Pidgins and creoles

Last week a friend of mine posted a blog entry discussing the oddities of created languages and created cultures. This got me thinking about the relation between culture and language in various (real) subcultures and reminded me of a particularly resonant analogy I ran across while doing my orals reading last year.

First some back story: There’s a professor at Harvard named Peter Galison – PhDs in physics and history, turned down the directorship of The Institute for Advanced Study by the time he was 50, who is, by all accounts, a colossal prick. Last year I waded though the 982 pages of his book, Image and Logic: a material culture of microphysics, in which he makes some fascinating observations while showing off the fact that he is too important to have to take stylistic advice from his editor.

The book itself studies the sorts of social structures that accompanied the development of particle accelerators during the 20th century, particularly within the groups which designed and built the detectors which make sub-atomic particles visible. These detectors are where theoretical physics meets reality, transforming the subatomic shrapnel from unspeakably high-energy collisions into visible tracks and measurable quantities. They are particularly interesting sites of study because the detectors embody types of training, theoretical approaches, and intellectual lineages in their design and they are the focal points of individual research teams which then compete with other groups for all-important "beamtime". One detector, for instance, might try to capture a picture of a certain particle, for which a single picture – a “golden event” – is enough to prove the existence of a particular species, while others gather statistical data to test various competing theoretical models. As particle accelerators grew bigger - expanding from Lawrence’s table-top cyclotron at Berkeley to the 27 km main ring at CERN - the ever-increasing scale and complexity of the experimental apparatus has driven this fragmentation. These research groups, can exist for years, developing their own languages, methodological approaches, social structures, etc. An anthropologist who studied the physicists at SLAC (the Stanford Linear ACelerator) as her “tribe”, has some good examples of the different sorts of cultures and cultural markers that develop – ranging from dress codes, to office decoration, where they sit in the auditorium, to whether a given physicist will walk down the accelerator tunnel while the beam is active (experimentalists – yes, theoreticians – no).

So back to the language/culture problem: Communications between these distinct scientific subcultures is often difficult because of the lack of a shared language about what is actually happening at the experimental level. This realization is, of course particularly powerful, because we’ve been conditioned to believe that physicists communicate in timeless, exacting mathematical utterances. Sadly not true (see Bruno Latour, Science in Action).

To make sense of this problem, Galison draws out an analogy from anthropology. In anthropological terms, there are distinct sorts of linguistic blending that occur at cultural interfaces: Pidgins and Creoles. Creoles are the result of two languages blending together to form a new, complete language. Pidgins are languages of convenience that spring up in trading zones and contact points between languages. While children can be raised speaking a creole, there are no native speakers of a pidgin.

Within the umbrella language of physics, experimental subcultures create creoles that can last for decades. New students are raised within these particular cultural frameworks eventually learning to speak a “language” of experimental physics, but it’s different from what other groups of physicists working on different experiments of on different instruments learn. When they communicate with other subgroups, there is no common language to resort to, and without a common language, they construct pidgins which enable them to share ideas but which force both groups to use foreign abstractions, approximations and analogies. As particle accelerators increased in scale, “trading zones” in which instrument makers, theorists, and experimentalists exchanged information became vital for science to function. These problems emerge, when different research groups talked to one another, or had to interface with funding agencies, or engineering firms etc. Sadly, Galison never really expands on this analogy, but for me, it’s an interesting starting point for the problems of organizational culture.

It’s an interesting analogy to think about for organizational subcultures in general. Have computer techies created their own creole which separates both their communication and culture from the rest of the organization? Is management communication inherently a pidgin in that it is a language of convenience that allows ideas to be communicated to numerous subcultures?

I'm particularly fond of this analogy because the issues of culture and communication are immediately recognizable in any large organization. If you've ever wondered why you could never understand the salesforce/programmers/line cooks/marketing department etc -- this is your answer. They actually are speaking a different language, and behind that language is a different culture. You can communicate with them - through pidgins - and if you spend enough time with them, you may even become bilingual, but the problem is more serious than simply not understanding their jargon. Blaming communications difficulties on jargon alone suggests that it is simply an issue of using abbreviations and shorthands that the uninitiated don't understand. The pidgins/creoles analogy, on the other hand, suggests that the communications problem is rooted in deeper, cultural divide.