INTRODUCTION
In this paper, the author examines the problem of intercultural communicational misunderstandings and attempts to answer the questions:
In today’s society there are an immense number of cultures, religions and nationalities. These factors vary from country to country and each country has its own opinion of other cultures, religions and nationalities. The different opinion of others’ is also known as: stereotypes. In a society exposed to numerous religions, cultures and ways of thinking, stereotypes and labeling have become common in making sense of the world and the people in it. In this research paper we shall be researching the origins of stereotypes. Where they mainly originate from and what the most influential factors are that allow stereotypes to arise. It is interesting to research such a topic, as it will help us comprehend accessibly the true reasons behind the stereotypes occur. It will allow us to become more aware of such a behavior and understand the influences behind it.
This paper will discuses what stereotypes are, how they affect people and how stereotypes can affect society. However, the common factor in either situation is that no good comes from stereotyping others.
I.Introduction
II.Abstract
Intercultural communication has become more and more important in a world where everything is becoming global.
The topic of my paper is “Stereotyping as a Phenomenon in Intercultural Communication”. As a basis I will describe the term “intercultural communication” by explaining the model of communication and by trying to give a definition of “culture”. I will focus on the topic of stereotypes by giving a definition and by showing different forms of stereotypes and explaining the difference between positive and negative stereotyping. Furthermore, I will explain how stereotyping arises and how it can have a positive as well as a negative effect on intercultural communication.
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Papers: A Framework for Understanding Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings
INTRODUCTION
- The first issue is: what are they kinds of cross-cultural misunderstandings that can occur, how do they relate to one another, and can they be classified into larger categories of misunderstanding. The second issue is: what cultures are likely to have what kinds of general and specific misunderstandings when they interact.
In this paper, I will explore the various ways that cross-cultural communication breakdowns have been described and explained, and suggest research that could potentially clarify and illuminate the construct
Exploring intercultural communication::
POCZĄTEK
NICE
Communication is the lifeline for society. There are many barriers that are found to be out of the reach of others and the feeling of helplessness overpowers those who are unable to communicate effectively. We will look at these communication barriers and see how society can overcome the inability to communicate with other cultures.
Through such things as idioms, translation errors, and wrong body language communicative skills can be incorrect.
Effective communication with people of different cultures is especially challenging. Cultures provide people with ways of thinking--ways of seeing, hearing, and interpreting the world. Thus the same words can mean different things to people from different cultures, even when they talk the "same" language. When the languages are different, and translation has to be used to communicate, the potential for misunderstandings increases.
Abstract
Początek
“ordinary” people from different cultures come into contact with each other. This phenomenon can be explained due to various reasons: The internet makes it possible to communicate with people from all over the word, modern technologies give people the chance to travel further and faster than ever before. We live in a multicultural society with various cultures. Intercultural communication has become a theme which concerns everybody and which will even become more and more important in our world of globalization where people from all over the world come together and get in contact with each other every day.
Cultural misunderstandings can occur when people don’t share or understand the ‘rules’ of a particular culture.
The ‘rules’ of how you behave are to do with what people expect you to do in certain situations. People can learn the rules of a new culture by watching people and through asking questions. It is cultural values that lead to expectations and ‘rules’ about how people behave.
Culture is like an iceberg. The obvious things are above the surface like the food we eat and the clothes we wear. We can’t actually see the other things like traditions, ways of thinking, ways of looking at the world, and values.
Social customs (the way people behave in social situations) may seem unusual in a new country. In Australia, if someone invites you to a party and asks you to bring a plate, this means bring some food to share.
Personal space is the distance that feels comfortable between people when they meet and talk. The distance varies depending on the relationship between people, how well they know each other. It also varies from culture to culture.
How people think about and use time usually depends on how their culture values time. These differences may cause some misunderstanding. In the following table are some sayings that show different cultural attitudes to time.
Cultural behaviours may lead to stereotyping and prejudice which can lead to further breakdowns in communication.
When people generalise or believe something about a group of people and expect that all people of that group will behave that way, they are stereotyping. This often leads to judging people before you know them, which is prejudice. Some people make racist comments, tell racist jokes, write racist graffiti and call people names. These are examples of prejudice. Often prejudice results in blaming other people for your own difficulties, eg blaming migrants for unemployment.
The Notion of Misunderstanding in Intercultural Communication
Volker Hinnenkamp
University of Augsburg, Germany
Misunderstanding (MU) is a central working category in Intercultural Communicaton (ICC) studies. Generally speaking, MUs have gained the role of a raison-d'être for studying ICC, in particular under the premise that the communication in question is between cultural others, thus transforming MU into intercultural MU
ponizej
SRODEK
Since the works of E.T. Hall, many scholars have analysed the influence of culture on communication, but they mostly followed a culturalist approach, which means that they posited a strong correlation between language behaviour and group or ethnic identity. Without invalidating the idea that each person has a his or her own distinctive view of the world, recent research based on the ethnography of communication and interactional socio-linguistics has shed light on the mechanism of the relationship between language and culture in communication in a way which is no longer purely descriptive or normative.
Communicating is no only exchanging information, it also means establishing a relationship involving symbolic or real power relations. It is also through language that a given individual becomes aware of his or her own personality. Social communication allows the development of self-awareness.
1. Errors in coding and decoding
By presenting a few examples of cultural misunderstandings (sometimes abusively referred to as "intercultural misunderstandings") we will attempt to demonstrate that obstacles to communication do not arise so much from cultural characteristics as from relational difficulties or from what is at stake in a given situation. An important role has been given to errors in coding and therefore in decoding in communication, hence the excessive development of education and training programs based on the knowledge of cultural characteristics. This approach through knowledge not only reinforces the process of attribution (Heider, 1958), i.e. the process through which an individual makes sense of his cultural environment through representations which enable him to understand and have a degree of control over this environment by attributing the causes of events to permanent and stable structures which cannot be observed directly and totally, but only through certain visible manifestations. This approach reflects a desire to organize the environment on permanent and coherent bases regardless of differences and variations.
However, just as the knowledge of words and language structures is not enough to ensure communication, the knowledge of cultural characteristics and codes cannot guarantee efficient communication. This point is attested by many examples.
Gestures are culturally determined to a very high degree and the failure to observe the relevant code may not result in misunderstanding if the interlocutors take the trouble to explain their respective codes, as the example shows. It is true that since the works of E.T. Hall, in particular, non-verbal communication has been an important dimension of intercultural communication, but the knowledge of non-verbal codes cannot altogether reduce the risks of misunderstandings. A large number of handbooks aimed at business managers or diplomats have been published, offering objective and explicit explanations of implicit rules concerning non-verbal communication, or the degree of reliance upon the context. According to such handbooks, Germans and Americans have a one-dimensional conception of time (one does only one thing at the same time), while the French and the Italians see it as multi-dimensional. While it is true that not everybody has the same conception of time, can we accept such national, cultural or ethnic generalizations ?
Cultural misunderstandings arise from errors in the processes of coding or decoding of cultural signs. In this sense they are superficial and may be cleared easily if the interlocutors explain their meanings, or more precisely if they wish to do so, that is to say if they wish to preserve the relationship that has been established, either temporarily or durably. While misunderstandings may be cleared by a simple explanation, dysfunctions, which affect the relationship, must be analysed following a pragmatic approach.
It is significant that culture is not a source of conflict when the interlocutors trust each other and communication takes place in the context of a harmonious person-to-person or group-to-group relationship. Culture in invoked essentially in the context of a conflictual or disharmonious relationship. In a balanced and easy relationship, cultural elements are perceived as potentially leading to divergences or differences, but a simple explanation is enough to remove errors in interpretation. This is what we refer to as cultural misunderstandings. In this case, cultural differences do not affect communication to the point of causing the relationship to be discontinued. By contrast, we will use the notion of cultural dysfunction to refer to situations in which relationships are conflictual and culture or cultural characteristics are invoked to justify conflict and disharmony. The emphasis is no longer on culture as a factor determining communication, but on an analysis of communication in a situation of cultural diversity and of the manipulation of culture for purposes of argumentation.
2. Impact of socio-cognitive mechanisms (prejudice, stereotyping, categorisation)
By the term socio-cognitive mechanisms, we refer to the prejudiced opinions, stereotypes and categorisations, as well as the already mentioned processes of attribution. According to E.M. Lipiansky, the process of categorisation has an impact on intercultural communication. Several mechanisms are at work here : an effect of contrast, which tends to emphasize the differences between cultures ; a stereotyping effect, which means that foreigners are perceived through stereotyped social representations of their cultures of origin, encouraging the belief that all nationals of the same country fit those representations ; and an effect of assimilation, which tends to increase the similarities between individuals of the same country.
The fact that prejudice and stereotyped representations (whether of other or one's own cultures) have a strongly detrimental impact on communication is today widely recognized. The point I would like to stress is their signifying and communicational aspect. In the movie Gadjo Dilo, film director Tony Gatlif shows an encounter between a Frenchman and Romanian gypsies. When the Frenchman enters the village, the gypsies are distrusful and a woman says : "He is going to steal our children from us". What is at work here is a manipulation and a reversal of the stereotype developed in western countries about gypsies.
The point at issue is not so much about developing an awareness of these processes, as about finding ways to minimize their impact and setting up training programmes of prevention. In a book titled Ecoutez-moi¡Paris-Berlin, aller-retour (Listen to me...from Paris to Berlin and back), French writer Francoise Giroud and German writer Gunter Grass give an account of a conversation they had with each other, which reveals the significance of history and of collective and individual unconscious imagination as factors in the misunderstandings between France and Germany. In their attempt to understand the reasons of the difficulties in the French-German relationship and while drawing on the same philosophical, literary and political sources, F. Giroud and G. Grass admit their own uneasiness, reluctance or prejudice in relation to certain issues. This dialogue further demonstrates that even a high level of education and the possession of cultural knowledge, in the anthropological sense of the term, may only go so far in improving communication. The interpretation of stereotypes may vary according to the circumstances, according to the context, or according to the interlocutors. For example, an American student of Mexican origin explains that due to the large number of Mexicans in the United States, her ethnic origin, although easily identifiable, is not very conspicuous. When she was in France, she was surprised to find that, while her Mexican origin was far more noticeable, the perception she had of herself was far less problematic, as people usually behaved very nicely to her. She thought that this was due to the fact that French people have a positive perception of Mexico and Mexicans and of Latin America in general.
3. Discursive strategies
The analysis of diplomatic incidents provides another possible method of analysis of misunderstandings in communication. It is difficult to interpret the meaning of an offensive remark, of an inappropriate gesture, or a failure to observe social conventions, and to determine whether this remark or action was deliberate and calculated or whether it was spontaneous and unpremeditated. But it is equally difficult to interpret references to culture in communication. Making use of cultural misunderstandings may be a discursive strategy. What is new is not so much the manipulation of cultural facts (this has always existed), as its systematic and growing use. The recognition and the study of the cultural dimension of communication are relatively recent, but in my opinion, current theories are too often dominated by a determinist and causal conception of culture. The transgression of codes and conventions has always been used to convey meaning without using words, to impose a mode of relationship and to position oneself. Therefore one should not confuse ignorance of the codes and their deliberate transgression for the purpose of signifying and making a point / gaining some advantage, whether symbolical or not. Khruchtchev hitting his desk with his shoe at the United Nations, or De Gaulle crying "Vive le Quebec libre" ("Long live free Quebec") in 1967, or the manipulation of time in the reception of foreign visitors and diplomats, are examples of such transgressions, which give rise to an abundance of interpretations by political commentators.
Another anecdote may help to understand how cultural characteristics may be used for purposes of argumentation, and even, in this case, of manipulation. An African man took out an insurance policy for his car specifying that he should be the only driver. In spite of that, he lent his car to his brother, who had an accident. The insurance company therefore refused to give him compensation on the basis that he knew he should not have allowed anybody else to drive his car. The African man replied that he had admittedly lent his car, but his brother "was just the same as himself, same father, same mother". The argument might have been acceptable if analysed according to a culturalist approach, but its interpretation may be different if we take into account the fact that this man had lived in France for twenty years and so was probably aware of insurance regulations. The point is not knowing the "truth" of the situation, but being aware of the possibility of an instrumentalization of culture and avoiding simplistic and superficial cultural (or rather culturalist) interpretations.
Communicating is not only exchanging information and meaning, it is also positioning oneself / establishing one's position and negotiating one's identity, this negotiation being either a prerequisite or the object of the communication. This is illustrated by the case of an American student of Mexican origin who first lived with her family in a predominantly Mexican area. Soon, her parents decided to move to another area where few Mexican families lived, in an attempt to facilitate their social integration by minimizing visible connections with the Mexican culture. At the same time, that student paradoxically admits putting forward her Mexican ethnic identity in order to take advantage of affirmative action quotas, particularly to get a place in a university. The use of cultural marking / branding ? / stereotyping depends on the circumstances and is clearly determined by the goal which is pursued, whether symbolical or not. The same student also says that when she was a child, she deliberately imitated a Mexican accent (although she could speak English without accent) in order to avoid being assaulted by a gang of rough kids whom she had identified as being of Mexican origin. Knowing how to play the identity game is indeed a component of communication, a component which is particularly difficult to isolate and analyse in a society characterised by cultural mixing.