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SECTION:
Culture and Body Language: How Foreignness Is Conveyed
Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Contributions to:
Email: Anselm Eder (Wien)
Studies of prejudices and xenophobia show again and again, that prejudices toward foreigners and toward the foreign are very often not based on information, but rather have the function of substituting for information. Prejudices, as pseudo-information, thus also make the search for information obsolete and create a cycle of self-confirming pseudo-knowledge. In the production of this pseudo-knowledge, unconscious interpretations of body-language stimuli play a role that is not to be underestimated. When the current culturally specific interpretations of body-language behavior differ, then with great probability the result in everyday interaction will be false interpretations, which above all cannot be so easily eliminated, because in most cultures it does not belong to the established rituals of everyday culture to discuss body- language signals. "What exactly do you mean by raising your eyebrows?," is something one cannot so easily ask a passer by, who is by chance standing next to one. It is easier to quickly make up a - usually wrong - everyday theory, to act according to this theory, to call forth by this theory a - probably just as wrong - reaction of one's partner and, on the basis of these two false reactions, to see one's original interpretation confirmed.
It could be the procedure of a section, with the help of experts, to referee theoretical and practical examples of behavior that might lead to body-language misunderstandings and also to put them to a practical test. A desired end product could be, for example, the establishment of a permanent work group, with a theme such as, for example, "Meetings with foreigners, meetings with the foreign; the foreign in and around us and what we make of it." Such a work group could, as a continuation of the conference, develop a concept for public work on the topic: "Everyday Association with the Foreign." The focus of such a work group could be the idea, that the foreign in and around us creates a very similar quality of problems and therefore probably must also be treated with a very similar quality of measures.
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