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George W. Grace

University of Hawaii

11 February 1991

ETHNOLINGUISTIC NOTES

Series 3, Number 42

FURTHER REMARKS ON MONOCULTURE IMPERIALISM

Some of the wording in Grace 1990 may have seemed to imply some kind of organized conspiracy behind monoculture imperialism. For example, on p. 618 I spoke of "the imperialistic designs of the agents of [the monoculture]", and in the next paragraph said "that promoters of the monoculture are constantly trying to increase its dominance everywhere in the world". My purpose in writing this is to explain a little more clearly how I think the forces of what I called "imperialism" work. To begin with, I do not think that there is an organized conspiracy. In fact, I think that the principal agents of this "imperialism" have very different ideas about what they are actually doing.

While I do think that there are some people who are more or less conscious promoters of the monoculture, I don't think they are really the predominant factor in its spread. I think a very large number of people and institutions contribute to that in one way or another. Although it should be kept clearly in mind that I have no claim to expertise in such matters, I will try to give more substance to the discussion by sketching out very briefly and roughly what I think some of the factors are.

I think that there are a lot of activities by a lot of people which tend to increase monoculture dominance. To begin with, there are governments which are concerned to establish international conventions governing trade, warfare, and the whole range of international contacts, and to get existing conventions adhered to as widely as possible. Such conventions and the procedures surrounding their preparation, adoption, and implementation are governed generally by established monoculture practice, and therefore themselves extend monoculture dominion. As regards trade, there are such matters as assuring access (especially by monoculture entrepreneurs) to markets and to raw materials according to uniform rules; as regards war, there are such matters as establishing the conditions under which the initiation and prosecution of war is to be regarded as legitimate, and specifying what weapons may and may not legitimately be used, what are legitimate targets, what is acceptable treatment of civilian and military prisoners, etc.; as regards international contacts, there are such matters as conditions governing diplomatic missions, rights of citizens while abroad, cooperative arrangements for international carriers, mail and other communications, police matters, etc.

In addition to these government-initiated and government-conducted activities, there are many that are initiated by private individuals or organizations. E.g., business or religious organizations wanting to obtain permission and favorable conditions to operate in particular parts of the world. Prominent among these are often businesses concerned with obtaining raw materials or local products for export and with developing markets for their own products. The tourist industry is also often very influential. And these activities, where successful, may lead to communities of representatives of the monoculture in residence and a resultant demand for many other monoculture services.

Of less direct, but not insignificant, importance would be groups concerned with current monoculture political issues: e.g., groups concerned with protecting various aspects of the environment throughout the world or in particular parts of it and groups concerned with various kinds of what they hold to be universal human rights or rights of prisoners, minorities, women, fetuses, animals, etc., throughout the world or in particular parts of it. Some of these groups, of course, represent causes which could not be said to correspond to established monoculture values, but which are in fact highly controversial within the monoculture setting. In many cases there is, in that setting, an organized opponent group representing the precise opposite cause. My reason for including such groups is that I think their position most often presupposes general monoculture values and that their arguments are likely to appeal directly to such values.

All of the above-named activities bring acculturative pressure to bear on the not-fully-acculturated. Those who carry out any such activities thereby function as de facto agents of the monoculture. However, there are many differences among them and the parts they play. The attitudes and activities of some seem to favor the spread of the monoculture in its totality. In fact, some individuals seem to favor the earliest possible "modernization" of all the world--by force, if necessary. The attitudes and activities of others are focused on quite narrow issues. Some act largely for reasons of personal moral conviction; others out of other--most often economic--interests. Some of the convinced are more convinced of the overall superiority of the monoculture than are others, in fact, some may harbor quite negative feelings toward many monoculture values and institutions. Etc.

All of the above examples are of deliberate attempts to spread the monoculture or some version or aspects of it. However, a large part of the not-fully-acculturated world is also subjected to continual acculturative pressures from activities which are intended to be strictly neutral, but which are shaped by monoculture assumptions. The reporting of the news media is a conspicuous example. Although reporters may have no intention of doing anything other than reporting the news in an objective manner, they may (almost invariably do, in my experience) perceive and interpret everything in terms of the monoculture world view. (Even if a reporter were able to understand an event in local vernacular culture terms, his/her intended audience would be a monoculture one, and he/she therefore would presumably have to reconceptualize it in monoculture terms). Thus, people are continually being given a monoculture-eye view of even the events of their own lives. And so people who have no intention whatever to impose their values on others may inadvertently, but quite effectively, act as agents of the monoculture.

And this leads to a general point about rhetorical strategy. One very effective strategy for inducing people to adopt an assumption is to expose them (persistently) to a way of talking which makes it an unstated presupposition. The objective, of course, is to induce the hearers to come, perhaps unconsciously, to use the same way of talking so that their discourse comes to be informed by the assumption in question. In other words, you talk in a way that would (as careful analysis would show) make sense only in a world where the particular assumption was valid. If you can entice your audience into this mode of discourse, then you will have effectively implanted the assumption.

This strategy can be pursued deliberately, but it is often practiced quite unconsciously. It can accompany overt arguments for the assumption in question, or it can be employed subtly with no overt acknowledgement of the speaker's motives.

It was this kind of effect that I had in mind in including some groups representing controversial causes among those which bring acculturative pressure to bear on the not-fully-acculturated. Their way of talking about their subject is likely to assume the monoculture view of the world, and therefore to listen to their arguments at all will require some accommodation to that view. Therefore, I consider them instrumentalities for spreading monoculture values (and often quite heavy-handed ones at that).

And now we may turn to linguistic theory, where the case is somewhat similar. Of course, linguists as a group are not concerned with expanding the hegemony of the monoculture. However, linguistics has developed a way of talking about language which presupposes something like the following propositions:

1. Any linguistic expression used in actual speaking or writing is in some language (i.e., it is governed by the grammar of that language).

2. It is approximately true that in the case of each language, it is possible to determine exactly which expressions belong to that language (i.e., which expressions its grammar governs).

3. By the same token, it is approximately true that for any expression, it is possible to determine exactly which language it belongs to (i.e., which grammar it is governed by).

4. Each language has a grammar and vocabulary which are known (in a novel sense of the work "know") by their speakers--in fact, it is only as knowledge in the minds of the speakers that they exist at all.

5. When speakers speak, they compose sentences on the basis of--by applying--their (grammatical and vocabulary) knowledge of their language.

6. When individuals understand something which has been said, they do this by "processing" the phonetic information they have received--i.e., analyzing it in terms of their (grammar and vocabulary) knowledge. (1)

Although I think these propositions are somewhat true of monoculture standard languages and of properly schooled speakers of those languages when they are working with certain kinds of monoculture expository prose writing (and, derivatively, monoculture expository prose speech), and although I think they represent something like what the monoculture schools teach us to believe about language, I think they present an extremely distorted picture of human language as a whole and of human beings as language users. Although such systems of false assumptions may be defended as being the keys to scientific progress, it is progress in some directions only while the same assumptions can at the same time be doing considerable harm in other areas.

Anyway, I hope I have made it clear that I didn't intend to suggest that monoculture imperialism has any more conscious supporters among linguists than among any other groups, and furthermore that I didn't intend to suggest that there is anything like an organized conspiracy on the part of anyone to achieve final monoculture ascendancy. What I was most particularly concerned with was support which was not intended as support at all.

However, I am also concerned with a kind of culturocentrism in contemporary linguist theory that I find not entirely unembarrassing. Someone once said of the nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists that they saw evolution, biological and cultural, as a grand scheme by nature the ultimate aim of which was to produce the Victorian English gentleman. Is contemporary linguistic theory very different? Isn't it saying, at least by implication, that the evolution of the human brain was designed quite specifically to accommodate the linguistic competences of today's monoculture mainstreamers? Doesn't this make such competences appear to be part of a grand teleological scheme? And doesn't it thereby (and that, of course, was my point in Grace 1990) make the culture in which they were designed to function--the monoculture--appear to be the ultimate objective of the whole scheme?

NOTE

But that translation in one's own language can't represent understanding either because, according to the linguistic theory we are discussing, it must in its turn be "processed" by one's internal grammar. This presumably yields another translation (into what? a language of the mind?).

To arrive at what I think "understanding" should mean seems to require whatever further regresses are required to arrive at the language of some homunculus in there, who then does the processing into real understanding. Real understanding, I think, implies having obtained some kind of knowledge that doesn't just mimic the linguistic expression. The expression must somehow be digested and assimilated. Real understanding involves knowing what what was said means to us, what it's significance to us is, what it's good for, what implications should be found in it for our state of mind or future behavior.

I don't understand how knowing how an expression is put together can be equated with understanding it. I don't even understand how such knowledge is necessarily involved in any way in understanding. Back up

REFERENCE

Grace, George W. 1990. Is contemporary linguistic theory an instrument of cultural imperialism? Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, Number 41. Printout. 23 pp. Back up. Also internet World Wide Web page (Click Here).

Last updated 20 January 1996