Abstract
Living in a mixed marriage can be seen as a constant sliding between two worlds, constantly questioning deeply rooted beliefs and demanding that they be balanced with those of someone with a different culture. Conversations of Intercultural Couples seeks to shed light on this process by analysing the emic perceptions and language learning experiences of migrants living in an intercultural marriage and dealing with a different linguistic and cultural environment. More specifically, it aims to investigate issues of language learning as a key to integration within a foreign community, differences in daily sociocultural practices between immigrants’ homeland and the new country, and the perception and understanding of hybrid identities for individuals living between different cultures.
The project is based on interview recordings of conversations with nine intercultural couples, namely, Anglophones married to native German-speaking Swiss, who live in the diglossic area of Interlaken, central Switzerland. In her analysis of the negotiation and performances of hybrid identities – which forms the main focus of the book – Gonçalves rejects previous essentialist models where identity is seen as a static and fixed concept, regarding them instead as discursively co-constructed and negotiated through social interaction. However, essentialist views are still considered ‘the “starting point” for understanding the interrelationship between language and identity construction’ (p. 88). This becomes particularly apparent when having to contrast the fact that the participants perceive their identities as stable and unchanged, while simultaneously admitting a certain degree of change and adaptation to a number of practices believed to be Swiss.
Chapters 4 and 5 establish the author’s approach to identity construction by adopting Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) sociocultural linguistic model, in which language is seen as a catalyst by which identities not only emerge but also are constructed. According to this principle, through the acquisition of temporary roles in conversations – that is, positions – subjectivity and inter-subjectivity are created by individuals. In this way, by looking at how the participants of her study position themselves (reflexive positioning) and others (interactive positioning) in discourse, the author comprehensively shows how identity is constructed through language. To underscore different types of positioning, the author looks into specific linguistic devices derived from Bucholtz and Hall’s model: direct reported speech, prosody, pronominal use, code-switching and mixing, and indexical process of labelling.
The analysis ultimately shows that admitting a culturally hybrid identity is not easy, even in those cases when participants claimed to accept it. The reasons for such a reluctance remain, however, undiscovered. The author presents a broad analysis of the concepts of performance, performativity and doing in sociology studies and gender theory, incorporating in particular West and Fenstermaker’s (1995) model of doing, whereby semiotic processes of identities, such as gender, race and class, are considered as socially created and reproduced in interaction with others. Additionally, the author proposes to include the concept of culture in such a model as an inter-subjective accomplishment as well. What stems from the analysis of the data, in fact, is that doing Swiss is carried out by the study’s participants in social interactions within their various communities of practice.
As a key to integration within a foreign community, the Swiss Federal Office of Migration considers learning a national language a crucial feature for immigrants’ adaptation in Switzerland. What emerged from the recordings excerpts illustrated in Chapters 6 and 7, however, was that language competence is only one of the several daily social practices that contribute to the construction of what doing Swiss means for the participants. Themes such as language practice, cooking/eating and shopping also arise, and individuals’ acceptance or rejection of these sociocultural practices serves as identity markers in admitting, rejecting or embracing hybridity. Moreover, rather than learning a national language, acquiring competence in the local Bernese dialect appears as the key to integration. As a result, ‘doing Swiss becomes an intricate and at times difficult aspect of individuals’ identities that they are able to display or keep hidden depending on the socio-historical circumstances and their interlocutors’ (p. 102).
This is perhaps the main result of the study, for which the author proposes the adoption of two terms to understand identity: situated and situational. While the term situated refers both to ‘an individual’s sense of self, often characterized as “stable” and somewhat “fixed”’ and to how the individual is ‘seen’ by others, the term situational identities is used when individuals ‘describe themselves or others as being or acting in a way with reference to particular circumstances or conditions’ (p. 23). The strict intertwining of both types of identities is shown in excerpts of the conversation recordings where both situated and situational identities can be revealed, even simultaneously within a single utterance. By introducing these notions, the author aims to compare and contrast the saliency of the participants’ past identities with their current ones.
Only a few previous studies have specifically investigated identity construction and language in intercultural marriages, the most intimate community of practice. Although Conversations of Intercultural Couples offers readers a solid analysis of the linguistic devices through which cultural hybridity is constructed by individuals living abroad, the book falls short of showing concretely how living in an intercultural marriage specifically affects participants’ emic perceptions of hybridity – in contrast to, for example, migrants not living in an intercultural relationship. This is probably due to the fact that although the focus of the study is, as claimed in the title, the intercultural couple, most attention is placed on the foreign spouses and the construction of their hybrid identities. Nevertheless, the book provides useful insights for all scholars interested in the relationship between discourse and identity, and especially the linguistic repertoires of culturally hybrid identities.