Chris Oliver

Fifty years after the publication of anthropologist Edward T. Hall's landmark book The silent language, which set Hall on course to becoming recognized as the founder of the field of intercultural communication, a puzzling question that remains is why Hall has managed to have such a significant impact on research and practice outside of anthropology, but very little lasting impact on anthropology itself. By examining anthropological writings on Hall's work between 1959 and the mid-1980s, this paper offers an understanding of how Hall came to be depicted and seen in American sociocultural anthropology and thus how, in the process, he failed to engage in a meaningful dialogue with his own discipline.

This article examines the use of intercultural training by Japanese corporations in order to help cultivate internationally competent Japanese employees. Its aim is not to gauge how effective or successful the training is from a managerial point of view, but instead to ascertain how the training uses "culture" in constructing a particular approach to communication as social practice. I argue that the training constructs communication with much emphasis on making oneself understood to others but with little regard for understanding others in terms of their cultural specificity, and that examining such meta-discursive constructs of social relations is important in social-scientific attempts to grasp the historical unfolding of multicultural relations more generally.