116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)

Introduction to Lingthusiasm

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And I'm Lauren Gawne. And today we're getting enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures.

Website Updates

0:33But first, we've been doing a bit of spring cleaning on our website. There are kind of a lot of Lingthusiasm episodes by now. We have deliberately made them so they can be listened to in any order that strikes your fancy. But that means that if you're trying to do something a little bit more systematic, it can be hard to figure out what to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We've added some new topic categories that you can browse for example, which episodes analyse the linguistics elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we've been reading. And we've kept my favourite part of the topics page, which is

1:06the ability to browse episodes by linguistic structural feature, which is perfect for when I'm looking for an episode to pair with the subject I'm teaching this term. You can also see a starter pack of episodes we think are especially good to try to get your friends into Lingthusiasm with, all our interviews and book-related episodes grouped together, and more categories. Go to lingthusiasm.com slash topics or find this under the episode section of our website. Our most recent bonus episode was all about idioms and how they work linguistically. It's a real barrel of laughs. It'll pass muster. It'll bring the house down. Heads will roll.

1:39Wait, that sounds bad. Okay, maybe we'll put that cat back in the bag. This episode also has a swear warning, because we finally explored why linguists are so keen on the idiom, the, uh, stuff hit the fan. To get access to the idioms episode and over nine years of Lingthusiasm bonus episodes, go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm.

Hellspark Book Discussion

2:01Lauren, some days, do you ever just want to can it all and become a linguist on a spaceship? Oh, yeah. I mean, sometimes the space linguist is more like an interpreter, or they're very good at just wrangling the translation machines. But what I love are those episodes of Star Trek where Uhura or Hoshi have a gap in the system and they need to figure out what's happening

2:34in order to communicate. We recently got a great book recommendation from a listener. Shout out to Trish B, who asked us on Blue Sky whether we'd read Hellspark by Janet Kagan and said it was a science fiction murder mystery and one of your top four books ever. Also, shout out to the four other people who immediately replied and said they also loved this book, a book we'd never heard of. With endorsements like that, I had to read it. I can tell you it was great and we are going to structure a whole episode around it. And if those initial endorsements weren't enough, you told me, there was a bunch of

3:07gesture stuff in it and so I had to read it. So, let's start with the basic premise of Hellspark. We're not assuming anyone else has read it. Yeah. So, I guess it's a murder mystery? I honestly forgot about the murder mystery part. To me, this book was really about cross-cultural communication. So, we're on a planet and there's a survey crew of humans trying to figure whether this alien species, which I pictured as sort of looking like an emu, is capable of intelligent communication. We have a whole episode on communicating with aliens who have completely different ways of

3:42doing language. But this episode isn't about trying to communicate with the emu aliens. Instead, the thing that's very enticing about this particular book is the survey crew of humans. Which is made up of this really diverse set of cultures. They deliberately recruit people from different human cultures to expand the – I guess the range of how useful they'll be in interacting with aliens. But the ironic thing is for a deliberately recruited and trained cross-cultural group is they are so

4:16bad at cross-cultural communication.

Cross-Cultural Communication

4:18Yeah. And then there's this one character who arrives who's a Hellspark who's basically from this culture where their whole deal is cross-cultural communication. Is it Hellspark or Hellspark? Yeah. This book has really fun language play in that this is a deliberate joke that's overtly discussed in the book. It could be either Hellspark or Hellspark. The Hellspark humans seem to play this up for their own amusement and consistently alternate their pronunciation.

4:51And random fluctuation is absolutely how human languages work. Being incredibly consistent about A, B, A, B, A, B is not really how human communication works. So that's a fun little detail that makes it more alien to me. But the thing that made we want your take on this book the most, Lauren, was that the cross-cultural miscommunication was a lot about how people interact with each other in physical space, not just outer space. So how people sit with

5:23respect to each other in a room or how close they stand in conversation. And the term that this book uses for this phenomenon is proxemics, which looks sort of familiar to me from linguistics terms like morpheme and phoneme. But a proxeme isn't a word I'd ever heard before. This seems not exactly gesture, but kind of like gesture. Have you heard of proxemics? Is it a real thing in linguistics somewhere? Yeah. Figuring out what is polite or comfortable in terms of how close you can physically stand

6:00near people, how you face each other or don't face each other in conversation is absolutely part of the larger way that we structure interacting with people. And it is a real piece of communication terminology that she's taken into the book, which I love. And I've definitely experienced the feeling of having a conversation with someone who's continually advancing on me because their personal bubble is smaller than mine or they're standing awkwardly distantly away from me because my personal bubble is smaller than theirs. So it felt very

6:33real that like, oh, this is great. Someone has actually studied this. Yeah. And you might also interact with someone who really enjoys sitting side by side and not making eye contact. Or you might have people who really prefer their conversations to be really front onto each other. There's lots of ways we can arrange ourselves in space. And a lot of this has been looked at in the kind of cultural anthropology literature. Ah. And so I knew about this term, but Janet Keegan specifically gives a shout out – and I love

7:05it when authors do this – to an anthropologist who specifically coined the concept of proxy mix, Edward T. Hall, who is someone I hadn't really read before and went down a little Edward T. Hall rabbit hole? A rabbit hole?

Edward T Hall and Proxemics

7:20That's a joke that only works in your accent, not mine. I loved the author's note at the end. Janet Keegan, alas, is no longer with us. This book came out in the 80s. But we do have her author's note at the end where she's like, yeah, it was very influenced by Edward T. Hall. Proxemics comes from this real literature. And I was like, yes, Lauren, do you know this literature? What does Hall say about proxemics? So he was really interested in like a really expansive idea of proxemics. So he

7:50was interested in face-to-face communication, but also how people structured like the physical built environment. So he hung out with architects as much as anthropologists and linguists. Ooh. He had this really expansive view. And he had this real sense of there being this really strong cross-cultural variation. So he trained as an anthropologist in the United States of America. He worked in a number of Native American communities. And then in World War II, he served in the US Army in Europe and the Philippines. He's kind of known for noticing a few things that vary

8:25across cultures, whether that's the way people relate to each other in space, the way different cultures relate to time and concepts like punctuality. And he also talks a lot about how we can take a structural approach to researching these differences. And then by making those differences more apparent, we can learn them and try to overcome them as we interact across cultures, which if anyone's read one of those like how to do business type books, this is such a common trope

8:58now that we need to understand people from different cultures. But in the second half of the 20th century, this became like a new thing to consider and actively study. – So this is the guy that sort of predates what I think of as sort of the tired business cliche about the Japanese. But he's predating that and sort of coming up with this stuff wasn't as cliche when he was observing it. – Yeah. He has a book called Hidden Differences – Doing Business with the Japanese in the kind of post-war US-Japan trade relationship where you had these two very different cultures and

9:32people trying to conduct business. This whole trope kind of started with this military-trained anthropologist who then spent a lot of time working with the United States Foreign Service Institute training diplomats and then subsequently training business people. – And I feel like maybe there was less like global popular culture or this idea that maybe like Western people may have watched some anime or read some manga or like less of this sort

10:02of overlap so that maybe some of the stuff was like less familiar at the time. – We take how much different cultures and kind of the general population from different cultures get to interact thanks to modern transportation and modern airplanes. And so yeah, this was really fulfilling that. It is wonderful. And the other thing that I really appreciate about Edward T. Hall is that a lot of his writing was for a general audience. And I can absolutely see how Janet Keegan would have read his books and just been able to really be inspired for them because he really did

10:36this great accessible writing in the late 50s through to the 1990s. Perhaps one thing that has shifted from that earlier work to today is that it was really predicated on this is how all American English speakers stand when they're talking to each other. Or this is how all American English speakers think about punctuality and timeliness when it comes to meeting people. And then it's like, now we will discuss the Japanese. Everyone in the Philippines.

11:11– I don't want to brag here, Lauren, but I've known quite a few Americans in my time. And what I would say is they have differing approaches to punctuality depending on themselves as individuals. And presumably this is also true for Japanese people of whom I've known several but not quite as many as Americans. – So you are definitely zeroing in on one of the, I think, challenges and limitations. And a lot of his work at a very high level, you may be inclined to be like, oh, yes, there must be differences here. And

11:43when you zero in, it becomes a lot harder to actually pin down those differences. – I was thinking about this when reading Hellspark because I've definitely experienced these sorts of communication breakdowns that are described in the book. There's a few examples of like, oh, this person is accidentally approaching this other person from the direction that leads them to be perceived as a threat rather than as a friend. Or this one person is from this culture where they wear really elaborately painted toenails and things like that. Another person is from a culture where the feet are

12:16very taboo and need to be covered all the time. And so they're sort of in this tension. And I was thinking about a time when I was talking with someone in a professional context and this woman kept touching my thigh in a way that I am not typically familiar with being in a professional context. She wasn't flirting with me. It was just like, we're having an engaged professional conversation. The way that I'm going to demonstrate that is that I'm going to do this. – Were you seated really close to each other? – We were seated on sort of the same bench. So she didn't have to reach around a table. That would

12:50have been kind of awkward. But she was just sort of engaged. And the way that some people might touch your arm – I think she might have started with the arm and kept going with the thigh. But she was my mom's age. There wasn't the dynamic that – – I just want to double-check she wasn't flirting with you. That's not the vibe you got. – Really? That was not anything about the rest of the vibe that I got. Eventually, I was like, okay, well, I guess if we're in touching thighs shows that we're engaging culture, I'll do this back because maybe you also like this. And so I did it back, even though I wouldn't normally do so

13:24thereby passing the Hellspark test of can I adjust my behaviour on the fly. And she seemed quite engaged. And we did not go on a date – she did not interpret this as me flirting back. It was just like, oh, we're having this engaged conversation. And yet nothing about this person's particular background. I have met other people from her background, and they were not inveterate thigh touchers. So I can't say that this was a cultural difference at some level, but it wasn't a cultural difference in this sort of reductive like, oh, she's from a certain place. She must be doing it

13:55in this particular context. – Yeah. But it's also a really good illustrator of how often we arrange ourselves in relation to other people in a really not conscious way. She was just like, we're having a friendly conversation. This wasn't a like, this is a professional but friendly relationship. And so I'm going to move into the 5cm zone instead of the 20cm zone that I would stay in for a professional but non-friendly conversation. She's not doing that consciously. – No. And I was doing a certain

14:28amount of it consciously where I was like, oh, I guess this is what we're doing. I will mirror back to you whatever you're doing. So I do think that people potentially have the ability to adjust our behaviour on the fly more to each other than this – I want to emphasise – science fictional book that is deliberately exaggerating a fictional premise, right? Not to critique this science fiction book for being science fiction. – The characters do display a remarkable lack of insight, but we've all possibly been here as well. It's very obvious when your cultural norms

15:02are being infringed on without necessarily being aware of when other peoples are being infringed. – And that sometimes what you need to do in response isn't as clear as reciprocally also touching someone's thigh. Sometimes it's like, oh, I need to not approach this person from the left, which I'm not going to know if some culture has left-approachment taboos. – Yeah. I do have to say I just love how much this Hellspark character really just felt like an avatar for this concept from anthropology, but also how much she absolutely just feels like wish

15:36fulfilment for anyone who has been in a social situation where they are second-guessing how they should interact with people. – Definitely a wish fulfilment character for socially awkward people. They're like, oh, what if I could just decode and perfectly replicate other people's body language and then we would totally all get along and everyone would be my friend? That was great. – And very much treated as a – this is a fixed code. As soon as I am exactly the distance away from someone that their cultural script expects, they will immediately start being relaxed around me and they won't know why. I just – I don't think – it would be nice if proxy mix existed in

16:12this strict, almost grammatical way, but I don't think they do. – And none of the other people were sort of bicultural or culturally fluid at all. They've been on this planet for so long with sometimes no one else or only one other person from their culture, and they haven't adapted to each other's norms at all, and yet they're immediately able to do that as soon as someone points out to them why they need proxemics and what to do overtly, and that they weren't doing any of that adaptation spontaneously. I love when a very specific academic concept is just taken all

16:49the way to its full extreme in a fictional context, particularly when it's a theory I haven't encountered before. I wish more people would run with concepts like this and take inspiration from specific academic concepts. – Is this the very unsubtle point where I point out we have a whole episode about the Sapir-Whorth theory of linguistic relativity and how much it pops up in science fiction and other genre? – Yeah, and so many people have already done Sapir-Whorth. Pick a new theory to take to its extreme, please. This is why this was so great. – Yeah, and cite your academic

17:25sources. We love it. – And even if those academic sources get more discredited later than they were in the 80s when the book was written, it's still a fascinating introduction to the academic topic that introduced me to something. – The vibe I got from anthropologists is that Hall is very much a product of his time, and he had some interesting ideas and certainly is considered to be one of the fathers of the field of intercultural communication, which is now a massive area across linguistics and

17:56anthropology. I couldn't find anything particularly dubious about him beyond your usual white guy in the middle of the 20th century, but intercultural communication has definitely moved on to be a lot more nuanced, as has anthropology. – I got to go to the Canadian Anthropology Society conference last year when it happened to be in Montreal and very much noticed this, like, oh, we're gonna consider this one particular culture on its own terms. Someone else is gonna consider this other particular culture. I remember a fun presentation about someone doing anthropology on

18:32the roles and inactions of people playing a D&D game. A role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons and how the players enact specific character roles. The saying that they're going to do something is effectively the doing of it because you're doing this imagination thing. You're not doing a LARP where you're actually physically having the sword fight. – Just to be clear, that D&D game wasn't being used as representative of the entirety of North America or Canada or even West Coast Anglosphere Canadians. – Or even all D&D players. It was really being considered as an example of what these particular

19:08players were doing and what maybe has generalizability to other players of role-playing games, but not exactly as avatars for their entire culture. The way that, like, oh, we analyzed a few businessmen in a boardroom and now they're avatars for their entire culture was the initial trap this was falling into. – Yeah. You see this a lot more with studies in anthropology or in linguistics. You're looking at a much more specific community of people rather than this whole the entirety of Japan or everyone in North America does this. – I will say that there's been some more specifically

19:43grounded in particular fictional communities types of science fiction in the 80s as well. I'm thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which is very much written from the point of view of an anthropologist in a particular community and has this very rich description of that one particular community. But I also feel like I've been seeing this in some recent fiction as well that I want to talk about in conversation with this. – Oh, excellent. Does this mean we can talk about

Recent Science Fiction Books

20:07What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reid? – I really enjoyed What We Are Seeking and made you read it. I think it's got some really fun parallels to Hellspark. It's also set on a planet where some people have been trying to figure out how to communicate with some aliens. – These aliens are more like free-roaming cactus people rather than hyper-intelligent emus. – Yes, indeed. The thing that I found most compelling, again, was the communication between different cultures of humans, again. The viewpoint character

20:40is coming from a culture that views the broader settler community as enthrall to a barbaric custom called marriage. – Ew. – Instead, it's coming from a cultural background that reminded me of a group of people called the Mosuo in China who have this type of matrilineal household structure where women can have lovers. Ultimately, children are raised by the mother and the mother's brothers. The fathers

21:13are involved in raising the children of their own sisters. It's not a patriarchal or patrilineal society organized around a marriage. It's organized around a matriarch and her daughters and her son and the children of those daughters. – This culturally isolated man who is in this fictional world is kind of trying to navigate this society where he doesn't have his matrilineal house that he's affiliated to because he's in this new environment and all of the cultural challenges for him that

21:47spill out from that. I will say, as a classic sci-fi trope, Cameron Reed has done this great thing where she's taken the absolute tiniest kernel of matrilineal household and then just dialed everything up to 20. – Right. I don't want to say that this is at all an accurate reflection of what the Mosuo are like, just that there is a real-world culture that is, at some level, provides a germ of where this science fictional concept is really taking something and running with the implications

22:19in a direction that enriches the story rather than trying to be grounded in that one culture. – I think it's a really important development in a lot of the most interesting recent science fiction and fantasy that does this is that you're coming from the perspective of that cultural outsider rather than a book like Hellspark where that character is very North America-coded or very Anglosphere-coded. – Right. The Hellspark character is very much the cultural insider who's the insider to

22:52all of the cultures rather than having her own particular point of view that's finding everything else just as unfamiliar. I think another recent book that does this in a different way is To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Monoquil Blackgoose. – Mm-hmm. It's on my reading list. My entire recommendations list is pretty much made up of things that Gretchen recommends to me. – Look, I know you've got less time to read than me and I want to make sure you only read the best. – I appreciate your curation. – So, this one is set on Earth in an alternate history where there's a young Indigenous girl in

23:31colonial America who bonds with a dragon – also, there's dragons. – Well, they're our highly sentient, opaque-to-us intelligence. – Well, the author in an interview points out that the dragons aren't sort of people, they're sorts of animals. So, they have this emotional bond with people and you can tell them to do things like go there the way you could with like a dog that you're bonded to, but it's not that they – like some dragons in some contexts are really like they communicate in full sentences and that's not what the dragons are doing in this particular story. But there's still this sort of

24:06other that makes the plot happen where the humans are interacting in particular levels. – Yeah. – So, this main character, who's from a community in southern New England, sort of Rhode Island, Massachusetts area, and speaks an Algonquian language, has to go to a colonial boarding school in order to learn how to train her dragon, quote-unquote, properly, so it doesn't get taken from her by the colonial authority. And so, you get this indigenous

24:37perspective on the colonialism, but as a way of making that colonial world feel just as unfamiliar to the reader as it does to the protagonist, this is an old history where basically the Roman Empire and Christianity never happened. – Huh. So, who is our European hegemon then? – Well, they're still from the island of Britain, but they are sort of like the Danelaw happened the whole way through. So, they're sort of influenced by a Viking culture into England and all of the

25:10names for chemistry and stuff that she's learning are based on this sort of English, Anglo-Saxon roots rather than Latin and Greek terminology. – Excellent. So, we also get that feeling of like being a bit of a cultural outsider. – Exactly. So, you get that sort of double-leveled outsider-ness and coming to understand the other people who are also in various ways outsider-ed from this society and how they form alliances and what they're trying to do in the world. – So, how does this tie into the other books we've been talking about? – I think that it's more specifically grounded in a particular culture, although I checked some

25:46interviews with Moniquil Blackgoose to see if she intended the protagonist to be from a specific existing Indigenous culture or one that was sort of influenced by her own background but wasn't a specific named one and it was definitely more the second one. She says, a lot of the time was weird for me because I'm from Rhode Island and the Algonquin language kind of seeps into the things that are named. So, it's got this sort of influence but it's not intended to be, I think, a one-to-one mapping because it is this fantasy setting. But that's sort of going one step further in terms of being

26:17grounded in the very specific sense of place and people and relationships that's also showing cultural differences. What she says in an interview is that one of her goals was to get readers to comprehend how fundamentally different the European or colonialist perceptions of the world are from the Indigenous perceptions. I think it fits with this theme of cross-cultural communication and putting characters into friction as a way of having readers inhabit different kinds of ways of being

26:48in the world. – One of the reasons I'm excited to get to this book on my reading list is because it makes overt this theme of people coming into a space that's not theirs and this kind of coloniser frontier theme overt in the way that it's not in a lot of non-fiction history and the kind of fiction of meeting aliens or new peoples. – Yeah. When we were researching this episode, I came across a post on the Reactor website by Joe Walton, who's a friend of the podcast,

27:24called A Wish for Something Different at the Frontier, which is about how there's actually quite a lot of books that are somewhat like the books we've been talking about where you have a tiny group of humans on a planet trying to figure out whether they can communicate with the aliens and eventually arriving at something that resembles greater understanding and how those books are influenced by the American frontier colonial history but with the Indigenous people cast in the role of

27:56aliens. To have a book that's saying, no, this is explicitly about an Indigenous worldview is, I think, interestingly in conversation with that broader history within the genre. – Hellspark and What We Are Seeking and To Shape A Dragon's Breath all have these big, looming, alien, unknown presences. Finding these out and discovering more throughout the narrative is what is the big

28:28driving plot. But what really drives things forward and what really helps us see these characters is the way they relate to other humans from different cultures. – I think one of the things that draws people to linguistics and also to anthropology is this desire that if we could analyze the systems and the people that are around us more closely and with more engaged and curious attention, we might ultimately be

29:02able to communicate with each other more deeply and more respectfully and in a way that shows how much we truly want to appreciate and get to know each other. – For more Linkthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode and to vastly expand your reading list, go to linkthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or

29:33linkthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on linkthusiasm.com slash transcripts, and you can follow at linkthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including the international phonetic alphabet, branching tree diagrams, booba and kiki, and our favorite esoteric unicode symbols, plus other Linkthusiasm merch like the very upper pro not judging your grammar just analyzing it bags and notebooks at linkthusiasm.com slash merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I'm on social media as gretchenmcculloch.com on

30:04blue sky at gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. – My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Linkthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Linkthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes from the last nine years to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com slash Linkthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our

30:35Discord chat room to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include idioms, children's oral culture in things like skipping rhymes and counting chants, and an extended chat with Corey Stamper about the colourful spoilers in her book True Color. – Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Linkthusiasm to anyone in your life who's curious about language. Or leave us a nice review, like this one from Not Charizard, who said, I really like – and this sounds obvious given the name – how enthusiastic the presenters are.

31:07It makes me so happy when they get excited about what they're talking about, because it makes me get very enthusiastic too. I also really like how they don't assume a lot of knowledge, so I can understand what they're talking about, because they always explain. – Linkthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gorn. Our senior producer is Claire Gorn. Our editorial producer is Sarah Doppiarella. Our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billens. Our editorial assistant is John Crook. And our technical editor is Leah Vellman. Our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. – Stay Linkthusiastic!