跨文化交际知识要点概览

跨文化交际知识要点概览

1.Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another. To an anthropologist it means all the ways in which a group of people act, dress, think, and feel. People have to learn the culture ways of their community: they are not something that people in the group are born with. We learn some the ways of our culture by growing up in it.

2.Instinctive behavior is a pattern of behavior that an animal is born with. Spiders’spinning their webs is an example of instinctive behavior. The mother spider doesn’t teach her babies how to spin webs. They know how to do it when they are born. This is what we mean by instinctive behavior.

3.The characteristics of culture: 1/ Culture is holistic and can be broken down into several subsystems, including a kinship system, a religious system, a political system and so on. The various system of culture is closely interrelated and any change in a subsystem will affect the whole system. 2/ each culture, past or present, is coherent and complete within itself, an entire view of the universe. Regardless of how peculiar a fragment of culture seems, when it is placed within the whole tapestry, it makes sense. The completeness of cultures also means members looking out from their own seamless view of the universe probably do not see anything lacking in their “unifying and consistent vision”.3/ Cultures is subject to change over time. It loses some of its traits and gains new ones. Every culture changes over time although the rate of change of every culture varies. Four major mechanisms account for the change of cultures: technological invention, disasters (including natural and human calamities), culture contact, and environmental factors. 4/ Culture are not instinctive and can be learned. Culture propagates through generations, which adopt their old customs and traditions as a part of their culture.

yers of culture; There are many interpretations of culture. We like to compare culture with an onion, which consists of many layers. One popular division of culture includes three layers: the surface layer, all kinds of behaviors man conducts. It

includes all the direct contents in the field of culture, language, clothes and so on. This is the level of explicit culture. Middle layer, criterion and sense of worth which lead to the recognition of what being right and wrong. Deep layer, basic judgment. People have basic judgment toward the question like, what is life/ how to deal with the problems appearing in life/what is beauty.

5.Culture shock can be described as the feeling of confusion and disorientation that one experiences when facing with a large number of new and unfamiliar people and situations. people’s response to culture shock vary greatly, from excitement and energetic action to withdrawal, depression, physical illness, and hostility. The notion of culture shock calls shock calls for two useful points to mind. First, culture shock is more a product of the situation than of the traveler’s personal character. Second , culture shock, like other kinds of “shock”, is normally transitory. It passes with time.

6.Culture shock is divided into five stages. Each stage can be long standing or appears only under certain conditions. Researchers have found that most people go through very similar stages during the process of adapting to a new culture. They have identified five distinct stages, called: honeymoon stage, rejection stage, adjustment stage, acceptance stage, reentry stage.

7.According to cross-culture theorists, individualism and collectivism are the basic clusters of values and assumptions. Individualist cultures have been described as “I”cultures. That is to say, in cultures that score high on individualism, the basic social unit is the individual. in such cultures, the individual human being is seen as having intrinsic worth, and individuals tend to define themselves by the extent to which they are different from, rather than similar to others.. Cultures with collectivist orientations, in contrast, place little value on individual identity and great value on group identity. They have been labeled as “we”cultures because the basic unit is the in-group or collective. The survival of the group is more important than that of any individual member.

8.Intercultural communication looks at how people, from different culture backgrounds, try to communicate, and attempts to produce some guideline under