal factors checked in all potential employees during the mandatory screening process of the assessment. The “assessment center” seems to have a similar structure in almost all firms: applicants must prove their professional competencies as well as their “soft skills” through a number of rounds of interviews and fictive role-plays or project simulations. These application rounds are led by internal employees and trainers, in most cases. In only one case was it maintained that in the assessment process intercultural competence was specifically tested by means of structured measures for this purpose. In the case of this consulting firm, it was a program — 253 —

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implemented by the American parent company. In this program, particularly defined personality traits are to be tested – among them were “tolerance,” “acceptance of different work styles,” “differences of opinion,” and “cultural differences.” These characteristics and traits were checked using qualitative methods, measuring perceptions through 360 degree feedback, i.e. questionnaires were given to past employers, friends, and customers of the consultant to evaluate his/her ability. Two further HR staff interviewees could imagine, at least theoretically, that intercultural competence is measurable. According to them, one would have to stipulate particular personality criteria such as “curiosity,“ “learning ability,” and “sensitivity,” and then check these through interviews and role-plays. The other HRP who were interviewed judged intercultural competence to be “not measurable.” Intercultural competence could neither be measured nor tested in advance, in their view, as it is a question of behavior or so-called “soft skills.” Thesis 4 can be confirmed: experience abroad is regarded as a basis for intercultural competence by consulting firms, and thus as an important prerequisite in the selection of potential candidates.

Training – Courses, Seminars, Workshops Of all the seventeen interviewed firms, only four offer their consultants intercultural training. In three cases, this takes the form of workshops which are carried out by internal and/or external trainers. These training courses include, for example, specific information on countries, sensitivity training, development of awareness, and behavior training. In the fourth case, the offered intercultural training is a so-called “computerbased” training course which supplies only general information. It is available to all consultants and can be done if desired, but it is not mandatory. No information could be given as to when and by whom this training is completed. The remaining thirteen consulting firms, which offer no intercultural courses or seminars, gave the following reasons for this: (a) There is no need/desire The reasoning here was that consultants already have intercultural skills. On the one hand, this was achieved through the assessment center’s selection process – only applicants with experience abroad are taken. On the other hand, contact with international colleagues is sought through global workshops and projects; thus intercultural competencies are automatically available and learned, so that there is no necessity for extra training measures. The catchphrase “learning by doing” was given as a reason a number of times. These interviewees were of the opinion that one could gain — 254 —

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intercultural competencies only through practical experience, and not in what they considered “theoretical courses.” In one case, it was explicitly pointed out that problems that come up in intercultural cooperations are not due to cultural differences, but rather to the wrong strategic or operative decisions, such as bad planning, leadership, motivation or roles. Intercultural training would therefore make no sense. (b) Intercultural training has no priority In two cases, “September 11th” was given as a reason. Since the terrorist attacks in the U.S.A. on September 11, 2001, international business contacts had seen a drastic drop, and the motivation to work abroad had declined as well. Therefore, fewer efforts were being made to invest funds in intercultural training. (c) No one here is responsible for it Two of the interviewed firms stated that, in Germany in general, there was nobody responsible for the internal training of employees, as the enterprise was steered by the parent company in the U.S.A. If at all, then programs would only be taken over from the U.S.A. In another consulting firm, there was no operating personnel department; matters such as informing of a need for training and/or the requesting of seminars, etc. from the personnel department were left up to the personnel manager at the respective location. Of these thirteen consulting firms offering no forms of intercultural training, at least six stated that, in the generally offered “soft skills” training courses for consultants, intercultural aspects were at least mentioned. Thesis 5 cannot be confirmed: of the interviewed consulting firms, 18 percent prepare their consultants for intercultural projects. Intercultural courses and seminars are obviously not regarded as an important instrument. In 2001, IFIM found that only 20 percent of all German employees working abroad had actually received intercultural training before their departure (IFIM 2001a). Economic and political events will certainly have modified this figure since then. In general, however, it can be said that the training situation of consulting firms in Germany corresponds at best to the German average.

Knowledge Management A decisive success factor in the consulting industry is the ability to make the acquired knowledge and experience available internally and to learn from it. Therefore, this study wishes to find out whether cultural experience and knowledge are also utilized.

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Of seventeen firms interviewed, fifteen stated that cultural experience gained is neither analyzed nor documented after the end of the project. Five companies said that this could be done informally if needed and/or desired – through talks with the project leader, for instance. Yet there were no official guidelines or procedures for this. Only two consulting companies stated that they collate, analyze, and document the cultural experiences of consultants following completion of a project. Furthermore, reintegration seminars – after the fact – serve to offer reflection on the cultural experiences of consultants returning from abroad. (These two firms were, of course, among those which prepared their consultants by means of intercultural training courses/seminars in the pre-departure phase.)

Perceived Need and Prognosis The three firms which have already implemented programs for the promotion of intercultural competence in consultants said that they were relatively satisfied with the development and not planning any further measures. One firm said it would plan such programs at short notice; two companies stated that they were planning the implementation of such programs in the long term. The remaining eleven interviewed firms do not plan any intercultural training measures in the future or could not make any statement about this.

Interpretation of “intercultural competence” How do consultants and HR staff define “intercultural competence?” Does a specific opinion exist in the consulting industry, a view or idea in reference to “competence in dealing with cultural difference?” In order to find this out, consultants as well as HR staff were asked to list what are, in their opinion, the most important key factors (characteristics, personality traits, skills, and abilities) that are necessary for a person to possess in order to ensure his or her intercultural competence. The factors which were named can be divided into two categories: skills/abilities and basic attitude. Skills/abilities. Here are to be found “experience” and “knowledge.” These two factors could be called “hard skills,” because both of them can be learned and/or “worked on.” On the other hand, a large number of so-called “soft skills” were listed by the participants, among them “flexibility,” “talent for observation,” “understanding,” “ability to connect with others,” “learning,” and “performance/effective action.”

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Basic attitude. Here the following factors were named: “interest in/appreciation of cultural differences,” “respect/tolerance,” “openness,” “patience and calmness/ composure,” and the “courage to be open.” For both groups, “understanding” of cultural differences seems to be one of the most important factors. For the HRP, “f lexibility” is by far the most important factor, whereas this gets hardly a mention from the MCs. In the HRP group, “performance/effective action” in the intercultural environment is a sign of competence, whereas this is not named at all by the consultants. For the MCs, “respect/tolerance” is one of the most important factors, whereas it is hardly mentioned by the other group. Moreover, “openness,” “talent for observation,” and “experience” are important to this group as well. The members of HR departments clearly show a greater orientation toward the performance factor than the MCs. This is demonstrated by the high number of skills and abilities that were mentioned. The fact that “flexibility” is looked upon as the most important basic prerequisite most likely reflects the personal experience of the participants. Germans have been said to be fixated on rules, principles, and extremely structured ways of working. This is perhaps the reason why the HRP group worry about the level to which German consultants are flexible or not and thus worry they could have difficulties in adjusting to new cultural environments. It could be that “flexibility” in a high-context culture could be seen as given and is therefore not mentioned explicitly.

Why is “respect and tolerance” so Important to the Consultants? During the qualitative interviews, consultants frequently mentioned general problems in their job. A consultant tends to incur a bad reputation, because he or she comes into a company to find fault, i.e. mistakes, in the way the employees are doing things. So naturally the consultant can meet with resistance. Esteem for their position becomes more important as they are met with negative assumptions. It could be that just as consultants themselves expect and hope for eventual respect from their clients, so are they conceivably prepared to accord it to other cultures. Thesis 6 can be confirmed: in the basic division of factors into the categories “hard skills,” “soft skills,” or “basic attitudes,” both groups agree in their assessment. The MCs and HRP put their main emphasis on different things when it comes to particular factors and characteristics which are seen as a basis for intercultural competence.

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Evaluation and Comparison Profiles Consultant Profiles The basic attitude toward intercultural competence seems to correlate with several factors: On the one hand, it can be seen that the openness toward intercultural cooperation increases in proportion to the experience abroad that consultants have had. On the other hand, however, it was the young and inexperienced consultants who proved to be somewhat more open and interested in intercultural cooperation. The consultancy work itself seems to have no influence on the basic attitude of the respective consultant. Also, the extent to which a consultant would proactively prepare before an assignment abroad – to deal with a different culture – does not seem to be connected with attitude or experience. Additionally, their attitude and interest in intercultural aspects of the work seem to depend on individual factors and personality traits. There is a further logical tendency which can be recognized here: the more experience abroad consultants have, the fewer problems occur in intercultural cooperation and/or the more successfully they can then deal with the differences in everyday work environments. Thesis 7 can therefore be confirmed. And thesis 8 cannot be confirmed: the tasks performed by the MCs do not seem to be connected with his or her perceived intercultural competence.

Company Profiles A clear connection between basic attitude and activity is to be seen. The firms that consider intercultural competence to be very relevant have already implemented training in the form of courses or seminars, or they plan to do this in the future. The companies which do not see it as relevant – or see it as a “given” in their respective companies – do not plan any training. There is no connection to be found between the size or internationality of an enterprise and its proactivity toward intercultural competence. The number of branches in Germany and/or the international presence apparently does not have an effect on how relevant intercultural competence is seen to be. Nevertheless, there is a connection to the size of the client. Those consulting firms working more with regional and/or small and medium-sized companies regard intercultural competence as less relevant. Thesis 9 can be confirmed in part: the value placed on intercultural competence in an enterprise depends on the size and internationality of clients but not, however, on the size and internationality of the consulting firm itself. — 258 —

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Comparison of Consultants and HR Staffs It was seen a number of times that the consultants and the HR staff who were interviewed within the same firm expressed different opinions in regard to the relevance of intercultural competence. In general, it can be said that more than two-thirds of the HR employees find intercultural competence important, whereas only half of the consultants say this. Thus, thesis 1 can be confirmed only in part at present: more than half of those involved in consulting work consider intercultural competence important. Noticeable here is the fact that MCs and HRP have different opinions, as both MCs and HRP were asked during the interviews to give a subjective assessment of the intercultural competence of the consultants. Thesis 10 can be confirmed in part: the two groups assess the intercultural competence of the consultants differently. MCs consider their own intercultural competence to be very high. However, it is notable that the consultants express more negative opinions about their own colleagues than the HRP do. The consultants mentioned the problem of overestimation of one’s own abilities and judge the intercultural competence of their colleagues to be “mediocre.” The HR employees, in contrast, expressed positive opinions about the consultants, saying as well that the German consultants were open, motivated, and competent, and possessed an “affinity for mobility.”

Assessment of the Competence of Consultants As can be seen from the interviews conducted with HRP, the difficulty with intercultural competence as a so-called “soft skill” is that it is hard to measure. However, the attempt is to be made here to obtain results which enable a quantitative judgment, by means of qualitative questions aimed directly at this difficult question. In order to judge the competence of the consultants, the following five criteria were set up and then tested through interviews. These criteria define “intercultural competence” and form a metric system, as it were, with which the competence of the MCs is to be measured. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Basic attitude toward intercultural competence. Understanding of intercultural competence. Intercultural experience. Ability to deal with intercultural problems. Proactivity.

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Findings Of the fourteen MCs interviewed, only three are to be found who satisfy all of the above criteria and who thus could be regarded as “interculturally competent” according to this definition. Two consultants satisfy almost none of these criteria. The other nine are to be found somewhere in the middle. This definition is based on the subjective assessment of the researcher(s) and of the consultants about themselves. It is therefore not representative, yet it can give an impression of the overall competence level of the interviewees.

Situation Analysis Problems and Threats On the basis of the analysis which has been done here, the following is a summary of problems and threats for the consulting firms and consultants in developing intercultural competence: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

No investment of time and money. Dominance of corporate culture – “we do it the right way.” Basic attitude of MCs and HRP – “learning by doing is enough.” Overestimation of consultant’s own abilities – “I’ve lived abroad so I get it.” Liberality – “treat everyone equally, don’t discriminate.” Low measurability and no competence to do so. No recognition of the need for training. Organizational structure doesn’t centralize skillbuilding for MCs. Lack of objectivity or ability to see need.

Strengths and Opportunities The following is a summary of the strengths and opportunities of consultancies and consultants for developing intercultural competence: 1. The network. The business-consulting firms which were included in the study are companies that operate internationally – that means that they have an already existing international network at their disposal. The advantages of this network lie in the availability of resources, personnel, and knowledge to ensure the success of large global projects. 2. Personnel. Great potential exists in the consultants themselves. They are young and, in most cases, single, and therefore flexible (according to German standards) in terms of logistics, i.e., traveling, moving, working long hours, — 260 —

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etc. are not a problem for this target group. MCs are accustomed to working under extremely stressful situations, often without much sleep. They are durable in personality and they possess a high level of ambition and the will to be the very best. Most of them have already had experience abroad, or at least study experience. Consultants are used to coming into and dealing with new environments. MCs are used to working with many different personalities. This does not necessarily say anything about their ability to deal with intercultural differences and/or their capacity to be tolerant, but consultants are quickly trained “on the job” to adjust to new situations. Consultants also bring with them the will and the motivation to adjust to new situations, companies, and people. This is an important prerequisite in order to be able to manage cultural differences successfully. 3. The organization. Management consultancies are some of the wealthiest companies in the world. They tend to excel even in times of economic crisis, as many firms go to them as a last resort to save their resources and restructure operations with the hope of being spared the potential hit of economic downturn. They would conceivably then have the financial means to roll out large-scale training programs in intercultural skills if prioritized. In addition to their strong internal assessment processes, consultancies offer competence in analysis and evaluative processes and systems for their clients. It is common for new and innovative methods and products to be developed regularly. The competence is there to develop metrics for measuring intercultural competence as well. Further, as has been said before, consultancies are the models on which practically all firms in the world base their organizational structures. Most of the big firms globally have used consultancies to help them in setting up systems. There is clearly an opportunity for consultancies also to become worldwide models of global excellence through channeling and harvesting intercultural competence.

Summary and Conclusion The findings of this analysis have shown that the majority of global consulting firms in Germany have German clients, who may or may not work internationally. However, whether they do or not, they perceive themselves to be – and are perceived by the outside as being – rather “monocultural” or “homogeneous.” For the most part, the research has proven, with little exception, that they also consider that they do not need to become more interculturally competent. In other contexts and industries, intercultural competence is gaining greater value in Germany; seen by international comparison, it is, however, a very — 261 —

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gradual process. The causes are seen to be a lack of well-trained providers of intercultural competence, a lack of a set of universal quality standards for intercultural training, and organizational ignorance of how to evaluate trainers and measure outcomes, and the relative “cultural” blindness of staff in German companies overall. In comparison to other economic organizations, consulting firms have a particular role to play. They must show their clients the tendencies and trends of markets, have know-how and expertise, and consistently be uptodate when it comes to economic development. In other words, they are accorded the role of “trailblazer” and must lead the way. The job of consulting firms is to make their clients competitive within the framework and conditions of international markets. However, they are able to accomplish this only if and when they themselves possess the skills to do so. For consulting firms, the acquisition of intercultural competence is therefore a deciding factor for success and for gaining the competitive advantage on the battlefield when it comes to acquiring clients – especially global players – and implementing projects with a positive end result. As stated earlier, Germany has, believe it or not, statistically more “ethnic minorities” than England. Yet the society consistently ignores this fact and professes continuously that Germany is not an immigrant nation, or doesn’t have the problems of other countries who have a history of colonialism, or slave labor, etc. However, there are over 4 million Muslims today in Germany (more than 3 million Turkish alone), 800,000 people of African descent, and 300,000 Southeast Asians; and, since 1990, 45,000 Afghanis, and 15,000 Brazilians (Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder 2003) were also counted, not to mention Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, and others from all over Europe and other parts of the world. If Germany is a multicultural society which operates in a global economy, how then, can management consultancies – with their pivotal role in Germany’s business world – afford not to address the process of developing intercultural competence?

References Adler, Nancy. 1991. International Dimensions of Organisational Behaviours. Boston, MA: PWS-Kent Publishing. Author unknown. 2001. “Sieg der Sterne,” Die Zeit, August 14, 2001. Author unknown. 2002. “Managementkonzepte 2002,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 17, 2002. BDU (Bundesverband Deutscher Unternehmensberater). 2001. Company Demographics in Germany. Bonn, Berlin. Available at: www.bdu.de (January 2002). BDU (Bundesverband Deutscher Unternehmensberater). 2002. “Image und Qualität von Unternehmensberatungen.” Infoletter ImPlus. Bonn, Berlin. Available at: www.bdu.de (March 2003).

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Intercultural Competence in Germany Bennett, Milton. 1986. “A Developmental Approach to Training for Intercultural Sensitivity,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 10(2): 179–95. Biech, Elaine. 2001. “Unternehmensberater werden und bleiben,” Berater und Ratnehmer March 17, 2001. Bolten, Jürgen. 2001. Interkulturelle Kompetenz. Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung. CICB (Center for Intercultural Competence). 2002. On-line Study. Kloten. Available at: www.cicb.net (January 2002). Faz.Net. 2002. “Die Top-Personalberater in Deutschland,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Available at: http://fazarchiv.faz.net/FAZ.ein (March 27, 2002). Hofstede, Geert. 1991. Culture’s Consequences. New York: McGraw Hill. IFIM (Institut für Interkulturelles Management). 2001a. Gemischtkulturelle Arbeitsgruppen. Rheinbreitbach: Institut für Interkulturelles Management. Available at: www.ifim.de (December 2001). IFIM (Institut für Interkulturelles Management). 2001b. Populäre Irrtümer. Rheinbreitbach: Institut für Interkulturelles Management. Available at: www.ifim.de (December 2001). Lamson, Melissa. 1998. “Intercultural Communication.” General Seminar in Frankfurt am Main: Lamson Consulting. Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Free Press. Lünendonk GmbH. 2001. Lünendonk-Listen 2001. Bad Wörishofen. Available at: http://www.luenendonk.de/presse_detail.php?ID=1&SFILTER=*&pattern=2001 (April 2005). McKinsey and Company. 2003. On-line Daten zum Firmenprofil. Düsseldorf. Available at: www.mckinsey.de (April 2003). Mole, John. 1991. Mind Your Manners. London: Blackwell Publishers. Müller, Eva. 2001. “Der ultimative Berater-Test.” Manager Magazin, August 24, 2001. Spitzberg, Brian H. 1990. Model for Intercultural Competence. New York: Springer Verlag. Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder. 2003. Ausländische Bevölkerung. Wiesbaden. Available at: www.statistik-portal.de/Statistik-Portal/de (March 2003). Trompenaars, Fons. 1993. Riding the Waves of Culture. London: Nicolas Brealey.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Majid Al-Haj, Dean of Research, the head of the Center for Multiculturalism and Educational Research at the University of Haifa, is professor at the Department of Sociology of the University of Haifa. He has been a Visiting Professor at Carleton University (Canada) and Duke University (U.S.A.) and a visiting scholar at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on the social and political structure of the Palestinians in Israel, Palestinian refugees, Russian immigrants in Israel, and freedom of expression. His books include Social Change and Family Processes (Westview Press, 1987); Arab Local Government in Israel, co-authored with Henry Rosenfeld (Westview Press, 1990); Education, Empowerment and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel (SUNY Press, 1995); The Arab Education in Israel: Control Vs. Social Change (Magness Press, 1996 – Hebrew); In the Name of Security: The Sociology of War and Peace in Israel in Changing Times (co-editor with Uri Ben Elezer, Haifa University Press, 2003); Immigration and Ethnic Formation in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of the 1990s Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004), and Social Critique and Commitment: Essays in Honor of Henry Rosenfeld (New York: University Press of America, 2005) (co-editor with Michael Saltman and Zvi Sobel). Oz Almog is professor at the Land of Israel Studies Department, University of Haifa. He is a sociologist and historian, specializing in semiotics, the sociological history of Israeli society, and Israeli popular culture and subcultures. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and the daily press (including literary criticism in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz) as well as three books. They are Kibbutz Natives in the Mirror of Their Language (Yad Tabenkin, 1993) and The Sabra: A Portrait (Am Oved, 1997). This book was a bestseller in Israel and won the Ben-Zvi Institute’s Ish Shalom award. The book’s English version, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, was published in December 2000 by the University of California Press, Berkeley. His third book Farewell to “Srulik” – Changing Values Among the Israeli Elite (Zmora Bitan and — 265 —

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Haifa University Press) was published in 2004 and received much large public attention and a positive welcome by the Israeli media. Dr Tamar Almog is a senior lecturer at the faculty of Education and head of the computer based learning unit at University of Haifa. She is an expert in the field of e-learning and specializes in integrating computer technology into educational systems. She is the former director of the e-learning unit at Haifa University and a member of the steering committee of the Inter-University Center for e-learning in Israel. She took a leading role in the initiation and realization of integrating computers into the education system in Israel. Dr Almog was a consultant to the Israeli Ministry of Education and to the Haifa Municipality, advising them on three “Model Schools” in the process of integrating multimedia and the internet: “Alef- Shefaram” (the only Arab Model School), “Abu Snan” (the only Druze Model School) and “Hugim – Haifa”. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Information Technology, Education and Society. Daphna Canetti-Nisim (Ph.D. University of Haifa, 2003) is the Rice Foundation Visiting Professor Council on Middle East Studies, The MacMillan Center and Department of Political Science, Yale University, and an assistant professor at the School of Political Science, University of Haifa. She specializes in mass political attitudes and behavior, survey research, and the psycho-politics of the Israeli–Palestinian conf lict. Her doctoral dissertation examined theoretical and empirical perspectives of the interrelationships between democratic values, authoritarianism, religiosity, and quasi-religiosity. Her present interests include the psychology of mass political attitudes and behaviors, and political methodology. For the most part, her recent work focuses on the role of religion and authoritarianism and their effects on support for democratic values; socioeconomic and psychosocial determinants of political extremism, xenophobia, and exclusionary reactions to minorities; and the political (e.g. exclusion, political violence) and psychological (e.g. posttraumatic stress disorder) reactions to exposure to terrorism. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on religion and democracy, Israeli politics, religion and authoritarianism, political xenophobia, political attitudes, and political behavior. She recently received the Fulbright award for postdoctoral scholarship and the Helen Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellowship. Joana Duarte is a current Ph.D. student at the Institute for Comparative and Intercultural Education at the University of Hamburg. Her research deals with bilingual language acquisition and its consequences for the improvement in school performance of migrant students. Her research is financed by the European Union. In Portugal she studied linguistics and literature and worked as a high school teacher in Portuguese and English before she decided to — 266 —

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complete her Master’s degree in Educational Research and Intercultural Studies at the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS) at the University of Hamburg. Inke Du Bois is a graduate of the English Linguistics Department at San Francisco State University. She studied Spanish and English at the Universities of Kiel and Barcelona. She worked as a lecturer on English language and American Culture at the University of California at Berkeley and Foothill College. Now residing in Germany, she works as a research associate at the Foreign Language Institute of the University of Bremen. She is also a trainer and lecturer for Intercultural Communication at the Northern Institute of Technology (NIT), and the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS) at the University of Hamburg. Her doctoral dissertation deals with the reconstruction of national identities of Americans living in Germany. Schirin Fathi was born in Tehran, Iran. She received her B.A. and M.A. from George Washington University in Washington, DC, U.S.A., and her Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg. She is currently working as an assistant professor at the Department of the History and Culture of the Middle East at the University of Hamburg. Her former activities include: Research Fellow in the Program “Europe in the Middle East: Political Key Concepts in the Dialogue of Cultures” at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, a three-year stay in Jordan with the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation to conduct research for her Ph.D., employment at the World Bank, and freelance work on documentary films. Shimrit Flaisher-Kellner has been working for several years as an educational psychologist and counselor in several multicultural settings in Northern Israel. She has continued researching in the field of body image and gender differences with a grammar school population. Eran Halperin is a Ph.D. student in the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa and a Project Coordinator of the National Resilience Project and the Psychological Aspects of Terrorism Project at the National Security Studies Center. His research interests include political psychology, Israeli politics, intergroup emotions, xenophobia, and emotions in politics. His Ph.D. dissertation deals with the role of intergroup hatred in political systems. Dr Badi Hasisi is a Lecturer of Sociology at the University of Haifa. His research topics are police–minority relations and national security, political violence, and protest policing. He has published about Arab–Jewish relations in Israel, public attitudes toward political violence and protest policing, and army–society relations in Israel. His present research projects deal with comparing police–minority relations both in Israel and Northern Ireland. — 267 —

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Juliane House is professor for Applied Linguistics at the University of Hamburg. She studied English, Spanish, and International Law at Heidelberg University and graduated with a diploma in translation. Following her emigration to Canada, she studied Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Toronto and received the degrees of B.Ed., M.A., and Ph.D. She is currently a codirector of the University of Hamburg’s Research Center on Multilingualism. Her research interests include multilingualism, translation theory, discourse analysis, intercultural communication, and English as lingua franca. Melissa Lamson has eleven years of experience in diversity and intercultural management consulting. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, she holds a Master’s degree in Intercultural Relations with a focus on diversity training from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has published several articles in the field and her clients include 3M, Gillette, DaimlerChrysler Services, Lufthansa, Schering, Siemens, and Volkswagen. Currently, Ms Lamson holds the position of Global Diversity Officer, External at SAP, managing a project in nine locations worldwide. She lives in Frankfurt, Germany and is working on her Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg. Rosemarie Mielke is professor for Educational Psychology at the University of Hamburg. Her research topics are self-concepts being influenced by learning processes via self-efficacy experiences, self-categorizations in intergroup contexts, stereotypes, and prejudice. She has published about attitude and behavior and self-related concepts such as locus of control, self-monitoring, self-efficacy, and social identity. Her present research projects deal with strategies for coping with “negative” social identity, the inf luence of (minority/majority) group membership on self-evaluation and achievement behavior, and the relationship between self-concept, values, and ethical thinking about biogenetics within dual-process models. Gordon Mitchell has lectured in Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town and been director of a Johannesburg-based research consultancy. Currently he is professor for Education at the University of Hamburg, with a teaching focus on intercultural and interreligous education. He coordinates research projects in the broad field of Memory, Human Rights, and Peace Education, both in Central Africa and in Eastern Europe. Dr Ami Pedahzur is an associate professor at the department of Government and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin. He is also a senior fellow at the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. His main fields of interest are terrorism, the democratic response to extremism and violence, and political extremism in Israel. His latest books include: The Israeli Response to Jewish Extremism and Violence – Defending Democracy (Manchester — 268 —

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University Press, 2002), Political Parties and Terrorist Groups (with Leonard Weinberg) (Routledge, 2003) and Suicide Terrorism (Polity, 2005). Currently he is co-authoring (with Arie Perliger) two book manuscripts. The first is entitled The Weapon of the Weak? The Paradox of Jewish Terrorism and the second Coping with Terrorism: Israel in a Comparative Perspective. He serves as an associate editor of the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. He was also the editor of the E-Extreme Newsletter (the newsletter of the standing group on Extremism and Democracy in the European Consortium of Political Research). Amir Rosenmann is a doctoral student and a junior lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa. His research interests include gender and sexual issues in Israel, as well as social identities of sexual minorities in the online world. Amalia Sa’ar, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist and teaches at the University of Haifa. She does research among Israeli Palestinians, focusing on gender politics and urban conditions. Her latest research project is on micro-enterprise among disempowered Israeli women of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. Marilyn P. Safir is a Professor of Clinical and Social Psychology and Director of Project KIDMA for the Advancement of Women, at the University of Haifa. Project Kidma offers programs for women from disenfranchised communities as well as leadership training workshops for multicultural and mixed socioeconomic group. Much of Safir’s research has focused on the interface between sex, sexuality, gender, and culture within Israel and beyond its borders. She is also interested in sexual minorities online and off line as well as influences of the online sexual revolution on the workplace. Nina Smidt was Deputy Director at the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS), University of Hamburg, from 2002 to 2006. She was specifically responsible for Academic Affairs and International Relations. Prior to her appointment, she worked as a TV production manager for the North German Television (NDR) in Sydney and Hamburg as well as in Corporate Communications and Press Relations at the German UNESCO Commision in Bonn and the International University Bremen. Since 2006 she is Executive Director at Bucerius Education GmbH, Bucerius Law School in Hamburg. She studied German and English Literature and Lingusitics, Communications, and Critical Theory at the University of Hamburg, the University of Technology in Sydney and Cornell University (U.S.A.). Her Ph.D. thesis concentrated on postcolonial concepts of identity and diversity studies.

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Sivan Spitzer Shohat is the research coordinator at the Center for Multiculturalism and Educational Research at the University of Haifa. She has a master’s degree in Sociology in the field of health policy. Her research interests include healthcare reforms, equality in access and distribution of healthcare resources, healthcare provision in multicultural settings, and policy networks. Olga Visbal studied psychology at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. She completed her master’s degree in Education and Intercultural Studies at the University of Hamburg, where she is currently completing her Ph.D. Her research project deals with the effects of intercultural contact on the views and attitudes of exchange students towards a foreign culture. She has been working since 2002 as a research assistant at the Center for Bilingualism at the University of Hamburg and has worked in different research projects, for example, for the UNESCO Institute for Education. Her main research interests are intercultural education, second-language learning, effects of intercultural contacts, and social psychology.

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INDEX OF NAMES

A Abbott, Max 169 Abramovitch, H. 169 Abrams, Dominic 26–27, 37 Abu Baker, Khawla 160, 169 Abu Shah, M. 169 Abu-Lughod, Lila 177, 191 Adler, Nancy 238, 262 Adorno, Theodor W. 27, 37, 123, 134 Adwan, Sami 81, 84, 86 Agar, Michael 54, 57 Agence France Presse 213, 223 Ahbe, Thomas 225 Ahmed, Leila 180, 191 Ahrens, Anthony H. 172 Alba, Richard 136 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 255 Al-Haj, Majid 4, 61, 63–65, 73, 74, 96, 118, 123, 134, 146, 156, 160–61, 169, 187, 191 Allen, S. 175, 191 Allport, Gordon W. 27, 37, 123, 134 Almog, Oz 5, 139, 149, 156 Almog, Tami 5, 139, Almond, Gabriel 121, 135 Altabe, M.A. 158, 171 Altemeyer, Bob 27–28, 37 Amareh, Muhammad 64, 73 Amireh, A. 193 Anastasio, Phyllis A. 37 Anderson, Arnold 168, 169 Anderson, John R. 30, 37 Angleitner, Alois 169 Antaki, Charles 208, 212, 224, 226 Anthias, Floya 175, 191, 192

Anzaldua,Gloria 193 Anzilotti, Cara 176, 192 Apple, Michael W. 62, 73 Apter, A. 159, 169 Armer, Michael 62, 73 Armstrong, Tamara L. 135 Asher, Arian 136 Asherian, Armen 169 Ashmore, Richard D. 127, 135 Atkinson, Dwight 54, 58 Atkinson, J. Maxwell 211, 224 Austin, Laura J. 171 Austin, William G. 39 Ayubi, Nazih, 117n3 118 B Bachman, Betty A. 37 Backman, Desiree R. 167, 169 Baguma, P. 159, 170 Banks, James A. 2, 7, 61, 73 Bargh, John 30, 37 Bargout, Sa’id 66–71, 73 Bar-Hamburger, R. 97, 118 Bar-Navi, Eli 65–66, 69–71, 74 Bar-On, Dan 79, 81, 84, 86n4, 86 Baron, Reuben M. 130, 134n9, 135 Barriteau, Eudine 174, 177, 192 Barry, B.M. 2, 7 Bar-Tal, Daniel 119, 135 BDU (Bundesverband Deutscher Unternehmensberater) 244–45, 262 Becker, Judith A. 157, 159, 167, 172 Beckmann, Jürgen 46, 58 Ben-Eliezer, Uri 73, 74

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Index Bennett, Milton 6, 7, 242, 263 Berry, John W. 198, 202–203, 205 Biaggio, Angela 169 Biech, Elaine 244, 263 Billig, Michael 244 Birzéa, César 12, 21, 21 Bishara, Azmi 81, 83, 86 Black, Donald 92, 96, 99, 118, 140 Blancovillasenor, Angel 169 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 45, 51, 52, 57, 58 Bobo, Lawrence 122–123, 125, 135 Boehnke, Klaus 121, 124, 135 Bogardus, Emory S. 126, 135 Bolten, Jürgen 240, 263 Boström, Ann-Kristin 12, 23 Bourdieu, Pierre 178, 192 Bourhis, Richard Y. 6, 7, 197–200, 202–3, 205 Boymal, Yair 117n5, 118 Branscombe, Nyla R. 34, 37, 39 Brazil, Donna M. 38 Bridges, David 23 Brown, H. Douglas 235 Brown, P. 191 Brown, Penelope 45, 57, 209, 224 Brown, Rupert 142, 156 Bruchonschweitzer, M. 169 Buchholz, Mary 209, 224 Bujaki, Merridee 205 Buss, David M. 26, 37, 161, 169 Butler, Judith 208, 224 Byrnes, Heidi 53, 57 C Campbell, Donald T. 123–24, 135, 136 Campbell, Eugene K. 124, 135 Canetti-Nisim, Daphna 5, 121, 135 Cantor, Davis 96, 118 Cash, Thomas F. 157–58, 161, 170, 171 Castles, Francis 2, 7 Cecil, Cindy L. 38 Chaiken, Shelly 29, 37 Chatterjee, Partha 177, 192 Chiricos, Theodore G. 95, 118 Cho, Yong H. 92, 118 CICB (Center for Intercultural Competence) 240, 263

Clark, Cal 176, 193 Clarke, Alan 95, 119 Clyne, Michael 53, 57 Cockburn, Cynthia 173–74, 192 Coenders, Marcel 122–25, 127, 132–33, 133n1, 135, 137 Cohen, E. 97, 118 Cohen, Stanley 95, 98–99, 108, 114, 117n6, 118 Collier, Mary Jane 208–9, 224 Comaroff, J. 117, 192 Comaroff, J.L. 117, 192 Connell, Robert William 177, 181, 192 Cook-Gumperz, Jenny 208, 225 Copty, Attalah 66–67, 73, 74 Cornwall, Andrea 181, 192 Coser, Lewis 135 Cotterrell, Roger 95, 118 Coupland, Nikolas 43, 51, 57 Crandall, Christian S. 157, 170 Crank, John P. 92, 118 Crocker, Jennifer 32–34, 37 Crompton, R. 191 Crowley, Barbara J. 171 Crymes, Ruth H. 235 Czapinski, Janusz 169 D D’Andrade, Roy 28, 37 Damary, Madar 180, 192 Danzinger, Sheldon 95, 118 Davidman, Leonard 2, 7 Davidman, Patricia T. 2, 7 Davidovitz, N. 146, 156 Davis, Angela Yvonne 178, 192 Day, Dennis 211, 224 Deagle, Edwin A. 158, 170 Defense Manpower Data Center 212, 224 Delanty, Gerard 191n2, 192 Del-Boca, Frances K. 127, 135 Deleon, Julip Ponce 169 Deppermann, Arnulf 210–12, 215, 224, 224 DeRaad, Boele 169 Deutsch, Roland 26, 29, 31, 39 Di Stefano, Christine 177, 183, 192 DiDomenico, Lisa 168, 169

— 272 —

Index Ford, Cecilia 212, 224 Ford, Kathrin 159, 170 Foster, Robert J. 177, 192 Fox, Barbara A. 212, 224 Freire, Paulo 18, 20, 21, 62, 74 Frenkel-Brunswik, Else 37 Funk, Nanette 176, 192 Furnham, A. 159, 170 Fuss, Diana 224

Diner, Dan 79, 86 Direct Cinema Limited 169, 170 Dirks, Nicholas B. 177, 192 Dolan, Bridget M. 159, 161, 170 Dovidio, John F. 30–31, 37, 135 Duarte, Joana 6, 197 DuBois, Inke 6, 207, 224 Duckitt, John 27–28, 36, 27 Duranti, Alessandro 57 Dustmann, Christian 125, 132, 135 E Edleson, J.L. 193 Edmondson, Willis J. 52, 57 Edwards, Derek 224 Eisenstein, Zillah R. 177, 192 Eisikovitz, Z.C. 193 Ekehammar, Bo 169 Eldering, Lotty 2, 7 Eliram, Yehuda 117n8, 118 Ellohamy, Noha 169 Erdreich, Lauren 186–87, 192 Espanioly, Nabila 183, 192 Espenshade, Thomas J. 124–25, 132, 135 Esses, Victoria 124–25, 132, 135 Evans, Chris 159, 161, 170 Eyerman, Ron 225 F Fallon, April 158–59, 161, 167–68, 170, 171 Farah, Naif 64, 74 Fathi, Schirin 4, 77 Faz.Net 246, 263 Fazio, Russell H. 32, 37 Federal Foreign Office Germany 212, 224 Feingold, Alan 158, 161, 170 Felling, Albert 125, 137 Fetzer, Joel 124, 127, 135 Fielding, Nigel 95, 119 Finkel, Eli J. 38 Fioravanti, Mario 169 Firro, Kais 90, 118 Fisk, Robert 80, 86 Flaisher-Kellner, Shimrit 5, 157 Foppa, Klaus 46, 58

G Gaertner, Lowell 38 Gaertner, Samuel L. 30–31, 36, 37 Garfinkel, Paul E. 170 Garner, David M. 158, 168, 170 Geliebter, Allan 165, 167, 170 Georgas, James 169 Georgi, Viola 21, 22 Ghanem, As’ad 63, 88, 90, 75, 118, 119, 176, 191n4, 192 Gideon, Lior 99, 119 Giesen, Bernhard 223, 224, 225 Gijsberts, Merova 122–25, 127, 132–33, 133n1, 137 Giles, Howard 43, 51, 57 Gilmartin, C. 194 Ginat, Joseph 96, 98, 108, 119 Giroux, Henry A. 61–62, 74 Gjerde, Per 169 Glazer, Ilsa 183, 193 Glazer, Nathan 121, 135 Gluck, Marci E. 165, 167, 170 Gmür, Wolfgang 225 Goffman, Erving 42, 44, 50–51, 57, 208–9, 222, 224 Goodich-Avram, C. 168, 170 Goodstein, Lynne 74 Goodwin, Charles 57 Goody, Esther 224 Graumann, Carl F. 46, 58 Gray, James J. 172 Greenwald, Anthony G. 32, 37 Gugenberger, Eva 209, 225 Gumperz, John 44, 57, 208, 223, 225 Gutman, Israel 79, 86 Guttman, Ruth 169

— 273 —

Index H Haddad, Ella H. 169 Hagan, John 121, 135 Hagendoorn, Louk 133n1, 137 Haidt, Jonathan 29, 30, 35, 38 Hai-Yuan, Chu’U 169 Haj-Yahia, Muhammad 183, 193 Hall, Kira 209, 224 Halliday, Michael A.K. 42, 58 Halperin, Eran 5, 121 Hamilton, David. L. 137 Hamilton, K. 168, 170 Hampstead, Katherine 124–25, 132–33, 135 Hardwick, Julie 176, 193 Hareven, Alouph 75 Harvey, Jeffrey A. 168, 170 Harvey, Richard D. 34, 37 Hasan, Manar 108, 119, 183, 193 Hasisi, Badi 4, 5, 87–88, 119 Hassan, Manar 160, 170 Hazan, Fatima 169 Heckhausen, Heinz 46, 58 Hedge, Radha 209, 225 Hefler, Gerd 121, 135 Hefner, Robert W. 177, 193 Helmcamp, Annette 171 Heritage, John 224 Herzog, Hanna 184–185, 193 Hesse-Biber, S. 194 Hewstone, Miles 36, 38, 39 Hickey, Leo 58 Hicks, Karen L. 158, 170 Hill, Robert 15, 22 Hinles, J.R. 144, 156 Hjerm, Mikael 123–24, 135 Hodgkin. Georgia E. 169 Höfer, Renate 225 Hofnung, Menachem 88, 119 Hofstede, Geert 239, 263 Hogg, Michael A. 26, 37, 39 Holmes, Malcolm D. 89, 119 Hom, Holly 35, 38 Höpp, Gerhard 80, 86 Horowitz, Anthony 208, 224 Horowitz, Dan 122, 136

Horowitz, Murray 27, 39 Horowitz, Tamar 122, 136 Hoskin, Marylin 124, 136 House, Juliane 4, 41, 43, 45, 47–48, 52, 55, 57, 58 Howard, John M. 27, 37, 38 Hutchby, Ian 211, 225 Hutchinson, Marcia G. 157, 170 Hymes, Dell 54, 58 I Iancu, I. 169 IFIM (Institut für Interkulturelles Management) 240, 255, 263 Insko, Chester A. 27, 38 Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 63, 74, 160, 171 Iwawaki, Saburo 169 J Jackson, Lynne M. 135 Janakiramaiah, N. 169 Janda, L.H. 157, 170 Jaszczolt, Katarzyna 46, 51, 58 Johnson, Brenda 37 Johnson, Courtney E. 171 Johnson, Craig 37 Johnson-Odim, Cheryl 179, 193 Johnston, Patricia K. 169 Jonasdottir, Anna G. 189, 193 Jones, K.B. 193 Jones, Melinda 141, 156 Joseph, Jerald 18, 22 Jost, John T. 38 K Kahn, Samuel 125, 136 Kalodner, C.R. 168, 171 Kamil, Omar 80, 86 Kanaaneh, Rhoda 177, 184–85, 193 Kandiyoti, Deniz 173–74, 176, 184, 193 Kant, Emmanuel 35, 38 Kashubeck, Susan 167, 171 Kasper, Gabriele 43, 45, 52, 57, 58 Katzman, M.A. 170, 171 Kawakami, Kerry 37

— 274 —

Index Kelman, Herbert C. 31, 38 Kenny, David A. 130, 134n9, 135 Kety, S. 171 Keupp, Heiner 208–9, 225 Khazan, F.S. 161, 171 Khlin, Walter 136 Khosroshani, Fatemeh 169 Kilbourne, Jean 168, 171 Kim, Uichol 205 Kittay, Eva F. 177, 193 Kleinsteuber, Hans J. 213, 225 Koester, Jolene 225 Kotthoff, Helga 53, 58 Kozar, Robert 38 Kraus, Wolfgang 225 Kreitler, Shulamith 169 Kymlicka, Will 2, 7, 61, 74 L Labov, William 210, 222–23, 225 Lachenicht, Lance 169 Lakoff, Robin 45, 58 Lambert, Alan 125, 136 Lamson, Melissa 6, 237, 239, 263 Land, Kenneth 96, 118 Landau, Jacob M. 191n1, 193 Langer, Ellen J. 46, 46, 58 Lasry, Jean-Claude 198–99, 206 Lavie, Aviv 82, 86 Lazreg, Marnia 178–79, 181, 193 Lechinsky, Achim 74 Lee, Jerry W. 169 Lee, Margaret 169 Lee, Rose J. 176, 193 Legge, Jerome 124, 136 Levi, S. 97, 118 Levinas, Emmanuel 46, 58 Levine, D. 135 Levine, Robert A. 123–24, 136 Levinson, Daniel J. 37, 134 Levinson, Steven 45, 57, 209, 224 Lewin, Kurt 28, 38 Liik, Kadi 169 Linder, Wolf 124, 136 Lindisfarne, Nanca 181, 192 Lindsey, Samuel 25, 30, 39

Lippmann, Walter 242, 263 LiPuma, Edward 177, 193 Lissak, Moshe 122, 136 Little, Brian 169 Long, Michael H. 227, 234, 235 Longwe, Sara 14, 22 Lorde, Audre 190, 193 Lovegrove, Bernie 16, 23 Lubbers, Marcel 123, 136 Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele 210–11, 225 Lüdemann, Christian 136 Lustik, Ian 88, 117n5, 119 Lydenberg, R. 194 Lynch, James 61, 74 M Macey, M. 175, 191 Mackie, Diane. M. 137 MacKinnon, Catharine A. 177, 193 Macrae, C. Neil 38 Mahler, Margaret S. 157, 171 Majaj, L.S. 193 Major, Brenda 32–34, 37, 38 Makkawi, Ibrahim 62, 64, 74 Malle, Bertram F. 39 Mari, Abd al-Rahman 64, 73 Mari, Sami 73 Mariam, Moadelshahid 169 Markova, Ivana 46, 58 Mattthysse, S.W. 171 Mazawi, Andre 64, 74 Mazzella, Ronald 158, 161, 170 McAllister, Ian 2, 7 McClelland, James L. 39 McCoy, Shannon K. 32–33, 38 McDevitt, John B. 157, 171 McGhee, Debbie E. 32, 37 McIlvenny, Paul 211, 225 McKinsey and Company 245, 263 McLaren, Peter 61, 74 Medel-Añonuevo, Carolyn 12, 14, 22, 23 Meijerink, Frits 123, 136 Melzer, Arthur M. 7 Mendelberg, Tali 125, 130, 132, 136 Mielke, Rosemarie 3, 25, 202, 206 Mika, Stanislaw 169

— 275 —

Index Miller, Daniel 177, 193 Miller, Lawrence W. 124, 136 Miller, Pavla 176, 193 Ministry of Education and Culture 65–66, 74 Ministry of Education 146, 156 Mintz, Laurie B. 167, 171 Mitchell, Gordon 3, 11–12, 22, 23, 223 Mitzscherlich, Beate 225 Moane, Geraldine 169 Mohanty, Chandra T. 178–79, 189, 193, 194 Moïse, Lena C. 7, 205 Mole, John 239, 263 Montero, Maritza 169 Montoya, Matthew R. 38 Moore, Dahlia 122, 136 Moraga, Cherrie 193 Moscovici, Serge 27, 38 Moser, Rupert 136 Mosimann, J.E. 172 Moynihan, Daniel P. 121, 135 Mudde, Cas 123, 136 Müller, Eva 244, 263 Mummendey, Amélie 26, 38 Mummendey, Hans Dieter 206 Mundray, Kate 168, 171 Mundy, Karen 11, 22 Mundycastle, A.C. 169 Murphy, Lynn 11, 22 N Nakhleh, Khalil 64, 74 Nasser, M. 159, 167, 171 Nasserzadeh, Sara 15, 22 Nateras, Myrna 18, 22 Nauck, Bernhard 124, 135 Naval, Concepcion 12, 22 Naveh, Ayal 65–66, 69, 71, 74, 75 Neto, Felix F.M. 199, 206 New Israel Fund News 141, 156 Niit,Toomas 169 Nordbruch, Goetz 79, 86 Norris, Sigrid 212, 225 Nsenduluka, Evaristo 169 Nyerere, Julius 19–20, 22

O O’Connor, J. 175, 194 Oakes, Penelope J. 39 Ogden, Jane 168, 171 Okereafoezeke, Nonso 98, 119 Okin Moller, S. 177, 194 Oliver, Eric J. 125, 130, 132, 136 Olson, Michael A. 32, 37 Olzak, Susan 124, 136 Open University 146, 156 Or Committee 88, 111, 116, 119 Ozacy-Lazar, Sara 119 P Palmer, Douglas 124, 136 Pandor, Naledi 19, 23 Pappe, Ilan 117n5, 119 Park, Bernadette 27, 38 Parsons, Talcott 62, 75 Pateman, Carol 177, 194 PDP Research Group 39 Pedahzur, Ami 88, 119 Peled, A. 156 Peled, Yoav 191n4, 194 Penner, L.A. 158, 171 Perreault, Stephane 7, 205 Petrie, Trent A. 168, 171 Pettigrew, Thomas F. 27, 36, 38 Pettman, Jan 2, 7 Pew Research Center 214, 216, 225 Phillips, Robert 62, 75 Pienkowski, Ryszard 169 Pinter, Brad 38 Pirttila-Backman, Anne-Maija 169 Plous, Scott 140, 156 Polinard, Jerry L. 124, 136 Potter, Jonathan 224 Power, S. 205 Powers, John 214, 225 Poznyak, Svetlana 20, 23 Pratto, Felicia 27–28, 39 Print, Murray 12, 22 Prior, Markus 133n1, 137 Pruzinsky, Thomas 157, 161, 170, 171 Psaltis, Kay 168, 171

— 276 —

Index Q Quillian, Lincoln 123, 125, 127, 132, 137 Quintero, Marieta 23 Quinton, Wendy J. 32–34, 38 R Rabbie, Jacob M. 27, 39 Raijman, Rebeca 123–27, 130, 133, 133n1, 134n11, 137 Ramathan, Vai 54, 58 Rapoport, Tamar 186, 192 Rattner, Arye 89, 115, 119 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon 79, 86 Rechytskiy, Vsevolod 13, 23 Regan, Lester 171 Reicher, Stephen D. 39 Rekhess, E. 191n1, 194 Restrepo, Bibiana 23 Reynolds, T. 159, 167, 171 Rich, Adrienne 190, 194 Robinson, John D. 168, 170 Rogers, Rebecca 171 Rosch, Marita 136 Rosenberg, Evan 35, 38 Rosenfeld, Henry 63, 73, 75 Rosenhek, Z. 191n1, 194 Rosenmann, Amir 5, 157 Ross, Steven 43, 58 Rothbart, Myron 27, 38 Rothblum, Esther D. 158–59, 171, 172 Rouhana, Nadim 63, 75 Rousseau, Jaques 169 Rowland, L.P. 171 Rozin, Paul 158–61, 167–68, 170, 171 Ruiz, Alexander 19, 23 Rumelhart, David 29, 39 Runco, Mark A. 169 Russo, A. 190, 193, 194 Rust, Mary C. 37 S Sa’ar, Amalia 5, 173, 184–85, 191n6, 194 Saban, Ilan 117n12, 119 Sacks, Harvey 208, 210–11, 225 Safir, Marilyn P. 5, 157, 169, 170, 171 Said, Edward 81, 86

Salameh, George 66–67, 73 Salong, John 16, 23 Samuels, Curtis 169 Sánchez, William 23 Sandoval, Chela 180–83, 194 Sanford, Nevitt 37, 134 Sanitioso, Rasvid 169 Sarsour, Sa’ad 64, 75 Sayegh, Liane 198–99, 206 Scheepers, Peer 122–25, 127, 132–33, 133n1, 135, 136, 137 Schmader, Toni 34, 38 Schmidt, Peter 123–25, 127, 130, 133, 133n1, 134n11, 136, 137 Schmitt, Michael T. 34, 37, 39 Schneider, Christoph 223, 224 Schooler, Tonya Y. 25, 30, 39 Schopler, John 38 Schulsinger, F. 161, 165, 171 Schumacher, Julia 20, 23 Schwartz, Donald 170 Schwartz, Jordan L.K. 32, 37 Segev, Tom 79, 86 Semyonov, Moshe 123–25, 127, 130, 133, 133n1, 134n11, 137 Senécal, Sacha 7, 205 Serpell, Robert 169 Shafir, Gershon 194 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera 183, 194 Shamir, Michal 122, 136, 137 Sherif, Carolyn W. 124, 137 Sherif, Muzafer 124, 137 Shipler, David K. 99, 119 Shohat, Ella 189, 194 Sidanius, Jim 39 Sidman, R.L. 171 Silué, Sassongo 16, 23 Sleeter, Christine E. 2, 7, 61, 74, 75 Smelser, Neil J. 222, 225 Smid, Nico 169 Smith, Edward R. 123, 137 Smith, Eliot R. 137 Smooha, Sammy 63, 75, 88, 90, 119, 122, 137, 141–42, 156, 176, 191n1, 191n4, 194 Sniderman, Paul M. 133n1, 137

— 277 —

Index Solnick, Alumna 82–84, 86 Sorenson, T. 161, 165, 171 Spencer, Christopher 169 Spencer-Oatey, Helen 58 Sperber, Dan 54, 58 Spitzberg, Brian H. 6, 7, 241, 263 Stallworth, Lisa M. 39 Stangor, Charles 38 State of Israel: Ministry of Public Security 119 Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder 262, 263 Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein 213, 225 Stephan, Cookie W. 122–23, 127, 137 Stephan, Walter G. 122–23, 127, 137 Stewart, Miranda 58 Strack, Fritz 25, 29, 31, 39 Straus, Florian 225 Strauss, Claudia 28, 37, 39 Stunkard, A.J. 161–62, 165, 171 Suleiman, Ramzi 29, 39 Sullivan, John L. 122, 124, 126–27, 137 Swirski, B. 170, 171 Sztompka, Piotr 225 T Tabibian, Ketzia 66, 75 Tadinac, Meri 169 Tajfel, Henri 25–27, 39, 223, 225 Tannen, Deborah 45, 58 Thompson, Becky 180, 194 Thompson, Kevin 157–58, 168, 171, 172 Thompson, Michael 170 Thompson, Sandra A. 212, 224 Tiggemann, Marika 158–59, 172 Todorova, Elka N. 169 Torres, L. 193, 194 Troland, Kari 169 Trompenaars, Fons 239, 251, 263 Trope, Yaacov 29, 37 Tuijnman, Albert C. 12, 23 Turner, Jett 171 Turner, John C. 25–27, 39 Tyano, S. 169 Tyler, Tom R. 89, 119

V V. Holsteyn, Joop 136 Van Heck, Guus 170 Vandenbrande, L. 169 Vanlangenhove, L. 170 Veldhuis, Ruud 12, 22 Verba, Sidney 121, 135 Verberk, Genevieve 125, 137 Vernon, Dylan 17, 23 Visbal, Olga 6, 227 W Wahiba, Abu-Ras 193 Walbrick, Kevin 171 Walby, Sylvia 177, 194 Waller, G. 168, 170 Washington Headquarters Services 212, 225 Wasmer, Martina 136 Watts, Meredith W. 123–24, 126, 138 Watts, Richard J. 53, 58 Weinberger, Jerry 7 Weitzman, A. 169 Weizman, Elda 45, 51, 57 Wenzel, Michael 26, 38 Wetherell, Margaret S. 39 Wheeler, David 95, 118 White, John 21, 23 Widdicombe, Sue 208, 224, 226 Wiemann, John 43, 52, 57 Wien, Peter 80, 86 Wieviorka, Michel 61, 75 Wildangel, René 80, 86 Wildschut, Tim 38 Wilson, Timothy D. 25, 29–31, 39 Wilson-Barrett, Elise 158, 172 Wimmer, Andreas 122, 124, 138 Winstead, B.A. 157, 170 Wiseman, Claire V. 168, 172 Wiseman, Richard L. 225 Witt, Robert 95, 119 Wittig, Monique 177, 194 Wood, Katherine C. 157, 172 Woodward, Vann, C. 2, 7 Wooffitt, Robin 211, 225 Wooley, S.C. 170, 171

— 278 —

Index Worchel, Stephen 39 Wrinkle, Robert D. 124, 136

Youtz, Robert 62, 73 Yuval Davis, Nira 175, 192

Y Ya’cobi, Daniel 66, 75 Yang, Kuo-Shu 170 Yiftachel, Oren 63, 75, 177, 194 Yishai, Yael 122, 126, 134n11, 137 Yom-Tov, Anat 125, 137 Yorio, Carlos Alfredo 235 Young, Marta 205

Z Zanna, Mark P. 37, 38 Zarzur, S. 146, 156 Zertal, Idith 79, 86 Zimmermann, Klaus 209, 223n1, 226 Zinman, Richard 7 Zuckermann, Moshe 79, 86

— 279 —

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

A acculturation 43, 181, 198, 205, 214 attitude 197–98 host community 199 model 198–200 orientation 198, 201 scale 197, 200, 203 strategy 198–201, 203–5 action 141, 168, 174, 182, 190, 239, 241 affirmative 12 automatized 46 collective 187 complicating 210, 218 criminal 99 effective 256–57 ethnic-cleansing 70 falling 210 feminist 190 in intercultural situations 240 joint 18, 175 local collective 18 military 69 patterns of 89 police 97 social 223 verbal 54 advertisement 168 American 168 Israeli 168 advocacy transnational 11 affiliation 43, 178 collective 176 ethnic 175, 188

national-cultural 215 religious 143 agenda 81 ethnic 180 ethno-national 174 political 88 subversive 20 Americans 207, 209, 218, 221–23 in Germany 212–13, 215, 222–23 views of 213–14 anti-Americanism 82, 222 anti-Semitism 80, 140 European 80–81 Islamic 80 assimilation 200–2 policy of forced 15 attitude 27, 54, 62, 68, 174, 242 acculturation 197–98, 202–4 of the Arab populace 81 authoritarian social 28 body and eating related 157–60, 162, 166 of both sides 68, 84 explicit 30 hostile 125 ideological 27 implicit 30 integration 202 model of dual 25, 29–31 negative 121–23 prejudiced 33 separation 202 towards Americans 213–14, 221–23 towards FSU immigrants 130 — 281 —

Index towards intercultural competence 249, 253, 258 towards minorities 124–45, 133 towards modernity 187 towards outgroups 123 towards the police 89, 99–102, 115 utilitarian 186 xenophobic 121–33 authoritarian-conservatism dimension 28 autonomy, personal 28, 36 awareness 55–56, 246 building 18 cultural 55 interactants 51 intercultural 56, 238, 241, 252–54 political 69, 175, 182 B Balfour Declaration 68 bargain ethnic 174 liberal 173–79, 181, 183–84, 186–90 patriarchal 173, 184 beauty 168 ideals 161 Bedouin 90, 100, 101–3, 105–7, 112, 160 ‘benign-neglect theory’ 89 body attitudes to the 159–60, 162 Body Mass Index (BMI) 161–64, 166 consciousness 158 dissatisfaction 158, 163, 165–69 ideal shape 161, 167 ideals 158–59, 169 image 157–59, 161–63, 166–67 image survey 158 language 208, 250 satisfaction 167 shape 157–58, 166–69 size 158, 168 weight 158 C capital 179 cultural 181

human 178 symbolic 179 capitalism 13, 177–78 ‘crony capitalism’ 18 state 177 categorization 26–27, 36, 210 de- 36 ethnic 209 re- 36 self- 25, 26–27 social 27, 209 Christian Arabs 90, 100–7, 112–13, 118 Circassian 112, 153, 160 citizen 15, 64, 71 Arab 71, 73, 82, 87–88, 108–12, 115, 117, 187 Israeli 63, 123 Jewish 108–9 loyal 26 Palestinian 122, 124, 126–27, 130–32, 134, 175, 177, 183, 191 Palestinian women 174, 176 second-class 71 of the United States 214, 216 citizenship 15, 21, 71, 122 education 20 Education for Democratic Citizenship 12 Israeli 183 civilization 181, 238 European 81 class, ethno-national 184 classroom bilingual 197, 205 foreign-(second-)language 227–35 history 64 Israeli 84 Palestinian 84 code cultural 89 cultural normative 102 language 209 switch 57 coexistence 84–85, 185, 198 Arab–Jewish 63–64 peaceful 27

— 282 —

Index colonialism 16, 180, 262 neo- 19 post- 11, 20 communication 16, 17, 43, 46, 54, 57, 238, 240–41 intercultural 41, 45, 57, 248 intercultural mis- 44 interethnic 208 lowcontext 251 mass 160 nonverbal 206, 212 popular 17 self-centered 46 skills 55, 241 strategies 56 communities Arab 89–91, 93–97, 99, 104, 108, 111, 115–16 ethnic 199 Jewish 91, 93–97, 99, 108, 111 linguistic 209 national 176 neighboring 18 speech 54 urban 191 competence communicative 55 intercultural 41, 55–56, 237–38, 240–42, 246–50, 252–54, 256–62 interpersonal 55 conflict 29, 45, 61, 139 Arab–Israel 72–73, 122 between groups 123, 125, 152 context of 65 -critical approach 61–62 instrumental model of group 124 of interest 123 Israeli–Arab–Palestinian 66 Israel–Palestinian 72, 78–81, 83–84, 87–88, 134, 183, 191 Jewish–Arab 69 long-standing 63, 142 in the Middle-East 68 with minority group 89 model 62 overt 173

realistic group conflict theory 124 role 160 types of 96, 99 Zionist–Arab 67 Zionist–Palestinian–Arab 68 consciousness 29, 43, 55, 81–82, 85 action and 190 body 158 conservative 189 critical (transformative) 187, 189 feminist history of 180 historical 182, 190 Israeli national 79–80 oppositional 182 social 174–75, 183, 189–90 ‘white’ 175, 181 constructivist position 208 consultants 237, 243, 245–61 contact 84 daily 141, 154 human 45 hypothesis 27 intercultural 208, 252, 254 interethnic 203, 204–5 intergroup 36 nature of 198 scale 200 with host community 204 with police 88–89, 96, 99 control border 112 conscious mental 46 informal mechanisms of 88, 95, 108, 116 patriarchal 183 social 28, 88, 96, 98 sociocultural 62, 64 state 62, 72–73, 117 crime 88–89, 91–93 against humanity 81 drug 97, 104, 106 level of 183 property 93–96, 98–99, 104, 106, 115 violent 96–97, 99, 104, 106–8, 115 crime rates 98–99, 117 in Israel 96, 99

— 283 —

Index cross-talk 41, 50 culture 53–54, 167, 238–39 American 159, 213, 222 Arab 89 democratic 16 dominant 182, 184 Druze 149–51 indigenous 18 Islamic–Arabic 88 Israeli 142, 144, 146–47, 149, 151–53, 167 Israeli sub- 159–61 Jewish 88–89 language and 54, 56 ‘militaristic culture’ 73 Muslim 180 political 79, 121 privileged 21 curriculum for Arab schools (Arab) 63–66, 72 history 62–65, 71 for Jewish schools (Hebrew) 63–66, 72 national 19 Palestinian 79 D democracy education 11–12, 15–16, 18, 20–21 education network 20 ethnic 176 gender 14–15, 20 Israel as a liberal 176 and peace education 77, 80 demographic gap between Jews and Arabs 91 difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ 140, 152 in communicative norms 50 in communicative style 45, 51, 56 cultural 13, 48, 53, 157, 159, 166, 239, 246–47, 249–52, 254–57, 261 ethnic 35 gender 157–59, 161, 167 in group identification 34 in lifestyle 149 between local languages 16

moral 35 racial 167 discourse analysis 48, 52, 208, 211–12, 215 anti-Zionist 80 comprehension 47 dominant 184 frames 48 hegemonic feminist 182 identities in 208, 209 level of language 42 schema 48 strategies 48, 51–52, 55 structure 42, 48 style 55–56 discrimination attributing negative events to 32–33 budgetary 186 gender 179, 182 prejudice and 25–26, 32, 36 through language 209 victims of 33–34 disempowerment 173 political 180 dissimilarities, cultural 166 distinction, ethnic 90 distinctiveness 64 cultural 116 diversity cultural 61, 134, 253 different kinds of 35 inner 90 moral 34–35 religious 90, 143 tolerance of 35 divide ethnic 90 public–private 176 dominance of corporate culture 260 male 173 orientation 27 power and 28 theory 28 domination 176, 184 ethnic 181

— 284 —

Index forms of 178 male 177 Druze 90, 100–7, 112–14, 144, 146, see also culture, Druze E education citizenship 20 colonial 19 communal approach to 19 democracy 11–13, 15–16, 18, 20–21, 80 Education for Democratic Citizenship 12 formal 62, 64 higher 63 intercultural 21 level and xenophobia 124–25, 127–28, 130–33 literacy 14 moral 19 multicultural 61 national 78 peace 63, 77, 80 and prejudice 142 sociology of 61 teacher 19, 20 language 16 self- 15 The Women’s Empowerment Framework 14 empowerment 2–3, 14–16, 20–21, 187 encounter 190, 209 intercultural 152 intergroup 30, 35 in public space 216 epistemology hegemonic liberal 181, 188 liberal 174, 179, 181, 187, 189 Mizrahi 189 exclusion 176, 188–89 collective 183, 187–88 ethnic 175 gender 190 history of 190 national 175 structural 181

F family clan 96, 99, 104, 115 See also hamula feminism 175–76, 182 indigenous 180 Israeli 180, 191 liberal 182 postcolonial 173 Third World 179–80 Western 179 field theory 28 functionalist school 61 fundamentalism, religious 177 G gender adult literacy and 12, 14 ethnicity and 179, 183, 186–87 feminist values of 160 network 12–13 neutrality 176–77, 181 role idealization 168 role stress 160 struggle 11, 21 studies 20 Germans 200, 213, 220–23, 249, 257 Germany 21, 80, 140, 197, 198, 202, 204–5, 207, 212–13, 222, 237 consulting firms in 244–46, 261 ethnic minorities in 249, 262 ‘going white’ 181 group cultural 148–49 disadvantaged 32, 63, 153, 174 dominant 62, 178, 181–82, 184, 188–90 ethnic 71, 90, 140, 151, 160, 166, 197–98, 209, 211–12 historically privileged 190 identification 33–34 identity 89 immigrant 198–99 majority 89, 122, 188 marginalized 174, 178, 181, 188 membership 27, 36, 43

— 285 —

Index minority 32, 57, 88–89, 116, 122, 124, 130, 134 Moralia Research Group 19 religious-ethnic 90 stigmatized 32–33 subordinate 181, 189 H hamula 88, 96, 104 See also family clan historiography white 181 history Arab 64–66 feminist 180, 182 of the Holocaust 84 Islamic 65–66 Jewish 64–66, 79 of the Middle East 66, 84 ‘official history’ 62, 72 Palestinian 65, 79 teaching of 61–62 ‘unofficial history’ 62, 72 Zionist 64, 66 See also curriculum, history; textbooks, history Holocaust 79–84 denier 81 instrumentalization of the 81 Museum 82 hostility 25–26, 68, 96, 104, 111, 114, 124, 152 I identification ambigious nature of human 16 cross-cutting 21 group 33–34 with the heritage culture 198 historical 180 ingroup 33 Jewish 161 politics of 175, 190 proud national 183 with the United States 214 with universal values 167

identity 43 common ingroup 36 construction 215, 223 cultural 202, 208 damaged 222 distinct 67 individual 27 Islamic 186 of Jewish and Arab students 72 loss of 190 national 72, 207, 215, 222–23 national and ethnic 160 national-cultural 215 Palestinian–Arab 72 personal 140, 144 politics of 174–75, 189–90 reconstruction 222 sense of social 190 singular 183 social 34–35 social identity theory 25–26 ideology 67, 179, 183 dominant 73 of dominant Jewish majority 72 of individual mobility 33 Jewish–Zionist 64 justice 34 liberal 178, 186 mainstream 73 state 20, 64 ignorance 145–46, 148 cultural 142, 146, 152 of Islam 145 of Jewish religion 145–46 organizational 262 immigrants 122–23, 198, 211, 223 first-generation 203–5 Former Soviet Union (FSU) 126–27, 131–32, 134 identities of 207 Portuguese 197–98, 201–5 second-generation 204 immigration from the FSU 118 mass 71, 122 Zionist 79

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Index inclusion 178 and exclusion 176 individual 188 liberal 188 ingroup common ingroup identity model 36 favorable 223 identification 33 member 27, 123 and outgroup 27 values 26, 123 initiative, Arab–Israeli 82 integration and separation 202–3, 205 immigrant 199 stage 242 strategy 198, 199–200 intergroup bias 36 contact situation 36 context 34 encounter 30, 35 experiences 198 hostility 26 relationships 124, 133 structure 25 theories 25–26 intifada Al-Aqsa (Second) 72, 81–82 Palestinian 70–71 intuition 51 moral 29–30 and reasoning 29 social intutionist model 29 Islam 69, 81 knowledge of 142 political 180 Islamism 67 J Judaism 69, 142 ignorance of 146 knowledge of 143, 145–46 K knowledge 240–3 background 47, 212

basic 15, 144 cultural 142 dominant 184 ‘fugitive knowledge’ 15 linguistic 205 management 255 meta- 205 metapragmatic 55 pragmatic 51 resources 15 self- 15 L learning implicit 30, 36 intercultural 26, 204, 227 language 16, 55 lifelong 12, 19 reciprocal 15 lexicon project, multimedia cultural 142, 147, 152 liberties, civil 13, 176 liberalism bargaining with 187–88 concepts of 176–77, 178, 81 ethnicity, and modernity 181 ethnicity, and patriarchy 175–76 Israel’s self-declared 186 as symbolic system 177 M majority 63, 89 community 89 ethnic 182 group 188 Jewish 64, 72–73, 87–88, 117 maleness 179, 181 hegemony of 16 and whiteness 181–82, 190 management 238, 246 consultancies 237–38, 261–62 consultants 237, 243, 246 consulting 243, 245 intercultural 240 knowledge 255 lean cognitive 46

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Index marginalization 180, 215 triple 183 masculinity 181 modern 177 memory borrowed 21 collective 62–63, 72 pedagogy of 21 migrants labor 121–24, 127–32, 134 Portuguese 199, 201–5 minority 32, 57, 116, 122, 182 Arab 82, 88–90, 112 ‘hostile minority’ 73 identities 18 indigenous 62 national 64, 160, 175–76, 183 nonassimilating 160 Palestinian Arab 71–72, 122 police- 90, 102 politics 15 rights 121 sense of 185 state control of 62 miscommunication, intercultural 44 misunderstanding 41–42, 44–48, 50–51, 54–55, 57 in the classroom 56 conceptually based 48, 52 cross-cultural 47 Hamburg project on 47 information processing approach to 47 intercultural 41, 44–56 language-based 48 levels of 43 operational (processual) 48 psychopathological view of 46–47 strategic 48, 55 types of 48, 55 Mizrahi 180 activist 180 epistemology 189 feminists 180 mobility 188 ‘affinity for mobility’ 259 ideology of 33

individual (individualistic) 33, 186 trans-oceanic 197 upward 181, 187 model acculturation 198–99 cognitive 47 common ingroup identity 36 conflict 62 democracy education 18 discourse 52 dual attitude 25, 29–31 dual process 31 interactive acculturation 199–200 of intercultural competence 241 of masculinity 181 reflective-impulsive 25, 31–32 social identity 26 social intuitionist 29 modernity 177, 184–87, 191n2 and colonialism 180 language of 184 modernization 81, 88, 160, 180 individual 160 Moshav 160 movement 183 Arab national(ist) 66–68 national liberation 67 Palestinian national 62, 68–72 Second Wave feminist 180 Zionist 62, 66–68, 80 multiculturalism 61, 139, 152 Israeli 139 Muslims 69, 100, 102, 104, 112–13, 115–16, 142, 145–46, 262 Bedouin Muslims 90 Israeli (Arab) 142–43 N Nakba Arab 80 Palestinian 80 narrative 19, 21, 186, 210–11 hegemonic 85 historical 78–79, 83 Israeli–Arab 87 Israeli–Palestinian 187

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Index national 21 Palestinian 67, 69, 72, 79 Zionist(–Jewish) 67, 69, 72 nasaras 17 nationalism 79–80, 85, 176–77 Arab 67–69 Palestinian 68–69 postcolonial 180 O oppression 139, 175, 178, 182–83, 190 cultural 160 gender 175–76, 179, 187, 190 patriarchal 173 primordial 174 sexual 183 social and institutional 44 order dominant 175 ethnic 174, 176 gender 173–74 hegemonic 174 liberal 174, 178–79, 182, 184, 187–88, 190 social 96 symbolic 178 Zionist 183 Oslo agreement 72 P pan-Arabism 67, 180 patriarchy 173, 175–76 peace 61–64, 73, 78 building 84, 85n4 debate 80 education 63, 77, 80 making 85n4 process 71, 81, 83, 85n4 Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) 83–84 police in Arab communities 108 Arabs in the Israel 112 intervention 93, 96 in Israel and Arab citizens 87–90 presence 93, 100

policy of cultural relativity 116 of ‘forced assimilation’ 15 making 12–13 of neglect 89 ‘Politeness Theory’ 209 politics formal 187 of identification 175, 190 of identity 174–75, 189–90 local 96, 99 minority 15 postcolonial feminist 175, 190 positivist(ic) approach 61–62 methodology 181 power division of 96 regimes of 182 relations 62, 174, 187–88, 204 ‘situational power’ 178 structure 43, 62 system 73 prejudice 25–27, 30, 33, 35–36, 56, 123, 139–41, 152 attributions to 34 determinants of 31 education and 142 effects of 32 as intuitive judgment 29 nature of 28, 141 personality approach to 27 reduction 36 victims of 26 program adult literacy 16 cooperative 86n4 education(al) 15, 36 gender and literacy 14 intercultural educational 21, 26 teacher education 19 R racism 178, 184, 190, 209 aversive 30 concept of 123

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Index mechanisms of 209 and sexism 178, 181 state 183 symbolic form of 181 reconciliation 17, 63, 72–73 right(s) civil 177–78 gay 15 human 19–21, 179 liberal 177, 186, 191n4 women’s 184 role conflict 160 feminine gender 160 gender 168 negotiation 208 stress 160 S schema 28–29, 46–48 behavioral 31, 36 goal 28 social 28 school Arab 63–68, 71, 72 bilingual 198 functionalist 61 Hebrew 72 Jewish 63–68, 70–72 Palestinian 84 system 61, 63, 72 textbooks 78 schoolbook, German–Israeli 78 segregation 90, 183 ethno-national 184 residential 63 strategy 200, 203 self-categorization theory 25, 27 self-esteem, victim’s 32–34 sense of deprivation 88, 96 separation strategy 200, 202–5 sexism 178–79 symbolic forms of 181 Social Distance scale 126 society American 161, 165

Arab 88, 113, 160 Circassian 160 civil 176, 178 deeply divided 62, 87 Israeli 71–73, 95, 123, 139, 141–42, 147–49, 165, 185 Israeli–Jewish 180 Jewish 160 liberal 180–81 modern 181 multicultural 152, 262 Palestinian 79 racialized 184 state control of minority 62 democratic 117n12, 191n4 education 187 of Israel 64–68, 71, 79–80, 82, 88, 90, 117n12, 152 Jewish 87, 160 status 43 employment 124–27, 130–33 equal social 148 group 34 ‘mushaa’ 117n8 social 215 socioeconomic 121–25, 132–33, 149 stereotype 27, 29, 31, 56, 140–42, 148, 152, 213 gender 15 religious 81 stereotyping 26, 30, 36 Israel 141 national 54, 78 stigma 36, 148, 209 students Arab 63–64, 66–68, 71–72, 186 Jewish 63–67, 71–72 subculture 139, 147, 149, 153–54 Arab 160 Arab–Israeli 160 Jewish and Arab 159 system conscious believing 36 democratic 79

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Index education(al) 17, 19, 61–63, 79, 143, 146, 152, 204 impulsive 31 judicial 102, 117, 118n12 of oppression 178 political 17–18, 20 power 73 reflective 31–32 school 61, 63, 72, 186 symbolic 177 trust in the legal 102, 117n12 T textbooks 66 anti-Semitic 77 Arabic 72 Hebrew 70, 72 history 66, 78 Israeli 79 Palestinian 77–78, 85n3 school 78 threat 28 cultural 122–24, 132, 134n4, 134n7 economic 122, 124, 130, 132, 134n5, 134n7 internal security 88 perception 122–33, 133n1 of violence 19 tolerance 141–42, 148, 188 trauma cultural 222 of perpetrators 223 U UNESCO 11–13, 78, 85n2 Institute of Education 12 uniqueness 82 cultural 116 V value 43, 54, 62, 159, 173 American 160, 168

of coexistence 63 democratic 121, 141 egalitarian 31 feminist 160 fundamental 176 ingroup 123 predominant 28 social 85n1 sociocultural 28 universal 167 violence 19, 81, 83, 85, 93, 139, 178 communal 183 crimes of 96–97, 108, 115 male domestic 183 W Westernization Zionist 176 whiteness 179, 181–82, 190 women 173–76, 178–79, 180, 184–86, 188, 190 Arab 159, 160, 162–67 career 182, 189 of color 179, 180 empowerment 14 ethnized 181 Israeli 165, 167–68 Israeli–Palestinian 175, 183–84 Israel Police- 113–14 Jewish, 160 162–66 Palestinian 174–76, 183–85 Third World 178 white 179, 181–82, 190 X xenophobia 121–33, 133n1 Z Zionism 81, 141, 176 Jewish 64, 67 and Nazism 81

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