Based in Tokyo, Japan, Dr. Adair Linn Nagata is Lecturer at the University of the Pacific and the Intercultural Communication Institute, as well as a Facilitator at Personal Leadership.  We had the opportunity to ask her about the concept of “bodymindfulness,” and the role of our physiology within  intercultural communications.

How did you get involved in the intercultural field?

Like many people who consider themselves interculturalists, my involvement began with the desire to understand the intense personal experience I was engaged in. In the summer of 1968, the high school in suburban Boston where I was teaching social studies sent me on the Experiment in International Living to a destination of my choice, which was Japan. The man who became my husband of 42 years was one of the Japanese language teachers at the orientation program. We began a relationship that led to our marriage the following June. A year later, we went to live in Japan where we raised two bilingual and biliterate sons and have lived there ever since.

If relevant, what academic field was your entry into intercultural studies?  How do you see this link? 

I had earned a Master of Arts in Teaching Social Studies (M.A.T.) in 1966. Then, in the late 90s I completed my Ph.D. studies in human development. My dissertation was a multidisciplinary attempt to understand how Japanese people communicated so much without words. It required integrating my lived experience of being a member of a Japanese family and working at the intercultural interface in international education and multinational corporate human resources with my studies of psychology and communication. Once I finished my Ph.D., I began to teach intercultural communication at the university level.

Which aspect of intercultural learning or communication has your work focused on?

I have been most interested in the nonverbal aspects of intercultural communication competence because they were a mystery to me. As a member of a US American family of Northern European heritage, I was a “low-context communicator,” a person who unconsciously assumed that the most important meaning of a message was carried in the words (Edward Hall, Beyond Culture). Although I could not have articulated this belief as I was growing up, I believed a “good communicator” was someone who was articulate, clear, and talked a lot. Through my doctoral studies, I developed the conviction that what we need in order to communicate skillfully is something I came to term “bodymindfulness,” an integral approach to becoming aware of and adjusting our inner state. Bodymindfulness can improve communication by focusing our attention on how our somatic-emotional experience (bodily sensations of emotion) affects our verbal and nonverbal behavior of our momentary inner state and a recognition of how our communication arises from it.

What do you wish more people would understand about intercultural work?

The crucial issue for me about communicating across differences of all kinds is that “peace begins within.” We need to cultivate awareness of the various types of information that our judgments, physical sensations, and emotions bring us and hold the intention to step back and consider them and what we do not yet know in relation to our vision of ourselves functioning at our highest and best. Then, we can choose how we can communicate in that particular situation as creatively and bodymindfully as possible to generate new possibilities for our relationships instead of reacting according to our cultural programming. This is the practice of Personal Leadership®, an inner technology that I am committed to both personally and professionally as a teacher, facilitator, and coach.

What would you suggest for people new to the ICL field to read as they get started?

The founders of Personal Leadership©, Barbara Schaetti, Sheila Ramsey, and Gordon Watanabe, have articulated this approach in a fascinating and inspiring manual: Making a World of Difference. Personal Leadership: A Methodology of Two Principles and Six Practices (available from www.plseminars.com or online booksellers).

What are the hot topics in ICL these days?

The role of the body and of emotion have both been increasingly explored in anthropology, neurology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology since the 1980s. Not surprisingly, they are both hot topics in ICL now.

Another area that is receiving more attention is the personal practice of interpersonal communication, what Personal Leadership has drawn attention to as a third realm beyond culture-specific and cultural-general knowledge and skills.

A third-area in communication studies in general is the description of and theorizing about Afrocentric and Asiacentric communication in contrast to Eurocentric/Western patterns, which have dominated the field since its beginning.

Finally, how has the ICL field changed since you entered it?

As mentioned, there is more interest in the importance of emotional and bodily experience, more emphasis on personal practice, and more awareness of cultural bias in communication studies. My work bridges and attempts to integrate aspects of all of these.