In our book, intercultural communication is introduced as something that protects the "'good'" of a particular culture", and goes on to expand the idea that when communicating with another culture, each party must not assume superiority for the benefit of the communication.
It also talks about macro and micro culture, which is my focus of this blog post, based on personal experiences.
One of my very favorite people is a Somali woman who escaped Somalia shortly after the civil war broke out and eventually settled in the United States with her family after spending time in a refugee camp in Kenya and temporarily settling in Canada. She is fluent in at least three languages, a community leader, well educated, mother and wife. She also works with minority youth who are in the criminal justice system to help them ensure that they are fairly represented in the system, which must be a daunting task.
This is culture on a micro level. However, if I had made assumptions about my friend based on stereotypes of the macro culture and assumed my culture was superior, I would have never met this incredible bad ass woman, interacted with her, and learned about how empowered Somali and Muslim women can be.
Take, on the other hand, my sister who works in an inner city emergency room who sees all of the negative stereotypes of the Somali community constantly reinforced. Perhaps if she were to get to know the individuals on a micro level, her opinions (and arguably, racism) on a macro level could shift.
The description above reminds me the definition of "cultural shock". It is said in the textbook that cultural shock is "a feeling of disorientation experienced when encountering communicative events disruptive of one’s expected routine"(P 156). As I am personally an international student, I feel more exactly about what is "cultural shock". The most thing I dislike is stereotype, as people always tend to mark people from different cultural background with different tags. Though I personally think before making judgement, it is better to learn some basic information about the other's background. In reality, people seldom pay attention on the process of "learning".
ReplyDeleteAs described in the textbook, " For the 21st century, a pragmatic reaction to culture shock is learning"(P 162). It will be always effective asking people with good attitude, and the process of learning will be really interesting. And the learning process can help us to widen our horizon, and we will clearly know that stereotypes will be somehow biased with superior attitudes. And this kind of biased attitude will be challenged heavily by the trend of learning in intercultural background. And we can definitely help to promote the intercultural communication ethics/