Chapter 2 – The Genealogy of Intercultural
Communication
CULTURE
Ceasar:, Culture = “lingua, insttuts, legibus” language, customs, laws, descripton of an ethnic
group
Discourses of culture, cultural diference and intercultural communicaton arose in the historical
context of the nineteenth century as part of the processes of colonialism
Discourses of cultural diferences and intercultural communicaton are an essental aspect of
global inequality and they ofen serre to obscure power relatonships and material diferences
Williams & Bennet: Culture
o 15th century: “husbandry and tending to natural growth” lat. Cultura, agriculture
o 16th century: human growth, specifcally aesthetc, spiritual and intellectual derelopment
o 19th & 20th century: more abstract
o 19th century: Romantc morement began to emphasize folk cultures or popular cultures
Herder: “the specifc and rariable culture of diferent natons and periods, but also
the specifc and rariable cultures of social and economic groups within natons”
Tylor: “cultures” could be scientfcally measured by comparison with each other scientfc
measurement was to set “the educated world of Europe and America” as standard on the top
end of a scale and “sarage tribes” on the botom end and then arrange the world’s natonal and
ethnic groups in between on this gradient
o Bigoted idea of a global cultural hierarchy
Emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline and the spread of a new central meaning
of culture as a “partcular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in
general” occurred in the context of the derelopment of the modern naton state, the Industrial
Reroluton, nineteenth-century colonialism and its twenteth-century extension, globalizaton
period where increased trarel led to an increased awareness of diferent peoples needed to
be morally justfed: their assumed cultural inferiority
19th century riew of culture: diferent peoples haring diferent cultures and these cultures being
hierarchically ordered, with European culture the most superior
o People from other cultures were turned into spectacles for the Western gaze the
“exotc” cultural other, foreign other is set up as a weird spectacle, anthropological
accuracy is obriously completely beside the point, Westerners are reassured that they
are safe, normal and proper
o “educaton” not in facts, knowledge, understanding, and empathy but an “educaton” in
orientalism, that is an educaton in a partcular way of riewing the world where the
foreign other is always defned by their natonal identty and destned to ofer a
stereotypical spectacle for the Western riewer.
o Spectacle of the “weird but true” other may cause amusement, pity or disgust in the
riewer but, abore all, it is designed to bring home to the riewer their own essental
diference from, if not superiority to, those exotc others
Communication
CULTURE
Ceasar:, Culture = “lingua, insttuts, legibus” language, customs, laws, descripton of an ethnic
group
Discourses of culture, cultural diference and intercultural communicaton arose in the historical
context of the nineteenth century as part of the processes of colonialism
Discourses of cultural diferences and intercultural communicaton are an essental aspect of
global inequality and they ofen serre to obscure power relatonships and material diferences
Williams & Bennet: Culture
o 15th century: “husbandry and tending to natural growth” lat. Cultura, agriculture
o 16th century: human growth, specifcally aesthetc, spiritual and intellectual derelopment
o 19th & 20th century: more abstract
o 19th century: Romantc morement began to emphasize folk cultures or popular cultures
Herder: “the specifc and rariable culture of diferent natons and periods, but also
the specifc and rariable cultures of social and economic groups within natons”
Tylor: “cultures” could be scientfcally measured by comparison with each other scientfc
measurement was to set “the educated world of Europe and America” as standard on the top
end of a scale and “sarage tribes” on the botom end and then arrange the world’s natonal and
ethnic groups in between on this gradient
o Bigoted idea of a global cultural hierarchy
Emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline and the spread of a new central meaning
of culture as a “partcular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in
general” occurred in the context of the derelopment of the modern naton state, the Industrial
Reroluton, nineteenth-century colonialism and its twenteth-century extension, globalizaton
period where increased trarel led to an increased awareness of diferent peoples needed to
be morally justfed: their assumed cultural inferiority
19th century riew of culture: diferent peoples haring diferent cultures and these cultures being
hierarchically ordered, with European culture the most superior
o People from other cultures were turned into spectacles for the Western gaze the
“exotc” cultural other, foreign other is set up as a weird spectacle, anthropological
accuracy is obriously completely beside the point, Westerners are reassured that they
are safe, normal and proper
o “educaton” not in facts, knowledge, understanding, and empathy but an “educaton” in
orientalism, that is an educaton in a partcular way of riewing the world where the
foreign other is always defned by their natonal identty and destned to ofer a
stereotypical spectacle for the Western riewer.
o Spectacle of the “weird but true” other may cause amusement, pity or disgust in the
riewer but, abore all, it is designed to bring home to the riewer their own essental
diference from, if not superiority to, those exotc others
