Abstract
Intercultural communication plays an important role in every country, including the United States, with its expanding emphasis on immigration and diversity. This chapter focuses on the relationship of culture and communication, and how these concepts are interrelated. Studying intercultural communication encompasses cross-cultural communication, centering on elements of ethnicities, ethnographic methods, and qualitative/quantitative distinction, and international communication, incorporating mass-mediated communication and interpersonal communication. A sample study is provided to illustrate application of a specific social interaction within an immigrant family examining a unique cross-cultural situation.
The study of intercultural communication is important in any society or culture. This is especially true in the United States, which has made intercultural openness a central feature of its cultural persona. The United States is currently experiencing the greatest period of immigration in its history. Communication begins as an attempt by human beings to come to know their environment through symbols. This occurs through a gradual recognition by the child that symbols, objects, and ideas, and internal mental representations of them, can be related to each other in a meaningful fashion. Cross-cultural communication concerns the comparison of communication across two or more specific cultures or ethnicities, such as Japanese communication styles compared with US communication styles, or African American, Hispanic, and Anglo styles within the United States. The traditional referent of ethnography is the branch of anthropology dealing with scientific description of specific human cultures, both the fieldwork and the writing that it engenders.