Cross Culture Understanding_Meeting 1.pptx

What is Culture? What is Cross Culture Understanding?

1. Cross Culture Understanding (CCU) Unit Coordinator/Lecturer Selmina Rumawak , SS., MAppLing (Ms. Shelley)

2. Introduction “Many people who go abroad encounter features in their host culture that they may find disturbing. Reaction to these alien aspects of the new culture can dampen the entire experience in the country, resulting in various kinds of negative reactions. Learning another culture, developing relationships with people you meet, communicating efficiently, and adapting to the environment is a complex task of cross-cultural understanding”.

3. “ Cross-cultural understanding is concerned with understanding people from different cultural backgrounds/culture of the people so we can construct our attitudes and world view, more tolerable and generous toward strange ways that may be shown by other citizen of another country. If a person from an alien culture misinterprets a complex pattern of culture, then cross cultural misunderstanding arise.”

4.   A. Culture   1. Definition of Culture Culture  comes from Latin cultura , means cultivation. British anthropologist Edward Tylor  first gave the definition of culture which is widely quoted: “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, custom and any other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”.

5. “ Newmark describes culture as a way of life of a certain society which is expressed by certain language.” “ Clifford Geertz stated that culture is a symbolic meaning system. It is semiotic system in which symbols function to communicate meaning from one mind to another”.

6. “ Cultural symbols encode a connection between a signifying form and a signaled meaning . Culture might also be defined as ideas, customs, skills, arts, and tools which characterize a given group of people in a period of time”.

7. “ Culture as described by Larson and Smalley is a blue print. It guides the behavior of people in a community and is developed in family life and helps us to know what we can do as individuals and what our responsibilities as a member of a group”.

8. From the standpoint of contemporary cultural anthropologists , culture is characterized by the following four basic features: 1) Culture is a kind of social inheritance instead of biological heritage; 2) Culture is shared by the whole community, not belonging to any particular individual; 3) Culture is a symbolic meaning system in which language is one of the most important ones; 4) Culture is a unified system, the integral parts of which are closely related to one another.

9. In general , culture can be divided into three categories: - Material culture as the product of human manufacture - Social culture as the peoples form of social organization - Ideological culture including peoples belief and values.

10. THE CULTURAL ICEBERG HALL'S ANALOGY FOR APPROACHING INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING “The concept of the cultural iceberg was coined in 1976 by Edward T. Hall, who suggested that culture is analogous to an iceberg in that only about 10% of the iceberg is visible at any given time and that a large part of it is hidden beneath the surface. Culture has components that are external facing or above the surface and visible, and the majority of culture, about 90%, is hidden below the surface. The iceberg analogy of culture is highly referenced as it illustrates how much of culture is invisible and intangible. It also demonstrates that values and beliefs are deeply set. Please keep in mind that the cultural iceberg, like any analogy, is limited. For example, the image of the iceberg is static and fixed, while culture is dynamic and complex. Culture is not a 'thing' as this image suggests, and the iceberg is used as a means of illustrating a concept”.

11. 2. Cultural Universal “Cultural universals are elements common to all human cultures,  regardless of historical moment, geography, or cultural origin. There is a tension in cultural anthropology and cultural sociology between the claim that culture is a universal (the fact that all human societies have culture), and that it is also particular (culture takes a tremendous variety of forms around the world)”.

12. Koentjaraningrat (1990) categorizes cultural universal into seven, namely: Language Knowledge system Social organizations Life tool systems Livelihood system Religion system Art

13. “The idea of cultural universals itself runs contrary to cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the idea that all norms, beliefs, and values are dependent on their cultural context, and should not be used in the study or description of another culture. The way to deal with our own assumptions is not to pretend that they don’t exist but rather to acknowledge them, and then use the awareness that we are not neutral to inform our conclusions.”

14. “Cultural relativism is, in part, a response to Western ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture. judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture. Ethnocentrism may take obvious forms, in which one consciously believes that one people's arts are the most beautiful, values the most virtuous, and beliefs the most truthful”.

15. Reflection What did you learn today? Why is it important to study cross culture understanding?

16. Reference Pujiyanti , U and Zuliani F. R. (2014). Cross Cultural Understanding: A Handbook to Understand Others’ Cultures. Yogyakarta: CV. Hidayah .