In their interactions with others, social actors and actresses seek to achieve such goals as controlling their conversations, comforting others, gaining compliance from others, and inducing others to like them. Intercultural and interpersonal differences between French and Italian people have an impact on their relations and communication. Expectations of strangers influence how people communicate with them.
To be effective and able to adapt behavior, people from different cultures must understand what their expectations are and how they influence the way other people communicate. Habituation is a related issue in strategy selection. French and Italian National identity can be explained as a socially constructed category negotiated through a dialogue between the individual and his social environment.
People are creatures of habit when it comes to interpersonal strategies. They find one strategy that works for them and then stick with it, ignoring the possibility of other strategies. Moreover, there are strategy “habits” within interpersonal relationships between people from different cultures (Samovar et al 33). French people can be characterized as conservatives who value personal freedom and stable way of lie. In contrast, Italians are more energetic and authoritative.
Most people face problems of adjustment that can best be understood in terms of contacts between groups rather than between individuals. This condition is particularly evident in Italy, a country whose ethnic composition has regularly been in a state of flux (Hofstede 2007).
When the Italians come to France they import a pitiful tendency to mistrust and avoid all those who do not share their particular dialect and customs. As a result, collective approaches to the problems created by their uprooting and by the necessity of adjusting to the new society tend to be organized along village lines, or at best on the basis of provincial (county) and regional (state) identification. In contrast, French people are less flexible and stick to certain values and cultural traditions. In contrast to French individuals, Italians use expressive non-verbal communication including gestures and mimics, facial expressions and body movements (Scollor and Scollon 151).
To some extent, the kind of emotional distance between marriage partners is probably also a relic from the old society. Also, gender has a great impact on family relations and values, communication patterns and interpersonal interaction. In Italy the wife was constantly busy preparing food, watching over the children, putting them to bed, ministering to their health, sewing in preparation for her daughter’s marriage, going to church, and the like. All these things she usually did at her home in the village (Rogers and Steinfatt 32).
Her husband, on the other hand, was at work on the fields. When he came home late in the evening he was too tired to help with family matters, and he usually went to bed early so that he might arise before dawn and be out on the fields again by sunrise. In Franco-Italian families, where a wife is Italian these historical traditions dominate (Hofstede 2008). Thus, if the family is headed by an Italian husband, it is influenced by patriarchal culture and authoritative relations.
Following Hofstede, two separate cultural and linguistic systems at an early age likely makes for difficulty in verbal self-definition, because the French and Italian vocabularies and mentalities commonly allow for only single, exclusive, national, and individual identities. In both cases (women who are professionally dissatisfied and women who have difficulty adjusting to France) the French husband generally scores low on the national belonging scale, that is, his family or part of it had only recently come to France. The greater equality implied by — is not, of course, the explanation of why a woman may adjust better to her adopted land than her counterpart in a +- couple, but it does raise the question of the deeper significance of transplantation according to the various conjugal configurations (Scollor and Scollon 205).
At the turn of the century, as now, women in Italy are quick to acknowledge their husbands as the family head but almost invariably have a strong hand in the important decisions of the family. Italian women have always been almost exclusively responsible for raising the children; attending to their children’s religious education; preparing their children for marriage; articulating social relations with friends, kin, and townsmen; and above all, preventing the ever-present animus between father and children from erupting into open violence. This transformation, however, is best understood in terms of parent child relations. The outstanding change in the life of the Italian community was “the loss of respect on the part of the children” (Samovar et al 76).
Intercultural friendship has a great impact on both friends but allows both of them keep unique cultural traditions and unique personal identity. Since the old culture proved largely irrelevant for life in the new society, the result of culture contact could only be a wholesale disintegration of the old patterns, and hence an initial period of disorientation. Italians are more flexible and friendly. They easy make friends and come into contact with new friends (Scollon and Wong 121; Gumperz 213).
They find it proper to join a few friends and relatives for a chat around the corner or for a game of cards and wine in the local tavern. As a result of these and other factors, there is very affective communication between friends. In contrast, French people are more conservative and self-centered. The easy make friends but do not trust new friends at once. The responses of the younger people represent a radical departure from the old culture in each case (Scollon and Wong 126).
To the extent that they concern very important, even sacred, aspects of culture, the differences reflect a deep cleavage between the old immigrants and their children. The younger generation has had to build its own society relatively independent of the influence of its elders. Indeed, the Italian born are the object of considerable ridicule on the part of the youngsters (Gumperz 232-233). The children are strongly attached to their parents; yet they looked down upon the “greasers.”
On the whole, the older people do not command the obedience from their children that the older generation receive in most societies. If one attempts to see beyond these limited horizons, nationally mixed couples can be said to constitute, in the international or European perspective, the founders of a new, binational and bicultural type of citizens, and their offspring, a second generation of transnationals and transculturals. Given the economic and social disparities attached to ethnic origins, and especially social class, this concept appears for the moment to be restricted to elite groups, that is, members of the dominant industrial nations, though social elites are emerging from the other groups as well (Gumperz 225; Hofstede 2008).
Thus, according to Freud’s Iceberg theory, human mind and perception of the world can be explained as three levels of consciousness: conscious, preconscious and unconscious. Each of these levels has a great impact on elations between individuals and their personal interaction (Freud’s iceberg Theory 2003). Taking into account Freud’s iceberg theory, it is possible to say that on the conscious level French and Italians control their verbal expressions and try to accommodate to new relations.
Preconscious level involves cultural values and traditions followed by generations (Freud’s iceberg theory 2003). They have a great impact on traditions and interpersonal communication retrieved from the memory. Unconscious level has a great impact on actions and conscious awareness, behavior patterns and communication. The political and philosophical implications of double national belonging, on one hand, and double psychological and emotional allegiances (to mother and father) on the other, are an open question. Moving from the principle that a child of a mixed couple is not the exclusive province of one or the other, but is possessed of a cultural persona in which both source cultures are present to varying degrees (from dominant French to balanced bicultural, but in any case double), casts doubt on the axiomatic nature of identity (Rogers and Steinfatt 39).
Two propositions, at least, seem necessary in order to broach the concept:
- “identity” is not made of a piece, but must acknowledge a multiple heritage
- a person is not a property, either of a state or of a parent.
Visible cultural markings, such as first names, languages, religions, and the other choices that must be made in the normal course of events, and which end up by orienting the children’s cultural penchant, were taken as indications of their insertion into one system more than the other, or their remaining suspended between the two (Freud’s iceberg theory 2003).
Using G. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, it is possible to say that Italians have high power distance and strong uncertainty avoidance. They tend to be collectivistic and more masculine than French people. “The high uncertaintly avoidance ranking indicates France’s concerns for rules, regulations, and issues with career security. In addition to uncertainty avoidance, both individualism and power distance are also ranked fairly high, with masculinity ranking the lowest” (Hofstede 2007).
The linguistic problems of the Italians, perhaps more than anything else, bear witness to their culture’s poor adaptability. The Italians are among the slowest to gain proficiency in the foreign language. The reason is not merely their very low educational level. Nor is it primarily their habit of living close to one another, where they are constantly tempted to keep using the old language (Rogers and Steinfatt 98).
If they encounter severe linguistic difficulties in the new society, it is due in large measure to the fact that their language, however intrinsically complex, is geared to the expression of ideas that are ancient, almost changeless, and highly restricted. The things that happen, moreover, belonged to rather limited confines of experience. In contrast, French people easy acquire new traditions and languages hence, the conceptual complexities inherent in the ethnically and religiously heterogeneous society. The idea of work autonomy and separate gains is virtually inconceivable (Hofstede 2007).
In sum, unique cultural characteristics of French people and Italians have an impact on their interpersonal relations and communication. This type of relationship tends to produce and sustain a certain distance between man and wife. It follows that involvement in an economy that is not based on family enterprise is likely to give family organization a radical jolt. Because of socialization into a culture and ethnic group, people share a large portion of intersubjective realities with other people in this culture or ethnic group. Shared intersubjective realities are sufficiently stable that people consider the shared portion as an “objective” reality.
It means that people try to adapt to another culture, but their cultural values and traditions have a great impact on behavior patterns and communication styles. Cultural differences influence the way people process information. Unconsciously, people assume that their expectations are correct and they behave as though they are. A comparison between French and Italian cultures shows that culture and ethnicity provide guidelines for appropriate behavior and the expectations people use in judging competent communication.
Works Cited
- Freud’s iceberg Theory. 2003. Web.
- Gumperz, J. J. Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986.
- Hofstede, G. Cultural Dimensions. 2008. Web.
- Hofstede, G. Analysis of France. 2007. Web.
- Rogers, E. M., Steinfatt, Th. M. Intercultural Communication. Waveland Pr Inc, 1998.
- Samovar, L. A., Porter, R. F., McDaniel, E. R. Communication Between Cultures. Wadsworth Publishing, 2006.
- Scollor, R., Scollon, S. W. Intercultural Communication: a Discourse Approach Wiley-Blackwell; 2 editioion, 2000.
- Scollon, R., Wong, S. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World Routledge, 2003.