An Introduction to Intercultural Communication. Fred E. Jandt
people who serve as behavior models within a culture. A culture’s heroes are expressed in the culture’s myths, which can be the subject of novels and other forms of literature (Rushing & Frentz, 1978). Janice Hocker Rushing (1983) has argued, for example, that an enduring myth in U.S. culture is the rugged individualist cowboy of the American West.
The process of social transmission of these thoughts and behaviors from birth in the family and schools over the course of generations.
Members who consciously identify themselves with that group. Collier and Thomas (1988) describe this as Cultural identity, or the identification with and perceived acceptance into a group that has a shared system of symbols and meanings as well as norms for conduct. What does knowing an individual’s cultural identity tell you about that individual? If you assume that the individual is like everyone else in that culture, you have stereotyped all the many, various people in that culture into one mold. You know that you are different from others in your culture. Other cultures are as diverse. The diversity within cultures probably exceeds the differences between cultures. So just knowing one person’s cultural identity doesn’t provide complete or reliable information about that person. Knowing another’s cultural identity does, however, help you understand the opportunities and challenges that each individual in that culture has had to deal with.
Focus on Skills 1.1 Applying Cultural Concepts
Throughout this book, take note of special boxes marked Focus on Skills that identify intercultural communication skills appropriate to the content of that chapter.
Members of a culture share symbols and behavior norms, and identify as members of the culture. While families are not cultures, we can use that setting to explore the concept of culture.
Assume you have a sister, brother, or very close childhood friend. Think back to your relationship with that sibling or friend as a child. Probably, you remember how natural and spontaneous your relationship was. Your worlds of experience were so similar; you shared problems and pleasures; you disagreed and even fought, but that didn't mean you couldn't put that behind you because you both knew in some way that you belonged together.
Now imagine that your sibling or friend had to leave you for an extended period. Perhaps your brother studied abroad for a year or your sister entered the military and served overseas. For some time, you were separated.
1 Identify some of the experiences your friend or sibling had that may have changed your relationship in some way. For example, during the time your brother studied abroad, he likely acquired new vocabulary, new tastes, and new ideas about values. He uses a foreign-sounding word in casual conversation; he enjoys fast food or hates packaged food; he has strong feelings about politics.
2 Identify the ways that that separation changed how the two of you now communicate.
We can have no direct knowledge of a culture other than our own. Our experience with and knowledge of other cultures is limited by the perceptual bias of our own culture. An adult Canadian will never fully understand the experience of growing up as an Australian. To begin to understand a culture, you need to understand all the experiences that guide its individual members through life. That includes language and gestures; personal appearance and social relationships; religion, philosophy, and values; courtship, marriage, and family customs; food and recreation; work and government; education and communication systems; health, transportation, and government systems; and economic systems. Think of culture as everything you would need to know and do so as not to stand out as a “stranger” in a foreign land. Culture is not a genetic trait. All these cultural elements are learned through interaction with others in the culture.
This understanding of the concept of culture is common in popular literature and media in reference to national sources of identity. Thus people commonly think of national citizenship as one’s culture. Yet clearly within nations there are small groups that have continuity and that function as cultures in the sense that they regulate human behavior and provide important parts of identity. The terms subculture, co-culture, subgroup, counterculture, microculture, and community have been used to identify these groups. Each group has critical implications for its members’ identities.
Subculture
Complex societies are made up of a large number of groups with which people identify and from which are derived distinctive values and rules for behavior. These groups have been labeled subcultures. Perhaps a hundred years ago, the term was applied to human groups with shared cultural features that distinguish the group from the wider society. A Subculture resembles a culture in that it usually encompasses a relatively large number of people and represents the accumulation of generations of human striving. However, subcultures have some important differences. They exist within dominant cultures and are often based on geographic region, ethnicity, or economic or social class.
Ethnicity
As you read earlier, the term ethnicity refers to a group of people of the same descent and heritage who share a common and distinctive culture passed on through generations. Ethnic groups can exhibit such distinguishing features as language or accent, physical features, family names, customs, and religion. Ethnic identity refers to identification with and perceived acceptance into a group with shared heritage and culture (Collier & Thomas, 1988). Sometimes, the word minority is used. Technically, of course, the word minority is used to describe numerical designations. A group might be a minority, then, if it has a smaller number of people than a majority group with a larger number. In the United States, the word majority has political associations, as in the majority rules, a term used so commonly in the United States that the two words have almost become synonymous. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term minority was first used to describe ethnic groups in 1921. Since that time, advantage has been associated with the majority, and disadvantage has been associated with the minority.
Just as definitions of words such as culture have changed, the way words are written has changed. There has been considerable controversy surrounding whether terms such as Italian-American should be spelled open or hyphenated. It has been argued that immigrants to the United States and their descendants have been called “hyphenated Americans,” suggesting that their allegiance is divided. Style manuals such as the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, suggest omitting the hyphen. In this text, the term African-American is used for American Black persons of African descent while Black is used for peoples of any national identification. However, when reporting published studies, we adhere to the identifications reported by researchers.
That ethnic identity can be the basis of a cultural identity and affect communication with others outside that group has been demonstrated by Taylor, Dubé, and Bellerose (1986). In one study of English and French speakers in Quebec, they found that though interactions between ethnically dissimilar people were perceived to be as agreeable as those between similar people, those same encounters were judged less important and less intimate. The researchers concluded that to ensure that interethnic contacts were harmonious, the communicators in their study limited the interactions to relatively superficial encounters.
Co-Culture
Whereas some define subculture as meaning “a part of the whole,” in the same sense that a subdivision is part of—but no less important than—the whole city, other scholars reject the use of the prefix sub as applied to the term culture because it seems to imply being under or beneath and being inferior or secondary. As an alternative, the word Co-culture is suggested to convey the idea that no one culture is inherently superior to other coexisting cultures (Orbe, 1998).
However, mutuality may not be easily established. Take the case of a homogeneous culture. One of the many elements of a culture is its system of laws. The system of laws in our hypothetical homogeneous culture, then, was derived from and reflects the values of that culture. Now assume immigration of another cultural