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Samenvatting Intercultural Communication CPT35806Chapter 1: What is meant by Intercultural Communication?
Culture according to Hall = a historically shared system of symbolic resources through which we make our
world meaningful.
Culture is not equivalent to race, ethnicity or nationality even though we often use these types of labels in
discussing different cultures. -> 2 people may be culturally distinct even though they may be said to
belong to the same race or same country. On the other hand, 2 people who are neither from the same
country nor race may be culturally similar (shared membership in religious or professional communities).
Culture is a system: systems enable us to do things and to constrain us from doing things (what to eat,
what not to eat/right or wrong).
Culture is historically shared: sharing allows members to communicate with each other. A shared history
gives people one answer to the question 'Who am I?' -> gives us identity building blocks.
Culture consists symbolic resources: symbols help us to interact with each other (symbols stand for
something else) -> are open to differences of interpretation. Symbols are arbitrary and conventional
Arbitrary: no connection between symbol and reality (rose/physical flower) Conventional: agreed upon by
a group of people
Culture makes our world meaningful: cultures are creations of human interaction, it is something we
learn, we are not born with. Human behavior in a culture is often shared and thus meaningful.
Culture = the system that encourages us to select out certain features of a social scene and make sense of
the scene by showing how its elements are related and make judgments based on the perceived worth of
the pattern we discern.
Four-step process by Katriel and Philipsen in order to communicate:
1. One person must raise a topic that is important to him/her
2. The other person must acknowledge the legitimacy of that topic
3. There must be a sharing of ideas on that topic
4. The people involved must end the conversation in a way that indicates they are both good people
-> If any of these steps is not followed, there will be a perception of lack of communication.
,Understanding Hybridity: Towards the Study of Spaces of Intercultural
Communication
People are more exposed to intercultural communication because of cheaper airline tickets,
many channels of television and tourism booms. As a result, people recognize the differences in
cultures, need to deal with them and have to accept the existence of heterogeneity (difference).
Cultures meet at local levels -> Chinese restaurants are localized all over the world and the food
is adjusted to the local tastes and habits.
A Social-Psychological and Skills Oriented Approach to Intercultural Communication: Culture is
regarded as a variable that can be measured. Concrete behavioural studies look for similarities
and differences within and between cultures.
A Postmodern, Interpretative and Ethnographically Based Approach to Intercultural
Communication: In an anti-structural, complexity of the whole way it addresses concepts such
as Diaspora (verspreiding van volk over verschillende delen in de wereld), the 'Other',
representations, consumerism and identity. -> a book of how a culture lives
Three perspectives on cultural identity:
1. Structuralist/functionalist/modernist/Marxist: focus on structural factors influencing the
construction of identities, identities are a product of social factors (society shapes identity).
2. Interactionist/interpretive: processes of negotiation and interpretation shape identity.
People construct their own world views and shape their own identities.
3. Postmodernist/cultural studies: anti-structure, representation, fragmentation and hybridity:
fragmentation of identities in-between the global and the local, because of increased
globalizing forces, ICT developments and establishment of the information society, identities
are constructed beyond conventional borders.
Hybridity = in-betweenness
Liminality: the idea of spaces created through intercultural communication (geographically:
supermarkets, city squares/non-geographically: bodies of thought, ideologies) -> spaces of
intercultural communication can be found everywhere where one can find interaction of human
and non-human cultural elements.
,Chapter 4: How is culture related to our identities?
Identities = sets of social expectations related to ourselves and others that (a) are grounded in the
interplay between similarities and differences and (b) pertain to the personal, relational, and communal
aspects of lives.
Roles, language, identity involves a tension between similarities and differences (belonging and
separating)
Individual defines identity of self and group; group defines identity of group and individual; other groups
define identity of the group based on the relationship between groups.
3 levels of identity:
1. Personal: our perception of ourselves as unique individuals, distinct from all others
2. Relational: based on particular relationships we have with others
3. Communal: large-scale communities, nationality/ethnicity (Indiannes)
Every culture provides identity labels for people so that members can recognize them and have an idea
what to expect from them. This expectation is based on the idea that people's actions will reflect their
identity. This perspective assumes that identities are something we have or are and that they are stable
and consistent.
Our communication is connected to our identity in 2 ways:
1. Reflects: when we try to figure out why someone has done something, people's actions reflect their
identity
2. Constitutive: identity is something we do rather than something we are, we move from one identity
to another in an ongoing flow directed by our own communicative choices and the context in which
we find ourselves
Two basic pathways in the establishment of identity (establishment of identity always involves input from
both ourselves and others):
- Avowal: when we try to fit ourselves into our idea of what us allowed and expected of the identities
we envision for ourselves (conscious and unconscious)
- Ascription: having an identity assigned to you by others
- reactive ascription: to explain past and present behaviours or to predict future actions
- proactive ascription: to treat others in ways that pressure them to take up certain identities ->
encouraging others to act in ways that fit with our notions of the world and who others are
, Linking the Global from within the Local
The fact that cultures travel means that they are no longer to be found as "isolated primitive entities".
Anthropological culture is not what it is used to be, one needs to focus on hybrid, cosmopolitan
experiences as much as on rooted, native ones ("Roots and routes always co-exist).
The concept of displacement (= a seperation of place and culture) is linked to migration and diaspora. ->
results in pragmatic goals of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism.
Territorialization = a bounded connection between land and culture. When the culture gets
separated from its original location, we talk about deterritorialization.
Reterritorialization = a process of recreating a culture in new diverse locations (McDonald's
restaurants sell the Teriyaki McBurger in Japan)
Cosmopolitanism = a quality of individual human beings to have a willingness to engage with the
Other and having intercultural competence to communicate with the Other -> concerns openness
toward the world and a elite concept found in higher classes because they can afford to travel a
lot.
Cultural mixing often takes place in bordered spheres characterized by "inbetweenness", borderlands and
liminal/liminoid spaces.
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