Social Ties
Peer Group as the Social Imaginary: Evidence from Contours of Language
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Suranjana Barua
This paper will examine the position of the peer group as the social imaginary in the lives of graduate and postgraduate students. In the everyday negotiation of college/university life, the peer group is a powerful social collective that often influences the individual’s identity by defining one’s subjective experience of being in, or affected by, such a real/imagined collective. Through a micro-analysis of talk-in-interaction in various peer group contexts of college/university students in Assam (India), the paper works within a Conversation Analysis framework to examine assertion, mitigation and effacement of the peer imaginary in the interest of establishing selfhood. It makes the central claim that the peer imaginary is a potent social entity as well as ideological intermediary that is appropriated or rejected through the use of language for the sake of contextual negotiation of individual, and sometimes in-group, identity. Internal perceptions of self are mediated experiences of, and in relation with, the social and the ways of collective understanding of the social imaginary often end up (re-)creating social identities themselves at the moment of interlocution. From this perspective, assertions of identity are really contextual and negotiated use of language offset by the peer group as the all-powerful real/imagined social.
Cultural Cosmopolitanism as a Basis of Intercultural Communication
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mun Cho Kim
In a globalized world, the role of cross-cultural communication has been increasingly emphasized. In the field of communication studies, the term ‘intercultural’ implying the interaction of people of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds has been favored over ‘multicultural,’ since interculturality goes beyond passive acceptance of the existence of multiple cultural traditions and helps to activate cross-cultural dialogue. Here, cosmopolitanism, the idea that all human beings are citizens in a single community, emerges as a crucial factor facilitating intercultural communication. Although different versions of cosmopolitanism envision the community in different ways, it is basically classified into three categories; moral, social and cultural. Among those, cultural cosmopolitanism remains most crucial, since culture is said to be “a formidable machine that promotes the merit of diversity by producing differences". This paper starts with a review of the general process of globalization highlighting cosmopolitanism as a key concept in the globalized world. Next, focusing on cultural cosmopolitanism that seeks to diminish ethnocentrism, its nature and effect are investigated. Then, the shift in sociological discourse on cosmopolitanism is examined. Given the discussions, tasks and procedures of intercultural communication aiming at cross-cultural awareness, understanding, sensibility and association that give rise to new ways of seeing, thinking, feeling and living in relation with others are explored.
