Exploring Intercultural Communication: Language in Action
Professor Zhu Hua has written an article on Exploring Intercultural Communication: Language in Action to the BBK blogs.
Professor Zhu Hua has written an article which includes reference to the Downtown Abbey TV series for the Birkbeck Blogs.
In a recent episode of Downton Abbey, Mr Carson, the butler of the house and a master of etiquette, met the black jazz singer Ross for the first time. Overcome by Ross’s skin colour, he struggled with words. All he could come up with was ‘Have you considered visiting Africa?’
Those days of social and cultural compartmentalization of different racial groups are long gone. We meet, interact and build relationships with ‘others’ who may look different, speak different language(s) or are guided by different values from ‘us’, either by choice or by chance in various social spaces, due to a bundle of processes including globalisation and technological advances. Intercultural Communication Studies, pioneered by the American Anthropologist, Edward Hall, in the 1950s to research the cultures of the ’enemies’ of the US at that time, are primarily interested in understanding how people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds interact with each other, and what impact such interactions have on group relations, as well as individuals’ identities, attitudes and behaviours.