Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication is a very complex and multidimensional phenomenon, which permanently occurred within the population of different regions throughout the whole course of history.

Intercultural communication has various forms, for instance, international wars, migration, colonization, international trade and tourism, and can be considered as a way of exchanging experience between representatives of different cultures. Nowadays, intercultural communication becomes more and more active and is one of the major features of modern society. Such trend is enhanced by growing globalization, which makes ties between nations closer and their relations more interdependent. Indeed, fast transportation, that enables individuals to travel all over the world, the spread of Internet technologies, the functioning of transnational corporations, educational exchange programs and many other factors make the existence of isolated societies almost impossible. Therefore, almost everyone in the contemporary world has rich experience of intercultural communication. The current paper describes three personal experiences of intercultural communication, which happened this summer during my trip to Europe and struck me the most. These cases destroyed some of my stereotypes about representatives of certain nations and made me think about importance of intercultural communication for the whole humanity. My strong personal belief is that such communication is crucial for enhancing mutual understanding, tolerance and peace in modern world, and therefore, it must be stimulated through various means both on governmental and individual level philosophy paper topics

Intercultural communication can be defined as a form of communication, which involves at least two different cultural identities. However, usually, everything is not that simple because one person, even though it belongs to one nation, possesses different cultural identities. For instance, in the book Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, Scollon, Jones, and Scollon explain what means intercultural communication use as an example of communication between two persons from China and the United States:

“North American culture” and “Chinese culture” are not the only two cultures we are dealing with in this situation. We are also dealing with Japanese culture, gay culture, university student culture, Hong Kong Christian culture and North American Buddhist culture, gender cultures and generational cultures. 

The above-mentioned statements illustrate that the pattern of intercultural communication is very complicated and the main difficulties, which people face while this process, are differences in language, in understanding the world and treating certain life situations, conflict of various identities, etc. Therefore, sometimes, intercultural communication may be quite difficult and even oppressive. For example, as it happened in colonial era with Kaurna people, who were oppressed by dominant culture and political order of their European settlers and were a subject to strict limitation of their freedom under “The Aborigines Act” of 1911. Unfortunately, it is not the only example, when intercultural communication failed and led to the relations of dominance. Plenty of international conflicts, genocides or slavery can serve as an evidence for that. However, it is useless to focus attention only on such negative experiences, because generally intercultural communication, which involves a certain degree of tolerance and understanding, helps to deal with some differences, find some similarities and broke ostensible stereotypes. 

As you communicate more with people from different cultures, you learn more about them and their way of life �" including their values, history, and habits �" and the substance of their personality… One of the things you will learn is that although your cultures are different, you have much in common..

The description of certain situations of intercultural communication will be provided below. They enhanced my deeper understanding of other cultures.

My most exciting experience happened this summer when I had a chance to participate in short youth exchange in Austria, and the major topics for discussion were those ones related to sustainable development, tolerance and elimination of national and racial discrimination. It is common knowledge that today Europe faces serious refugees crisis. More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, and this amount increases every month. The majority of asylum seekers are from the Middle East, in particular, from such countries as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. The image of a refugee in European society is often not the best one and usually based on stereotypes and wrong generalization. In the book Discourses of Trust, the following explanation of such behavior is provided:

While in-group trust �" faith in people one knows and/or with whom one has interacted �" is normative, out-group trust �" faith is strangers including those perceived to be fundamentally different form oneself �" tends to be an exception rather than rule.

In order to get rid of some stereotypes in the program of our project, a meeting with refugees of different backgrounds was planned. They were supposed to come and visit our sessions, and we could visit them in their camp, which was situated a few hundred meters downhill from our place. I must admit that for me this upcoming meeting was quite thrilling, because I had no idea what I should expect from it and who are all these people. I am not that kind of person, who is inclined to create stereotypes about certain groups of people on the basis of information in mass media, but still, I had no other source to create an image of a refugee in my consciousness, except news on the TV and articles on the Internet. On TV, we usually see only poor and miserable people, who risk their lives in attempts to cross the Mediterranean Sea and safe themselves from persecutions in their native countries. We hear a lot about the threat of Islamic terrorism in Europe, which increases because of this crisis. Many politicians talk about the economic burden of the EU, which emerged with this great flow of migrants, but anyway, we hardly have an idea about who all those people really are and what are their life stories. So with this little knowledge but great interest, I was waiting for the meeting with them. Once, in the evening, they came to visit our session, there were people from all over the Middle East and some from Africa, and all participants of our youth exchange could talk to them and ask questions they were interested in. Sometimes, it was very difficult to talk because the majority of our guests knew only their native languages and German, but only a few could speak at least some English. Moreover, the majority of questions we were asking resembled them those ones they replied while applying for the asylum or talking with a police officer. Obviously, we wanted to know why these people decided to leave their countries, how they managed to get to Austria, and if they want to stay there with their families. However, for the majority of migrants, it was quite tiring to answer all these questions again and again. Therefore, after such a group discussion, I did not feel like I learned much more about personal stories of refugees and that I made up a picture of this situation. That is why, I decided to visit their camp on my own and to talk to them more personally, without asking very direct questions, which might hurt them. I had a lot of worries about this idea, because I was not sure if I would succeed in finding some English speaking people and if they would welcome me. However, when I came, I was more than lucky because several men, who could speak English more or less fluently, approached me as soon as they heard that I was interested to get to know them better. Eventually, we started to talk like old friends. There were representatives of Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. We talked a lot about refugees’ stereotypes, they complained about image of a migrant, created by mass media and told me some funny stories about how social workers tried to teach them to use a laptop, because they were convinced that the majority of refugees are not acquainted with gadgets. For me, the most impressive were their friendliness, kindness, and hospitality. Furthermore, we were talking about such tricky issues as religion and terrorism in Islamic society and even about gender inequality and all these people turned to be more than tolerant and open-minded concerning these matters. Generally, I was really happy to get rid of this negative image imposed by mass media. This experience was crucial to my understanding of the current situation with refugee crisis in Europe. After getting to know all these people, I realized that it is not hard to integrate them into European society, and that they do not pose any threat to European values. However, unfortunately, a lot of people prefer to make hasty generalization and avoid this intercultural communication.

The second invaluable experience happened to me in Paris. It is impossible to skip this city while visiting Europe. Paris is a small model of the world, it became home for representatives of different nations, from all corners of the globe. Furthermore, Paris is top tourist attraction in the world. In 2015, there were registered more than 22 million of arrivals to hotels, so due to this fact, cultural diversity is even more visible. Paris is the city, where intercultural communication happens every second in every corner, but even though some rivalry remains between citizens, on the basis of national or religious identity or social class. As the researchers point out in the article “The Paris Banlieue: Pheripheries of Inequity”: “The city still burns as tensions mounts among factions of urban populace”. In 2015, the two major terroristic attacks, organized by the Islamic terrorist, happened in Paris. These horrible events brought certain changes to the attitude of French people and tourists, who come to France, toward Muslims and, especially, people of Arab origin. When I was in Paris, I decided to use Couchsurfing, instead of booking a room in a hotel, to meet some locals and feel the real atmosphere of the city. One Lebanese student replied to my request, offering me a couch in his dorm room in the South of Paris. For me, communication with Arabs or Muslims was not a new experience, because they compose quite a big community in Australia:

Muslims constitute 2.2% of the Australian population… About two fifths of Australian Muslims are of North African or Middle Eastern origin and about a quarter are of South and Central Asian origin.

However, I still had some doubts whether I should accept this offer or not, since I

have never had experience of close communication with people of this origin, and I had some worries about the fact that we were going to stay in the same room. However, after chatting for a while, I made a decision to stay in his place and, eventually, it turned to be one of the most pleasant Couchsurfing experience ever. This guy impressed me with his intelligence, tolerance, hospitality, and respect toward women. I met a lot of his Lebanese friends, and all of them were extremely nice people. Despite we represent completely different cultures, we managed to get along with each other well, and we had no problems in communication at all. This experience totally destroyed my stereotypes about Arabic people, and I even regretted that I had these doubts before. In fact, after introduction to Arabic and Islamic culture, I felt myself much more confident and open-mended during communication with refugees in Austria.

Finally, the third experience I want to share about, took place in Spain, in Basque Country. Before visiting Spain, I hardly had an idea about the country, I only had a few associations, such as flamenco, siesta, bullfight, etc. Evidently, I even could not imagine how diverse and varied this place is and how many different ethnic groups live there. So, Basque country is an autonomous territory in the North East of Spain, with beautiful landscapes of mountains and the sea. The origin of Basques is one of the mysteries of European history, and scientists do not know exactly how this ethnos reached Spain. When I came there, I did not know anything about differences between Spanish and Basque culture, about their struggle for independence and language, which does not belong to any family of languages and is absolutely unique. I did a short term volunteering in this area, so I had a lot of chances to talk with locals and ask them more about their feeling of national identity, about their culture, language, history and about their attitude toward Spanish state. It was extremely interesting to listen to completely opposite opinions; some people said that they consider themselves more Spanish than Basques, other ones assumed their Basque identity and tried proving me why their country has to be independent. However, the most exciting was to visit their special traditional festivals and celebrations, and while admiring all those strange traditions, I could more and more assure myself that this nation is completely unique and special. Thus, this situation made me think about how many small nations around the world are invisible for the majority of people, just because they belong to big states and do not have enough means to introduce their identity, culture, and traditions to the majority of people. It was the moment, when I realized that, while being open to influences from the outside; it is still very critical to preserve elements of national culture.

All the experiences described above were so important to me because they allowed me to understand more about the world I am living in and about my attitude toward it. They proved that stereotypes arise when we act as if all members of a culture or group share the same characteristics. However the world is never only black and white, in turn, it is always diverse and colorful. From my perspective, instead of creating some false fears and worries concerning representatives of certain cultures, it is better to be as much open-minded as possible and use the benefits of intercultural communication to understand and support each other better.

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Author's Note

All the experiences described above were so important to me because they allowed me to understand more about the world I am living in and about my attitude toward it.