跨文化交际 期末复习资料 重点笔记

Culture: Culture is the total accumulation of beliefs, customs, values, behaviors, institutions and communication patterns that are shared, learned and passed down through the generations in an identifiable group of people.

Objective Culture: history, religion, literature, language, food, etiquette, law, and customs.

Subjective Culture: feelings and attitudes about how things are and how they should be –the concept of time, spaces, friendship, love, family, communication pattern, etc.

Characteristics：Learned, transmitted from generation to generation, based on symbols, dynamic, ethnocentric.

Doing Culture: It is meant to be a contrast to learning “about” culture underscores the idea that communicating across cultures is a process of making meaning, of people understanding one another so they can get to know one another, build relationships, and solve problems together. It should not be words on paper, but ideas in practice. Communication: Human communication is the process through which individuals –in relationships, groups, organizations and societies –respond to and create messages to adapt to the environment and one another.

Characteristics: Dynamic and interactive

Intercultural Communication: Generally speaking, it refers to interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds, such as interactions between people from America and China, between whites and African Americans, between Hispanic and Japanese Americans

The form of Intercultural Communication

a. Interracial communication –people from different races

b. Interethnic communications –the parties are of the same race but of different

ethnic origins.

c. Intercultural communication –communication between members of the same

culture, in which one or both of the participants hold dual or multiple memberships.

（gay, disabled, Mexican American, African American, or female）Communication Competence (ICC competence)

The cognitive component –how much one know about communication.

The affective component –one’s motivation to approach or avoid communication

The behavior component –the skills one has to interact competently. Perception: Perception is a cognitive process in which we attach meaning to objects, symbols, people and behavior in order to make sense of them.

Pattern of Thought: The way people in a culture think influences the way they interpret strangers’ messages.

World views: The grid (decentralized. This pattern does not have a fixed center)

The radiating star (highly centralized. In this pattern important things are at the center and everything else radiates out from the center)

The inside/ outside pattern (圈子)

female male

private public

home market, mosque, coffee house

the outside is plain, not welcoming, even forbidding. The walls are thick to protect what is inside.

highly centralized pattern: important people sit in the front middle;

decentralized pattern: people sit equally.

Stereotyping: People generalize to make sense of his experience. The result of the process of over generalizing based on limited or inaccurate information.

The classification of stereotypes

1. Negative stereotype of other cultures: Prejudice (severe prejudice)

2. Positive stereotype of one’s own culture: Cultural superiority Characteristics: universal, unavoidable, stable, variable, ethnocentrism

High context communication & Low context communication

HC culture (察言观色): Relies mainly on the physical context or the relationship for information, with little explicitly encoded.

LC culture: provide most of the information in the explicit code itself.

Perception: Perception is a cognitive process in which we attach meaning to objects, symbols, people and behavior in order to make sense of them.

High contact and low contact culture:

In high contact cultures people want to get close enough to one another and to objects to sense them in these ways.People in these countries stand closer, touch more, engage in more eye contact and speak more loudly than people do in lower-contact cultures.

In a low contact cultures, people rely more on sight, and especially sight at a far distance. People are most likely to stand a certain distance away to get the whole

picture, without actually feeling or sensing the other person’s body heat or subtle smell.

So in low contact culture as America, one is taught not to breathe on people.

However, this visual space seems unfriendly and indifferent to those from high contact cultures, which favor tactile space.

When a person from a high contact culture goes to a low contact culture, he or she is likely to feel that people are cold, lack human warmth, and are indifferent and pay no attention to them.

low-contact: Asia ; moderate-contact: Australia, Northern Europe, United States high-contact: South America, Mediterranean, the Arab world

Large and smell Power Distances

power distance is an attempt to measure cultural attitudes about inequality in social relationships.

In high power distance cultures, position in a hierarchy is considered to be natural and important. People are expected to show only positive emotions to others with high status and to display negative emotions to those with low status; tend to

decrease gaze in the presence of powerful people.

Low Power Distance Culture: Minimize and eliminate the differences in power and status; more emotional display, increase the amount of gaze. People believe that the differences in power between boss and workers should be reduced and not mphasized.

Individualism VS Collectivism

The individualism index measures the extent to which the interests of the individual are considered to be more important than the interests of the group. People from individualist cultures are more likely to act on principles that apply to everyone, principles that are universal and apply to associates and strangers alike.

Collectivists are not unprincipled, but when making decisions they tend to give a higher priority to relationships than individualists do. They expect people who are involved in a group relationship to have duties and obligations to one another.

Masculinity (Toughness) VS Femininity (Tenderness)

Masculinity means everyone in society embraces values that have traditionally been associated with men, that is assertiveness, competitiveness and toughness. On the feminine side of the scale we find societies in which people generally embrace values that have traditionally been labeled as feminine, that is modesty, cooperation and tenderness. Strong and weak Uncertainty Avoidance

The Uncertainty Avoidance Index seeks to measure the extent to which people in a particular society are able to tolerate the unknowns of life. In high uncertainty avoidance countries people experience more stress and a sense of urgency as they go through their daily routines. Relationships are guided by strict rules. People from low uncertainly avoidance countries do not have a strong need to control things, people, and events by clearly defining and categorizing them. Relationships are guided by strict rules.

Intercultural Communication

Intercultural Communication

Generally speaking, it refers to interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds, such as interactions between people from America and China, between whites and African Americans, between Hispanic and Japanese Americans The form of Intercultural Communication

a. Interracial communication –people from different races

b. Interethnic communications –the parties are of the same race but of different ethnic origins.

c. Intracultural communication –communication between members of the same

culture, in which one or both of the participants hold dual or multiple memberships.

（gay, disabled, Mexican American, African American, or female）

Language&Culture

People pay attention to basic language in cross-culture communication because of the essential role these codes play in communication and they are part of object culture.

The same word may stir up different associations in people under different cultural background, e.g. the word “dog”. In eastern culture, dogs are dirty, brutal and stupid. But in western culture, dogs are lovely, loyal and obedient. They are faithful friends and

compassionate animals.

Language reflects culture. Language expresses cultural reality, reflects the people’s attitudes, beliefs, world outlooks, etc. For example, American businessmen often encode their meanings in metaphors and images from these sports.

Chinese traditional sport culture emphasizes the harmony between human beings and oneness between man and nature. It is morality, benevolence, entertainment and longevity. But western sports culture is competition and sportsmanship.

Culture shock: Troublesome feelings such as depression, loneliness, confusion, inadequacy, hostility, frustration, and tension, caused by the loss of familiar cues from the home culture.

U-Curuemodel: Excitement→Confusion→Frustration→Effectiveness→Appreciation

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