Comm 261 - Intercultural Communication

Intercultural Communication: Review Sheet Exam One

1. CULTURE→ Culture can be a set of fundamental ideas, practices and experiences of a group of people that are symbolically transmitted generation to generation through a learning process. Culture may as well refer to beliefs, norms, and attitude that are used to guide our behaviors and to solve human problems.

DEF: “A negotiated set of shared symbolic systems that guide individuals’ behaviors and incline them to function as a group.”

1. Characteristics of Culture→  From the definition of the culture given above we can generate 4 basic characteristics:

1. Culture is holistic: As a holistic system, culture can be broken down into several subsystems, including a kinship system, an educational system, a religious system an association system, a political system, and so on, but the various aspects of culture are closely interrelated. Shortly, any change in a subsystem will affect the whole system.
2. Culture is learned:  Interaction with family and friends members is the most common way for us to learn about culture. Other sources of learning are schools, church, media. The process of learning our own culture will foster a phenomenon called “ethnocentrism”. Ethnocentrism leads heritages by subjectively using their cultural standards as criteria for interpretations and judgments in intercultural communication.
3. Culture is dynamic: cultures are constantly changing over time. Some cultures are more open and accepting of change. Cultural contact gives a chance to borrow things from other cultures.
4. Culture is pervasive: culture penetrates into every aspect of our life and influences the way we think, the way we talk, and the way we behave.

1. How we learn culture → Most people grow up immersed in their culture. They absorb it from their family, through rituals and customs, through language, through the arts, through social habits, and through a shared history. People also learn about culture through school, friends, television, and books.

1. What communication is→  an interdetermining process in which we develop a mutually dependent relationship by exchanging symbols.

1. Communication Model→ A dialectical model can be used to delineate the dynamic and mutually dependant feature of human communication. The model emphasizes the holistic orientation to human communication that represents a structure of dynamic and dialectical balance between the interactants. The process of connecting two individuals’ system defines understanding in communication. Two elements for this process: Temporal contingencies that require the interactacts to know when it appropriate to initiate, maintain and terminate a verbal/nonverbal interaction; and spatial contingencies that refer to static attributes such as one’s position in the environment.

1. Human Symbolic Activity→
2. Characteristics of Communication→ Communication has 4 main characteristics: Communication is holistic phenomenon, communication as a social reality, communication as a developmental process and communication as an orderly process.

-Holistic: communication is itself a network of relations that gives the interactacts an identity by granting them unique qualities or characteristics.

-Social reality: is based on the common meaning people symbolically assign to verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Thus, in different context the same message can be interpreted in different ways.