跨文化交际李成明unit2-A原文+翻译PDF

Unit 2

With the amazingly rapid development in transportation and information communication, people from different cultures interact more often than ever before, but misunderstandings even conflicts caused in the process of this interaction also grow increasingly. Just for this reason, much concern is focused upon the problem of how to help people interact and communicate successfully in a transcultural way. As a matter of fact, culture is not strange to us all. We hear, read and talk of it, such as Chinese culture, English culture, tea culture, campus culture and so on. But when it comes to the meaning of culture, it is notoriously difficult to define what culture really is or should be.

随着交通运输和信息交流的飞速发展，不同文化背景下的人们交往越来越频繁，但在交往过程中产生的误会甚至冲突也日益增多。正因为如此，人们关注的焦点是如何帮助人们以跨文化的方式成功地进行互动和交流。事实上，文化对我们大家来说并不陌生。我们听、读、谈它，如中国文化、英国文化、茶文化、校园文化等。但说到文化的意义，很难界定什么是真正的文化，什么应该是文化。

Text A The Concept of Culture

Culture is notoriously difficult to define. In 1952, the American anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164 different definitions. So far there is no agreement among anthropologists and scholars regarding the nature of culture.

众所周知，文化很难定义。1952年，美国植物学家阿尔弗雷德·克罗伯和克莱德·克鲁克汉对文化的概念和定义进行了批判性的重新审视，并编制了164个不同的定义清单。到目前为止，人类学家和学者对于文化的本质还没有达成一致意见。

Although the term culture is used by most of the social sciences today, over the years it has received its most precise and thorough definition from the discipline of anthropology. Whereas sociology has concentrated on the notion of society; economics on the concepts of production, distribution, and consumption; political science on the concept of power; anthropology has focused on the culture concept. From anthropology nineteenth-century beginnings, culture has been central to both ethnology and archaeology and has been an important, if not major, concern of physical anthropology. Anthropology, through its constant examining of different life ways throughout space and time, has done more than any other scientific discipline to refine our understanding of the concept of culture.

尽管今天大多数社会科学都使用“文化”这个词，但多年来，它从人类学学科中得到了最精确、最彻底的定义。而社会学则集中于社会概念；经济学则集中于生产、分配和消费概念；政治学则集中于权力概念；人类学则集中于文化概念。从19世纪的人类学开始，文化就一直是民族学和考古学的中心，并且一直是一个重要的，如果不是主要的，对物质人类学的关注。人类学通过对整个空间和时间中不同生活方式的不断研究，比任何其他科学学科都更能完善我们对文化概念的理解。

In nonscientific usage, the term culture refers to personal refinements such as classical music, the fine arts ，world philosophy and gourmet cuisine. For example，according to this popular use of the term, the cultured person listens to Bach rather than Eminem, can distinguish between the