Jan Servaes, Reflections on the Differences in Asian and European Values and Communication Modes, Asian Journal of Communication¸ volume 10, number 2, 2000. pp. 53-70.
Journalism & The Academy, Dr. Zelizer
By Lokman Tsui
Servaes takes on an ambitious project in discussing the differences in Asian and European values and how they impact communication modes. He uses two cases, human rights and Thai culture, as points of reference.
He starts with the straw man: globalization and modernization is supposed to lead to homogenization and convergence of cultures. He argues that modernization does not necessarily change cultural values. Rather he suggests that social change is more like the building of a web, than the building of a chain. So how do we research the complexity of this?
He stresses the importance of acknowledging the past. Servaes refers to Said’s famous Orientalism thesis which argues that what we know about the East is not derived from access to objective knowledge about the Orient, but comes from a ‘set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism’ (p55). In other words: “Europeans look at Asian values with Western eyes, while Asians view Western values with Asian eyes†(p55). The task of the researcher is to reveal these distinctive structures of meaning. Â
One major difference is how the Self, composed of both individual and group identifications, is conceptualized. What gets stressed is different from each culture, but that we should not confuse this with an either/or choice. He flags the danger of assuming that found differences between societies can also explain for difference in behavior of its individual members. Another difference is a holistic (Asian) versus a Cartesian (European) way of thinking. As a consequence, Eastern culture is dominated by harmony, Western by power. Servaes continues with differences in modes of communication, while emphasizing he is talking about ideal types so that his arguments are not taken as stereotypes. One example he uses is how social relations patterns are different: where in the West the assumed mode is equality, in the East it is hierarchy. Another difference is that Asians talk indirect and implicit, and prefer a holistic or total communication, or ‘no communication’ if that is not possible.
Servaes continues in his article to relate these differences to Thai culture and the discussion on the ‘universality’ of human rights, providing us the challenge to think how we can go from cultural relativism to cultural diversity.
As a consequence, Eastern culture is dominated by harmony, Western by power.
look at the comments above, especially “dominate”, it is still the Western eyes on East, for “dominate” equals to power, anyway, harmony could never came into power in “domination” per se.
Interesting stuff!
I took a comparative philosophy class in the undergraduate years. One uneasiness that I remember having was the idea of “comparing” east and west “philosophies.” David Wong wrote an encyclopedia entry on “comparative philosophy east and west” you might find that useful. Basically, what i found uneasy about comparative philosophy or comparative anything is that anything, seems to me, is comparative already. language is said to be a uniquely human capacity because of its reflexivity. this means that things are already comparative on the very ground of how or consciousness works (c.f.phenomenology). I wonder what would a phenomenology of communication would be like, and if we could “compare” (comparing on the ground of the difficult concept of experience of various kinds of culturally/historically grounded activities), instead of social concept such as hierarchy and harmony…they are too abstract, it seems to me, to be useful as analytical tools (derived from theoretical groundings) for “comparing” explicitly.