Culture as constraint or resource: essentialist versus non-essentialist views

Adrian Holliday
Canterbury Christ Church University College

This article is reprinted with the authors permission from Iatefl Language and
Cultural Studies SIG Newsletter Issue 18 pp38-40

There are two significant views of culture. The social science literature is divided
between an essentialist and a non-essentialist camp. The essentialist view may be
characterised as positivist, and the non-essential as interpretive; and as has always
been the case in science, the positivist, with its image of a more concrete reality, tends
to be dominant, with the interpretive relatively unknown and struggling for
recognition. The discussion below is summarised from Holliday (1999).

The essentialist view
This says that culture is a concrete social phenomenon which represents the
essential character of a particular nation. Hofstede (1991) is probably the most
popular protagonist of the essentialist view. Although he says we should be wary of
national stereotyping, he bases much of his work on the characteristics which
differentiate national cultures. He presents geographical maps which present a world
divided into cultural bubbles From this view comes the notion that cultures are
physical entities, which can be seen, touched and experienced by others. Thus one can
hear travellers say it is so fulfilling to visit new cultures.

Within the essentialist national culture there is also a complex of sub-cultures which
vary according to the features of smaller groups, but maintain the major national
characteristics. Hence, we have the onion skin, or Russian doll, structuralist model,
in which subcultures, although having a tremendous variety, are somehow caught
within the larger national cultures.

The essentialist view is dominant in applied linguistics and language education, where
national culture is closely associated with national language, and language learning
therefore involves culture learning.

The non-essentialist view
This says that culture is a movable concept used by different people at different
times to suit purposes of identity, politics and science. A significant contribution to
this view is Baumanns (1996) ethnography o f the Southall suburb of London. His
research illustrates how people from different origins use culture and community
to refer to different things at different times, depending on who and what they are
talking about. The membership of the cultural groups to which they refer changes
depending on whether they are talking about music, community events, where they
shop, where they live; and the meanings of community shift.

Within this argument, the essentialist notion of national culture is seen as socially
constructed by nationalism, within Europe in the nineteenth century, and now in the
developing world, where governments, intent on the building of national unity,
promote the notion of national culture through education and the media. This notion
of national culture is also welcomed by people for whom it provides a sense of
national security, and enables them to say things like In the Indonesian context
teachers do X.

A similar process of reification takes place within multicultural societies, where the
idea of ethnic cultures is socially constructed by the discourses of ethno-politics
produced by the government, the media and popular stereotyping. It is these
discourses of culture which define minorities and by which minorities can define
themselves when they choose to play the culture card for political survival. Baumann
(1996) describes how minority groups are both manipulated by and manipulate this
dominant essentialist discourse of culture.

Another way in which culture is device rather than fact is where sociology uses
culture as a methodological device to enable ethnography. Within this paradigm,
when ethnographers study a particular grouping of people, they treat it as a culture.
By seeing a drinks machine queue or a class group as a culture, it is possible to
analyse the relationships between the people involved according to universal
principles of group cohesion. Thus, the non-essentialist view allows for a more
flexible view of culture, in which the social world is made up of a seamless melange
of human groupings, any of which, (families, classrooms, teachers, students, schools,
drinks queues) may be characterised and understood as small cultures.

Constraint or resource?
In brief evaluation, the essentialist view reduces and otherises. It is the basis of what
has come to be known as Orientalism, through which we see them as less complex
than they really are, and tend to explain all their actions as being caused by a
simplistic national culture. A national group who are currently perceived in this way
in English language education are the J apanese. What J apanese students are able to do
in the classroom is constrained by their national culture, which makes them passive
and non-participant (see Holliday 1997).

The essentialist view is thus constructed in similar ways to sexism and racism,
attempting to fit the behaviour of people into pre-conceived, constraining structures. It
can therefore be said to be culturist. In the same way as a sexist statement explains a
womans behaviour solely and reductively in terms of her femaleness, a culturist
statement explains a J apanese persons behaviour solely and reductively in terms of
her J apanese culture. Because the essentialist view sees national culture as a
concrete structure within which the behaviour of a particular group is placed, the
behaviour of a J apanese person is seen as totally confined by the constraints of a
national culture. Non-stereotypical behaviour can thus only be explained as a
departure from J apanese national culture, and is seen as anomalous, neither real
J apanese, nor Westernised.

If one takes the example of investigating classroom conflict between teacher and
student expectations, an essentialist approach would be to begin with the notion that
the teacher comes from one national culture and the students from another. This
discourse of essential cultural difference would lead the investigation and colour it. It
would begin with constructing teachers and students according to national cultural
characteristics, such as individualism and collectivism, and perhaps end with a
conformation of these categories,

Very differently, the non-essentialist view liberates culture as a resource for
investigating and understanding social behaviour, but is careful not to allow
preconceptions about national cultural characteristics to constrain the investigation.
Because it is free form national pre-definitions, a non-essentialist approach can help
us to unlock any form of social behaviour by helping us to see how it operates as
culture per se.

If one takes the same example of classroom conflict between teacher and student
expectations, a non-essentialist approach would not begin with the notion that the
teacher comes from one national culture and the students from another. Instead, one
would look at the classroom as a small culture and explore how the dynamics of its
culture lead to conflict. That the teacher and student interactants of this small culture
themselves come from different orientations would be something to be discovered in
what amounts to an ethnographic analysis. It may be that these different orientations
are connected with different national scenarios, with experience of other types of
classroom, educational or political cultures. But this also would be discovered by
ethnography rather than pre-defined. Another important factor, revealed through
analysis of the workings of the classroom culture itself, would be the interaction
between these imported orientations and the other elements of the classroom culture
which they confront, which would produce behaviour more indicative of the
classroom culture than of pre-defined national cultures (see Holliday 1998). A final,
very significant factor to be considered in such an analysis, is that statements about
culture are themselves artefacts of how people see themselves and others, and how
they wish to be seen. Thus, students or teachers who claim national cultural
underpinning for their behaviour are actually doing so to meet the requirements of the
small culture context within which they find themselves.

The non-essentialist view of culture therefore allows social behaviour to speak for
itself. It provides the resource of an overall understanding of how culture per se
works, which provides a framework for analysis of behaviour, but it does not impose
pre-definitions of the essential characteristics of specific national cultures. It thus
avoids cultures by prohibiting reductive statements such as Japanese students behave
like this because this is how the Japanese are. At the same time it recognises that
culture is used by people as their own resource for self-presentation

References
Baumann G. 1996. Contesting Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hofstede G. 1991. Cultures and Organisations: software of the mind. Maidenhead:
McGraw-Hill

Holliday A R. 1997. The politics of participation in international English language
education. System 25/3

Holliday A R 1998. Japanese fragments. Unpublished paper, Canterbury Christ
Church University College

Holliday A R. 1999 Small cultures Applied Linguistics 20/2

This article was published in The J apanese Learner (Issue 20: March 2000)