cultural interaction definition
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Our cultural environment is changing quickly and becoming more and more diversified. Cultural diversity is an essential condition of human society, brought about by cross-border migration, the claim of national and other minorities to a distinct cultural identity, the cultural effects of globalisation, the growing interdependence between all world regions and the advances of information and communication media. More and more individuals are living in a “multicultural” normality and have to manage their own multiple cultural affiliations.
Cultural diversity is also an economic, social and political plus, which needs to be developed and adequately managed. On the other hand, increasing cultural diversity brings about new social and political challenges. Cultural diversity often triggers fear and rejection. Stereotyping, racism, xenophobia, intolerance, discrimination and violence can threaten peace and the very essence of local and national communities.
Dialogue between cultures, the oldest and most fundamental mode of democratic conversation, is an antidote to rejection and violence. Its objective is to enable us to live together peacefully and constructively in a multicultural world and to develop a sense of community and belonging.
In political parlance, the term “intercultural dialogue” is still only loosely defined.
Defining intercultural communication
You may have already heard the term “intercultural communication”. In this section, we provide several commonly accepted academic and applied definitions to clarify this concept and process.
It is helpful when scholars and practitioners clarify what they mean by certain terms. The term “intercultural communication” represents broad ideas that are difficult to express in just one way. Thus we present several working definitions as starting points for exploring this topic:
- Intercultural communication refers to the communication between people from two different cultures. (Chen & Starosta, 1998:28)
- Intercultural communication is a symbolic, interpretive, transactional, contextual process, in which people from different cultures create shared meanings. (Lustig & Koester, 2007:46)
- Intercultural communication refers to the effects on communication behavior, when different cultures interact together. Hence, one way of viewing intercultural communication is as communication that unfolds in symbolic intercultural spaces. (Arasaratnam, 2013:48)
You might want to consider which of these definitions best describes this idea and process for you. Perhaps you’ve seen another definition or statement that would be helpful for us and your fellow participants to see. If so, share your thoughts or other quotes (and their author and source if possible) with us. Thanks!
culture contact
Assimilation is the process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnicity blend into the dominant culture of a society and may also be either voluntary or forced. In the 19th- and early 20th-century United States, millions of European immigrants became assimilated within two or three generations through means that were for the most part voluntary; homogenizing factors included attendance at elementary schools (either public or private) and churches, as well as unionization. During the same period, however, the United States and Canada had policies designed to force the assimilation of Native American and First Nations peoples, most notably by mandating that indigenous children attend residential or boarding schools (see Native American: Native American history). Assimilation is rarely complete; most groups retain at least some preference for the religion, food, or other cultural features of their predecessors.
cultural evolution
cultural evolution, also called sociocultural evolution, the development of one or more cultures from simpler to more complex forms. In the 18th and 19th centuries the subject was viewed as a unilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of human behaviour as a whole. It has since been understood as a multilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of individual cultures or societies (or of given parts of a culture or society).
Unilinear cultural evolution was an important concept in the emerging field of anthropology during the 18th and 19th centuries but fell out of favour in the early 20th century. Scholars began to propagate theories of multilinear cultural evolution in the 1930s, and these neoevolutionist perspectives continue, in various forms, to frame much of the research undertaken in physical anthropology and archaeology, the branches of anthropology that focus on change over time.
Objectives and conditions 
In a general sense, the objective of intercultural dialogue is to learn to live together peacefully and constructively in a multicultural world and to develop a sense of community and belonging. Intercultural dialogue can also be a tool for the prevention and resolution of conflicts by enhancing the respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. More specifically, the following goals have been outlined:
Easier than a definition is a description of the conditions, the “enabling factors” that characterize a true, meaningful intercultural dialogue. Based on existing experience, one can propose at least six crucial conditions that must be fulfilled from the very outset, or achieved during the process:
- Equal dignity of all participants;
- Voluntary engagement in dialogue;
- A mindset (on both sides) characterised by openness, curiosity and commitment, and the absence of a desire to “win” the dialogue;
- A readiness to look at both cultural similarities and differences;
- A minimum degree of knowledge about the distinguishing features of one’s own and the “other” culture;
- The ability to find a common language for understanding and respecting cultural differences.
Definitions
In the past, the Council of Europe has rarely offered suggestions for a definition of intercultural dialogue (the most notable exception is the “Opatija Declaration” of 2003).
For the purposes of the consultation process for the “White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue”, the following preliminary formulation may serve as a reference:
| “Intercultural dialogue is an open and respectful exchange of views between individuals and groups belonging to different cultures that leads to a deeper understanding of the other’s global perception.” |
In this definition, “open and respectful” means “based on the equal value of the partners”; “exchange of views” stands for every type of interaction that reveals cultural characteristics; “groups” stands for every type of collective that can act through its representatives (family, community, associations, peoples); “culture” includes everything relating to ways of life, customs, beliefs and other things that have been passed on to us for generations, as well as the various forms of artistic creation; “world perception” stands for values and ways of thinking.
Unilinear theory
The Age of Discovery introduced 15th- and 16th-century Europeans to a wide variety of “primitive” cultures. Almost immediately, European intellectuals began efforts to explain how and why the human condition had come to be so diverse. Although the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was very much mistaken when he described indigenous peoples as living in conditions in which there were “no arts, no letters, no society” and experiencing life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” his description encapsulates the era’s popular conception of the “savage.”
Ignoring or unaware of a variety of facts—many indigenous peoples enjoyed a much better standard of living than European peasants, for instance—Hobbes and other scholars posited that everything that was good and civilized resulted from the slow development away from this “lowly” state and toward the “higher” state represented by the cultures of Europe. Even rationalistic philosophers such as Voltaire implicitly assumed that the “upward” progress of humankind was part of the natural order.
Multilinear theory
A widespread reaction against sweeping generalizations about culture began in the late 19th century in the United States and somewhat later in Europe. Theories and descriptions of hypothetical stages of evolution generally, and of unilinear evolution specifically, were heavily criticized as racist; instead of presuming that some peoples were more evolved than others, the new trend was to regard all cultures as unique in time and place. In the United States this movement, known as cultural particularism, was led by the German-born anthropologist Franz Boas.
Boas and several generations of his students—including A.L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead—turned completely away from broad generalizations about culture and concentrated on fieldwork among traditional peoples, harvesting a great variety of facts and artifacts as empirical evidence of cultural processes within existing societies. The creation of encyclopaedic lists of cultural traits and changes therein led to the development of “culture histories” and dominated American anthropology for the first half of the 20th century.
