Building Intercultural Skills

1. Understand the relationship between identity and history. How does history help you understand who you are?

2. What do you consider to be your identity? Describe your cultural identity. What is the most important part of your identity to you?

3. Which kinds of history are most important in your identity?

4. Develop sensitivity to other people’s histories. Aside from where “Where are you from?” what questions might strangers ask that can be irritating to some people?

5. What do you leave out when you tell the story of your identity?

6. Talk to members of your own family to see how they feel about your family’s history. Find out how the family history influence the way they think about who they are. Do they wish they knew more about your family? What things has your family continued to do that your forebears probably also did?

7. List some of the stereotypes that foreigners have about Russians and Americans. Where do these stereotypes come from? How do they develop? How do these stereotypes influence communication between Americans/Russians and people from other countries?

8. Notice how different cultural groups are portrayed in the media. If there are people of colour or other minority groups represented. What roles do they play?

9. Notice how diverse your friends are. Do you have friends from different age groups? From different ethnic groups? Do you have friends with disabilities? Whose first language is not Russian? Think about why you have/don’t have diverse friends and what you can learn from seeing the world through their “prescription lenses”.

10. Become more aware of your own communication in intercultural encounters. Think about the message you are sending, verbally and nonverbally. Think about your tone of voice, gestures, eye contact. Are you sending the messages you want to send?

11. Look for advertisements in popular newspapers and magazines. Analyze the ads to see if you can identity the societal values that they appeal to.

12. What stereotypes do you believe in?

 

Lecture 2.

The Concepts of Culture and Communication

Key Terms

Culture	Low-Context Culture
Cultural Identification	Cultural Clash
Cultural Markers	The Nature of the Self
Cultural Beliefs	Cultural Differences
Cultural Attitudes	Communication
Cultural Values	Code
Norms	Decoding
Collectivistic Culture	Encoding
Individualistic Culture	Source
High-Context Culture	Receiver
Beliefs	Channel
Attitudes	Feedback
Values	Message
Interpersonal Communication	Noise
Intrapersonal Communication	Uncertainty
Symbols	Strangers
InitialContact

Intercultural Communication is the exchange of information between individuals who are unalike culturally. This definition implies that two or more individuals may be unalike in their national culture, ethnicity, age, gender, or in other ways that affect their interaction. Their dissimilarity means that effective communication between them is particularly difficult. The cultural unalikeness of the individuals who interact is the unique aspect of intercultural communication. One type of difference occurs when the two or more participants in a communication situation each have a different national culture. If the two communication participants differ in age, – one individual is a teenager and the other is a parent, the younger person has been socialized into a somewhat different culture than the adult. For example, while discussing rap music, which the parent regards as just loud noise and inferior to classical music. The teenager feels that rap is a meaningful expression of contemporary culture. This information exchange among individuals who differ in age also is intercultural communication because the teenager and the parent have somewhat different cultures.

Similarly, information exchange between individuals who differ in religion, ethnicity, disability status, health, or in other characteristics can be affected by their cultural or subcultural differences. Now consider two individuals who differ in their socioeconomic status.

Culture is defined as the total way of life of people, composed of their learned and shared behavior patterns, values, norms, and material objects. Culture is a very general concept. Nevertheless, culture has very powerful effects on individual behavior, including communication behavior. Not only do nationalities and ethnic groups have cultures (for example, Japanese culture, Mexican culture, African-American culture, etc.), but so do communities, organizations, and other systems. For example, the IBM Corporation has its own culture.

The language (or languages) that an individual speaks is a very important part of cultural identification. A Spanish-surnamed person who is fluent in Spanish is more likely to self-identify as a Latino than a similarly Spanish-surnamed individual who only speaks English. In the past many immigrants to the United States, once they or their children learned English, began to identify with the new culture. This melting pot process assimilated the immigrant cultures and languages into the general culture. Today, immigrants to the United States continue speaking their native tongue for a longer period of time, rejecting English, and thus are more likely to identify with their immigrant culture.

 

Cultural Markers

Many people have a culturally identifiable name and, perhaps, a physical appearance that conveys, or at least suggests, their cultural identity. For example, imagine a brown-skinned, dark-haired person named Augusto Torres. He identifies himself as Latino. But many individuals are not so easily identified culturally. Two million people in the United States are culturally mixed and may identify with one or two or with multiple cultures. A person named Susan Lopez might be expected to be Latina, judging only from her last name. “Lopez” actually comes from her adoptive parents, who raised her in the Latino tradition in the Southwest. But Susan’s biological father was a European American, and her mother is a Native American. Her physical appearance reflects her biological parentage. However, Susan is culturally Latina, preferring to speak Spanish, enjoying traditional food and music, and displaying other aspects of Latino culture. Here we see that blood ancestry does not dictate an individual’s cultural identification.

Many individuals have names that do not fit exactly with their self-perceived cultural identity. For example, consider three communication scholars named Fernando Moret, Miguel Gandert, and Jorge Reina Schement. Can you guess the culture with which each individual identifies? Do you think that their first name or their surname best predicts their cultural identification? In intercultural marriages, if the wife takes her husband’s surname, her cultural identity may no longer be conveyed by her married name.

When individuals change their religious or ethnic identity, they often change their name to reflect their new identification. For instance, when the world heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay became a Black Muslim, he changed his name to Mohammed Ali. Likewise, basketball player Kareem Abul-Jabbar was Lew Alcindor before he joined the Muslim faith. Some European immigrants had their names changed by U.S. immigration officials when they were processed through Ellis Island in New York. For example, “Stein” became “Stone”, “Schwarz” was often changed to “Black”. In many cases, the name change was to an Anglo-Saxon name that was easier to understand in the United States.