INTERCULTURAL COMPARATIVE RESPONSE STUDIES

"Different customs and institutions produce quite different ideas and attitudes [...]" declares the narrator of Thomas More's (° 1478-†1535) Utopia, and goes on to illustrate this claim by describing the first visit of people unfamiliar with Utopian customs in Utopia's capital:

"[...] when the Anemolians, who lived far away and had nittle intercourse with the Utopians, saw that all the people wore the same coarse clothing, they took it for granted that they did not have anything else. They themselves, being proud rather than a wise people, decide do dress themselves gloriously like gods and dazzle the eyes of the poor Utopians by the splendour of their garb. [...] Since they were nobles at home, the ambassadors wore cloaks of cloth of gold, gold rings on their fingers, caps with gold chains studded with pearls and other jewels, in short, decked out with all those things which among the Utopians were considered badges of slavery, signs of punishment, or toys for children. It was a sight to see how high they held their heads when they compared their clothing with that of the Utopians, [...]. It was not less amusing to think how far they were from creating the impression which they had expected to make, for in the eyes of the Utopians, except for those few who had visited other states, all this pomp and splendour seemed shameful. The Utopians saluted al the lowest people as lards and paid no respect at all to the ambassadors themselves, because they seemed to be dressed a slaves with their gold chains."1

This famous passage is undoubtedly a prime example of intercultural misreading, explicitly stated and analyzed. We can also read it as an illustration of universal cognitive principles of communication.

The key phase in such reading is "[...] they took it for granted [...]". Translated into cognitive terminology it means that the Anemolians had a cognitive scheme onto which they could map their perceptual data. Even if the scheme turns out to be invalid for the occasion, and results in an unwise behaviour, this in itself is I not a mark of stupidity, nor does the author claim that it is. When the narrator describes the Anemolians as stupid, he contrasts it with pride, not with wisdom, and makes clear that his critical target is not so much their misunderstanding of the Utopians as it is their mistaken values and mores. In fact, in terms of the culural dialogue and in defiance of the satirical intention, the Utopians are just as stupid! They too have cognitive schemas which, under the same circumstances of cultural difference, they cannot but misapply. In spite of the didactic message, that clothes do not and should not make the person, and the satirical exposure of the European dressing code, the fact remains that the Utopians salute all the wrong people.

'Realistically' the Utopians wish to salute the ambassadors, not to show respect to their servants, just a the Anemolians wish to impress the Utopians and not to offend or embarrass them. No wonder that very soon afterwards both Anemolians and Utopians change their patterns of behaviour and the comic misunderstanding is cleared up.

On the basis of these observations I would like to make my claims that in a full dialogue (i. e. in the presence of the two participants) true cultural mis- understandings are only temporal obstacle to successful communication and are easily removable.

Cognitively, true cultural misunderstandings are simply case of misinterpretations of data, derived from different encyclopedias.

They are natural material for comedy, in literature as in real life, as long as they do not become tools in serious power manipulations, where one party takes advantage of the other's ignorance or forces its conceptualization on the other.

Since reading and interpreting are at best deficient dialogue (a dialogue conducted in the absence of one participant and mediated by a written text) it would seem reasonable to assume that in the reading of texts cultural misunderstandings would be a more serious obstacle to successful communication. Because of the absence of the author, who is the sender of the message encoded in the literary text, the reader is unable to detect mistaken surmises and check the validity of a particular interpretation. However, precisely because the absence of the author is common to al reading situations, cultural differences do not create any particular interpretative problems.

In general the reciprocity between text and interpreter can be described in terms of the interaction between textual presentations -- designed to elicit from the interpreter a specific response (e. g. conceive of Hamlet as a tragic figure) -- and the cognitive models involved in their processing. There are four type of these cognitive models:

1. Linguistic information;

2. Cultural concepts (the various attributes of a concept such as 'water', the colour 'purple' or 'autumn' for example, and their concomitant cultural functions);

3. "Intertextual frames" (following Roberto Eco's terminology): knowledge of the pragmatic directive in the form of a genre indication, such as 'science fiction' or 'lyric poem', knowledge of particular historical data, literary topoi, etc.; and

4. Ideological frames in the form of political convictions, aesthetic norms, etc.

In terms of the reading process there is no real difference between hermeneutic problems caused by the heterogeneous repertoire of a culture -- which a writer may or may not be conscious of-- and those created by the unplanned meeting of two cultural repertoires. A reader might activate the wrong cognitive model for any number of reasons, cultural ignorance being in all probability the least important one. Aware of the presence of the codes of a different culture a reader might be more careful in surmising anything. Disregard for potential cultural differences is more often than not the result of ideological-psychological motivation rather than of lack of knowledge. An intercultural comparative study of the responses of readers to the same text is, I believe, an excellent tool for studying both the cognitive universals of the process of interpretation and the particularities of cultural differences within it.

Let me illustrate my theoretical and methodological claims by reporting the histories and result of two such studies. The first one focuses on the response of actual readers to the following description:

"[...] a pure Bedouin, his dark brown skin As dry as the sands of the Arabian peninsula, his prototypical

Semitic nose curving

Like the beak of a hawk."2

Anton Shammas, a contemporary Israeli/Palestinian poet and novelist and a professor of literature at the University of Michigan, published in the journal "Politika" an essay entitled In the Capering Light of Odessa on the Yarkon,3 in which he uses the above poem to prove the claim that the hegemonic Isreali culture has been, is, and will always be, disdainful of the region in which it is located and of its culture.

In the context of this overtly political essay Shammas mentions the "[...] pure Bedouin, his dark brown skin / As dry as the sands of the Arabian peninsula, [...]", as the point where "[...] few red lights began to flicker [..., the...] prototypal Semitic nose [... as the initiator of some...] sinful thoughts about Jewish anti-Semitism."4

My response to the poem in general and to this description in particular was very different. I read the passage as a representation of the native Bedouin, the romantic hero of my childhood sto- ries, who was one with the desert and its noble animals: the Arabian horse and hawk. Obviously my repertoire of stereotypes, their pertinent attributes, and their cultural status, a well as Shammas's includes at least two schemas (cognitive models) for processing the Semitic nose: the Semitic (or even Mediterranean) which is positively marked, and the anti-Semitic which is negatively marked in both his Arab and my Jewish cultures. Just as obviously each of us chose to activate a different schema-- the one which should be the less likely to be chosen in terms of our respective cultural backgrounds.

Trying to figure out what controls the choosing mechanism, and in particular the role of cultural differences in it, I asked the participants in a reader-response experiment to answer at its last stage, the following question...

-- "How do the 'thin lips' and 'hooked Semitic nose' of the khalif fit in your political-ideological interpretation of the poem?"

Some of the least trained participants, including most of the Arabs did not see anything peculiar about the description of the khalif. In their original responses to the poem they either included the hooked nose in their paraphrases or ignored it altogether. When they were specifically requested to comment on it, they were satisfied with pointing out that the khalif is presented as a typical Bedouin.

Most participants, however, shared the notion that a Semitic nose is not an innocent description, such as a wide, straight, or pretty nose (if any of these is innocent is another question), but that it activates a stereotype. If the interpreters' repertoire of stereotypes has included more than one which can be activated in the textual context the choice has been ideological. In this way, interpreters belonging to the Zionist left (whose interests are best served by not reading the poem in racist terms) chose the positive stereotype when they were familiar with it. Information about a participant's age and place of education was particularly important to determine the probable availability of the positive stereotype.

When the repertoire offers no alternatives, ideological manipulation replaces ideological choice. However, ideological manipulation is also constrained by the textual context. An interpreter who can deal with the image only through the activation of the Semitic-Arabic stereotype can deal with it in a number of ways. Choosing an appropriate cultural value is one such mechanism. It is possible to use the stereotype positively, as those who needed an enticing and powerful khalif did: the nose can be related to power and pride through its being likened to the beak of a bird of prey. It is also possible to use it negatively by invoking another cultural code: the note that stereotyping is wrong in itself, since it robs an individual of his/her individuality. Interpreters, whose interests such a view served, employed this strategy.

Similarly an interpreter who has access only to the anti-Semitic (i. e., anti-Jewish) stereotype must activate it in order to process the text, cannot negate its negative attributes, but can control its signification. Ideological manipulation works through the assignment of functions. In the experiment the use of the anti-Semitic stereotype has been explained in terms of two contradictory functions; to dehumanize and deligitimate the Arabs on the one hand, and to show that the Jews and Arabs are similar -- and so whatever is good or bad about the khalif is attributable to the Jews as well -- on the other hand. Here as elsewhere within the Jewish participants, those that belong to the extreme right made the same choices and executed the same manipulations as those belonging to the non-Zionist left. Apparently both need to read the poem as racist except that one group that hails it because of its alleged views while the other uses the same interpretation to condemn them. Politically conscious Arabs also used the racist option when they had the choice. As stated above, only with the less sophisticated interpreters among both Arabs and Jews did the choice of the schema reflect cultural differences.

My second example is the result of persona experience, not of an experiment. However, since it encompasses a deficient dialogue (i. e., my interpretation of a given text) as well as a full dialogue (the author was present and responded to my reading) I believe it can be called upon to substantiate my claims concerning the relative unimportance of cultural differences in literary interpretations.

In May 1995 I participated in a three-party cultural dialogue, whose participants were writers: Israeli (Jews and Arabs), Palestinians and Germans. I acted as a moderator in a session in which the Palestinian poet, Sami Al-Kilani, read the poem which I reproduce below in my translation (approved by the author):

"GREETINGS FROM THE NAKEB**

    The desert caravan moves over your wound's lips 
    The humps cry out of the scorching heat 
    The hoofs groan out of pain
    From the tsumud's** dwelling you draw 
    One kassida*** after another

    The camel-driver infuses the breasts
    With patience
    From your hurting wound
    Shade extends over their heads
    Lightening the burning heat 
    The burning heat of the Nakeb 

    Camel-driver, tell our loved ones 
    That we fell whipped under the hell's fire
    Over the sand's flame
    Into the Nakeb's bosom
    We fell like endless seeds
    Seeds that shall not lack water, even
    If drought dries up the sand of the Nakeb 

    Camel-driver, tell our loved ones 
    The body is not flesh and bones
    Along which pain spreads like beasts of prey 
    We spread like thin layers of steel 
    Reddening by the sand's glowing embers 
    From below and from above 
    Pouring out on them
 In couples, trios, thousands  
    Streams of dew
 Streams of the Nakeb
    Camel driver, turn to our loved one
    And return on your camels with the pictures 
    Scatter their dew drops over the desert's
 desolation
    So that it may be filled with grass it 
    And blossom with flowers 
    For us to embrace. 
    We'll peel onions in the enemy's eyes****
    We'll break the enemy's sword And we'll raise the flag of the Nakeb 

    Camel-driver, these are our tent-grounds 
    Their head towers like a mountain in hope and
 glory 
    Covering the view of the jail and its jailers 
    Casting them down 
    Come back to us and unload the burden Piles of pictures
    In exchange for which we'll give precious
 stones
    Carrying the emblem of the Nakeb 

    Camel-driver, turn to Zoya 
    Pluck from the spring-time of her cheeks and
 eyes 
    A kiss 
    Pass like a wondrous breeze 
    Quite, nothing as sweet 
    Come, slowly
    The burden is light and its price high 
    Ameliorate the desert's wilderness 
    Fill the desolation with generosity 
    And laughter will fill... 
    The skies of the Nakeb"

Reading the poem for the first time I read it as an overtly ideological text in which the reclamation of the desert is both a goal in itself and an emblem of a national struggle for independence. Accordingly I constructed the parched land of the Negev as the addressee of the first stanza. I visualized the wound in the form of a gashed or fissured land -- a common image of the Negev in Israeli culture, as you can see in the photograph below. The tsumud's dwelling I interpreted as an oasis and the caravan as an integral part of the stereotypal desert. The contradiction between the positive connotations of the Romantic stereotype and the suffering attributed in the poem to the inhabitants of the desert easy to resolve. The people who wish to reclaim the desert, to change it into fertile land, are not its native inhabitants. Rather, they are representatives of another culture: a culture which sees the desert not as its natural inheritance with which one needs to learn to cope, but as an enemy against which one needs to wage war. Consequently these new dwellers are not land cultivating pioneers and conquering soldiers. This dual identity motivates the mingling of the two different semantic regions, the scorching painful battleground on the one hand and the breezy dewy blooming garden on the other. It explains the transformation of scattered sparks into seeds which can withstands the drought, and of layered steel into floods of dew. The ultimate victory of the settler over the desert finds expression in the substitution of laughter in the closing stanza for the cries and groans of the opening one.

Dry land in the Negev.

The major symbol of pioneering -- a call for pioneering -- in the 1950's.

The above reading of the poem was not the outcome of a painstaking process of interpreting each semantic element so that it can be smoothly joined to the other. Nor was it the reset of an effort to guess what the writer might have wanted to say. It was a primary response based on the activation of literary and other cutter models, cognitive frames, which functioned as organizational hypothesis.

Hebrew Israeli culture provides at least three models onto which various image of the poem can be mapped in the prices of interpretation:

1. The dry land as a thirsty person.

Probably the most popular topos, prevalent in folk-songs, consists of a presentation of the Negev as a thirsty person praying for water:

"Have you heard how in the Negev,

The land confronting the skies,

Each clod of earth is always praying

Please, give us water!

Water, water! Give us water!

When we thirst for water;

We are thirsty, who will quench our thirst?

Who will give us water?"

2. The transformation.

In a parallel topos the dry land turns into a beautifull garden, and the grains of sand into blooming flowers without the laborious intervention of the pioneers. The transformation of the desert happens miraculously: the pioneers dance the national dance (Horah) and "Thousands of flowers suddenly bloom, covering the face of the desert."

The miraculous effortless blossoming of the desert, as well as the image of water suddenly running in its dry riverbeds is an ancient topos. Alredy in the Hebrew Bible this image is symbolically related to a national revival. It is wonder that the following selection of Biblical verses became a popular dance song in modern Israel:

"The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad

The desert shall rejoice and blossom;

Like a crocus it shall blossom abundantly,

And rejoice with joy and singing.")

[Isaiah 35, 1]

"[...]

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

And streams in the desert."

[ Ibidem., 6]

3. The desert as enemy.

Another popular topos is that of war between the desert and the pioneer. Dominating the political discourse of the pioneering period, the military metaphors of conquering the desolation invade the literary discourse as well. A folk-song of the 1930's tells the story of a road construction over sand dues in these terms:

"The burning pitch is hot,

The hand is bleeding;

In this way

Man fights the wilderness."

The ease with which the Zionist cultural frames could accommodate this poem, though it was written by a Palestinian poet whose attitude to the desert, I believed, must have been different, led me to conclude that the poem was a product of cultural interaction. I assumed that the poet must have assimilated the Hebrew models, and as writing a political poem employing a symbolic Negev, symbolic heat, symbolic dryness and even symbolic suffering. I was wrong. Kilani was not educated in Israel and his rapport with Israeli literature was rather limited. Unlike the Hebrew poems I quote above, his was a personal poem; political nit by virtue of a hegemonic discourse but by virtue of the situation of the fact that his experience was that of his generation, of his people.

In his response to my reading, the poet reminded me that the detention camp when he was held prisoner when the poem was written was located in a desolate part of the Negev; that water was lacking; that the reviving effect of the breeze at nightfall was a reality, not a metaphor. Without denying the political content of the poem, Kilani insisted on the potential symbolic identification of the blooming cool desert with personal relief, with a vision of peace and happiness.

With this in mind it became possible for me to visualize the phrase "[...] the lips of your wound [...]" in the form of parched lips; to construct the use of the second erosion as the poet's address to himself; to relate this traditional poetic device to other traditions of Arab poetry (well-known to me in their expressions in the Middle-Ages; in the Hebrew poetry of Al-Andalouse) -- the complaint of the exiled lover, for example. The activation of one of the fixed attribute of this thematic genre -- the description of the falling night as a camel stretching -- allowed me to relate the first stanza to the biographical information that the poem had been composed at nightfall when the poet was looking at the sky.

All of these elements formed part of the initial response of Palestinian and Israeli Arab readers, while they became part of my reading only at a later stage of the dialogue between myself, the poet, and other readers. Evidently, even though I was aware that the poem had been written when the poet was held as a political prisoner in a detention camp located in the Negev, I chose -- unconsciously -- to ignore the interpretive options relating the textual elements to the individual experience of a prisoner expressing his pain and longings. I needed the poet's actual rebuke to open my eyes to the other possibilities. I was more than usually ready to listen to the author's voice because it was and intercultural dialogue. Otherwise I might have maintained the opinion, currently popular in the West, that once the poem has became a text its author is only one of its readers.

Can I blame my initial myopia on cultural differences? Not really. As my first example shows, the interpretation of a hooked nose as either a positive attribute of racial identity or as a malevolent caricature has little to do with cultural differences. Just as in that expedient readers were motivated by their ideological-psychological needs in choosing a particular cultural construct from a wider repertoire, so I was motivated on this occasion. The text lended itself to a reading which underlined the similarity between the poet and myself. This similarity was welcomed in as much as I could base on it the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between me and the poet. The easier access that I have to my cultural constructs should have been in my particular case compensated by my experience as a literary critic and by the information at hand. But it was not.

This intercutural comparative study of readers's responses reveals then some universals of reading and interpreting.

An Israeli soldier, nicknamed of 'Beasts of the Negev'.

This caricature depicts the face of a soldier which contours are those of the map of Israel, his beard transformed into a field.

The ideological intertext (by which I mean the biographical induced view of the word and one's relation to it, as well as the ensuing known and unknown subjective interests) is the most important interpretative frame. This is evident in the presence of ideological thematization already at an early stage of the reading process, and, more significantly, in the interpretations of those elements which are open to ideological choices and manipulations. Whenever an interpreter is given a hermeneutic choice (i. e., the textual context allows the choice of more that one coded [intersubjective] meaning of a polysemic element) it is made by the ideological intertextual cognitive frame. Cultural concepts are important, though subjugated to both ideological and hermeneutic frames. Polysemic frames seem to be more important than clearly defined ones, because they provide the reader with options to choose from. An intercultural literary dialogue enlarges the scope of polysemy in a text. But in this, as in the mode of its interpretation, it is not different from any other deficient dialogue. **

NOTES

* Nakeb = The Arabic name of the southern part of Israel; 'Negev' in Hebrew.

** tsumud = In Arabic: survival related to holding on, being linked to the land.

*** kassida = A term in Arab poetry: an intentional poem; a long measured poem with a Prologue; a rhymed letter. During the long trips of a caravan the camel-driver chanted such long poems.

**** In Palestinian folklore this is a proverbial boast given in response to a challenge.

**Revised version of the paper:

BEN-PORAT, Ziva, Intercultural Comparative Response Studies,, in ENCONTRO INTERNACIONAL "DIÁLOGO CULTURAL E DIFICULDADES DE ENTENDIMENTO" (COLLOQUIUM ON CULTURAL DIALOGUE AND CULTURAL MISUNDERSTANDING), Macao, Instituto Cultural de Macau - Fundação Oriente, 13-14 October 1995 - [Oral communication... ].

1 MORE, Thomas, OGDEN, H. S. V., trans., Utopia, in "The Norton Anthology of English Literature", New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1968 [revised].

2 DOR, Moshe, Directions, in "Yediot Achronot", Israel, 23rd November 1990 (Literary Supplement) -- For the descriptive passage.

BEN-PORAT, Ziva, Cognitive Poetics and the Experimental Study ƒ Literature in Literary Pragmatics, in FILLM CONGRESS, Brasilia, August 1993 --[Oral communication (Forthcoming Proceedings of...)] -- The comparative study of the responses had to do with the poem (Directions) as a whole, and is fully described on this paper of mine.

The English translation is my own. "Yediot Achronot" is the most widely read Israel daily newspaper.

3 SHAMMAS, Anton, In the Capering Light of Odessa on the Yarkon, in "Politika", September 1991, pp. 14-17, p.

All quotations are my translation.

Odessa, the Russian town of the Black Sea, was an important centre of Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist literary activities arund the turn of the century. The Yarkon is a small river in Tel-Aviv. The combination symbolizes here the alledged East-Europen orientation of the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. "Politika" is the literary organ of the Zionist left.

4 The 'Oriental' or 'Colonial' origin of this positive stereotype does not in itself make it an element in a simply colonial discourse. Things were more complicated for the Jewish writers who used it, since they beloged to a minority group under the same foreign rule as the Bedouins and sought to become natives. I would also claim that the Semitic nose has been positivey marked in Mediterranean countries before the developmet of the 'Colonial' discourse. So as proof I can cite visual and verbal portraits of Roman aristocrats and Renaissance Italian magnates.

Two hundred people participated in the experiment. Sixty two questionaires, filled by undergraduate (first year) students in the Faculty of Humanities are still being analysed.

The rest consists of the following groups:

1. Seventy three kibbutz high school students (all of them of Jewsh descent);

2. Forty two students who belong to a Jewish-Arabic youth movement (thirteen declared themselves to be Israelites of Jewish descent, twenty nine identifed them-selves as Arabs, Israelite of Christian descent or as decendents of mixed marriages);

3. Eleven cunsellors at the same youth movement (seven Jewish, four Arabs); and

4. Eleven graduates students and advanced undergraduate students who particiated in the seminar in which this work began.

The constituency of the participants explains the highy unbalanced political distribution. One shoud also note that left and right may mean different things in the Arab and Jewish communities. The gap between the Palestinian left and the Zionist left, which is a central issue in Shammmas's article, is conspicuous in the answers as well.

5. A fuller understanding of this image and its role in activating a stereotype and the ideologicaly controlled chain rection caused by its activation requires a cognitive study proper. It is necessary to find out how salient in the hooked nose as an attribute of particular stereotype. Would people from the same cultural communities as the participants (or the participants themselves) react to the portrait of a Renaissance Grand Signore with a hooked nose in the same way? When would Jew activate the anti-Semitic frame in contexts other that a caricaturist presentation of a Jew? How do Arabs react to his feature in various descriptive contexts? These are examples of the questions that a cognitive study of the stereotyped concept seeks to answer. This study has not yet been completed.

* Ph. D. in Comparative Literature by the University of California, Berkeley/California. Acting Director of the of The Porter Institute of Poetics and Comparative Literature of the University of Tel Aviv, Israel.