Holliday, A. (2013). Understanding Intercultural Communication: The Grammar of Culture. London, England: Routledge.

Different cultural backgrounds oftentimes lead to miscommunication, prejudice, and conflicts. Understanding Intercultural Communication: The Grammar of Culture, by Adrian Holliday, aims at understanding the nature of culture and developing competency in intercultural communication. The purpose of the book is to help the reader find common ground and shared experiences with unfamiliar cultures.

The book is divided into 10 chapters. A brief scope of each chapter is provided below:

In Chapter 1, “The Grammar of Culture,” Holliday sets the stage for the discussion by presenting grammar of culture as a structure that allows individuals to read cultural events and explaining how this concept is used throughout the book. This chapter also introduces the categories of cultural action such as statements about culture, global position and politics, cultural resources, and underlying universal processes.

Chapter 2, “Cultural Practices,” elaborates on the phenomenon of cultural practices as a representation of the special features of different cultural groups and the formation of cultural identity. In this chapter, the author also describes how underlying universal cultural processes can, on the one hand, help us read the complexity across cultural boundaries and thus avoid prejudice, and, on the other hand, lead us to misunderstanding and othering by making us form superficial responses to differences between cultural practices.

Building on the concepts addressed in Chapter 2, the next chapter, “Investigating Culture,” presents a bottom-up approach to examining cultures as opposed to top-down approach that leads to stereotyping and prejudice. In this part of the book, Holliday explains that the bottom-up approach to investigating cultures needs to be accompanied by the disciplines of making the familiar strange and putting aside easy answers and by opening up to complexity and asking ethnographic questions.

Chapter 4, “Constructing Culture,” sheds crucial light on the process of small culture formation by describing the mechanism of routinisation (making behavior routine), reification (making unreal things appear real) and development of rituals. In this chapter, Holliday also addresses the phenomena of idealization of self and demonization of the foreign other as essential elements of small culture formation.

Chapter 5, “Dialogue With Structure,” aims at understanding the differences between the essentialism (the process of assimilation to another national structure) and non-essentialism (the existence of cross boundaries without between cultures without assimilation). In this chapter, the author also addresses the incongruence of rumors about imaginary cultural behavior and direct observation about actual cultural behavior.

Making the claim that small culture formation is influenced by historical narratives, in the next chapter, “Historical Narratives,” Holliday describes how historical narratives can contribute to the construction of self and other and theories of culture. Cultural contestation and sociological blindness—the issues related to historical narratives—are also examined in this chapter.

In Chapter 7, “Discourses of Culture,” Holliday explores the bottom of the grammar—discourses. Discourses are presented as things that people construct to make sense of culture, which can draw people to adopting and conforming to cultural practices. The chapter also discusses the complexity of the roles that people have with regard to discourses as well as the various degrees of power and control.

In the next chapter, “Prejudice,” the author explains how different kinds of constructs of culture can lead to cultural prejudice. Holliday also discusses the process of making sense of cultural differences and the roles of cultural belief and disbelief in this process.

Chapter 9, “Cultural Travel and Innovation,” presents the architecture of cultural travel, or the process of carrying our cultural experiences from one location to another. Holliday describes how people can adopt, reject, change, or important cultural practices in a new cultural environment and how they can be either accepted to this new cultural environment due to cultural belief or rejected by this new cultural environment due to prejudice or cultural disbelief.

The last chapter, “Epilogue,” presents the theoretical framework to the approach used in the book.

The structure of each chapter follows the same model. The text can be divided into two parts based on the nature and the function of the material: explanatory and analytical. The former consists of explanatory and discursive prose, which can be studied by the reader independently. The latter consists of the ethnographic narratives and their analyses and the reflective activities, which can be used as material for workshops and classrooms. The activities (e.g., questions, tasks) invite the reader to reflect on the ideas and concepts presented in the book. Whereas these activities are related to the content of each chapter, they are introduced independently, without any interference with the main text. In addition to the main text, each chapter offers a list of further readings with short annotations.

The tool that I found particularly helpful in Understanding Intercultural Communication is the thematic list of contents presented at the beginning of the book. The list introduces the concepts explored in the book with the indication of the chapters and the sections. This navigation tool can help the reader save time cross-referencing within the body of the book. In addition, Holliday also provides a glossary of the key terms.

Understanding Intercultural Communication can also be a useful resource for TESOL professionals. For example, ethnographic narratives included in the book can help English language instructors bring the elements of intercultural communication into their curricula. The explanations and examples included in the book can serve as a guide for teachers in their own journeys across cultures and provide a better understanding of students’ cultural backgrounds.

One potential limitation of the book is related to the further reference sections at the end of each chapter, which are not organized alphabetically. Nevertheless, taking everything into account, Understanding Intercultural Communication: The Grammar of Culture is a helpful guide for those readers who are willing to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of culture in order to deal with unfamiliar cultural practices and find success in intercultural communication.