Between culture and pragmatics: Scylla and Charybdis? The precarious condition of intercultural pragmatics.

This article tries to tease out some strands in the current debate about intercultural aspects of human behavior. Shying away from the facile interpretation of the term as "that which can safely be transported to and from cultures," I postulate the basic autochthonic character of any culture: the intercultural is only possible on the basis of an intracultural reality. This has consequences for the way we handle theoretical issues, such as the comparability of speech acts across cultures, and for our practice, whenever we have to deal with problems that beset immigrants who try to keep their culture intact while mingling with another culture. The solution is sought in a golden middle between pious romanticism and bone-hard realism, an attitude that so far only has existed in the minds of theorists, but needs to get translated into practice to avoid intercultural clashes of the kind we've been witness to over the past decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]