[SOUND] [MUSIC] They say that our world is the world of globalization today. So what is intercultural communication? In the era of globalization. In order to be able to answer this question, we'll probably need to start with a brief overview of the intercultural communication history. It was brought to life by practical demands of the second half of the 20th century world. And though of course people were involved in communicating across cultural borders Since long ago. But we can talk about a special, specific period that started in the second half of the 20th century, as the rise of the turn of inter cultural communication, as the rise of the discipline. And of course the discipline, was brought to life, emerged as a response to some practical demands. What were these demands? First of course it's, as always, economic development. After the second world war there was more trade that was going across the borders. There was developing of economies in those parts of the world that before were not so much involved in these global processes. As a result there was more travel happening between various parts of the world. More flying around the globe. Next step with the coming of economic affluence, at least in certain parts of the world, mass tourism emerged as an absolutely new Feminine in the human culture. Another practical and very visible aspect was the presence of the U.S. culture in those parts of the world that didn't see it before. Not only in the way of American company's and enterprises or military basis so through Hollywood. And the all we know about what music and officials coming also From the West and specifically from the US. Sometimes we call it mass culture, I don't want to make an equation between mass culture and global culture. But definitely as a result of all of this, we got what we now describe as globalization of the world, understanding. Not only globalization in terms of faster travel, more international companies, but also globalization in terms of culture that is coming to very traditional parts of the world. Where until then they lived with their own traditions, rituals, ways of life, and routines. The second, more abstract, less practical aspect of what caused intercultural communication is changes in public attitudes. They usually follow the things that happen in life, but also the life of ideas Is something separate that we need to understand. So changes in public attitudes, were related to the emerging interests in otherness. To exotic cultures, to Buddhism, to traditions of Indian yoga. To far away countries. This interest to others and sometimes that is not like us, something that is not routine and everyday. Also it brought and it was reflected in various disciplines and humanities and social sciences. It brought the break away from From purely Eurocentric perspective in social sciences, art, and literature. In a way it meant admittance of culture in the realm of this social sciences and also humanities as academic disciplines, but mainly social sciences. Still, the idea of culture at that time was part of the enchant of cultural anthropology was ethnographic in terms that it was putting exotic versus normal, so to say, cultures. It was already a step away from Eurocentric perspective, because it said okay, look, there are other cultures that are very interesting. They're so different from us. But at that point, the focus, the stress was on this otherness. Exotic cultures, the things that make them different. As I said, it was already a step forward in accepting other cultures, other ways of life. As part of the world which didn't happen before. And that was of course a prerequisite for intercultural communication emerging as a discipline. 50s saw the ground breaking publications and founding fathers. Among them I would name of course Edward Hall The silent language and in this book, the first the term intercultural communication was introduced to the public. Contributions of Edward Hall are significant not only for intercultural communication as a new discipline for cultural anthropology and other related disciplines in which to work. But, his contribution to the new Feel to the new academic discipline are as follows. First, he advanced the idea of comparative cultural study which made moved the focus from a single culture to various cultures and their comparison. Also, the idea of micro-analysis as opposed to micro-perspective is also one of his achievements. He suggested looking at various Aspects of culture at various things that make it, starting from how people look at time, how people deal with space, how they interact in various situations. All this we call micro-analysis, as opposed to macro-perspective talking about general and national, the character, cultural mindset, or cultural history in general. Also, he paid a lot of attention to communication in this cultural environment. Communication, as a rule governed practice. And if something is a rule governed practice then we can study these rules. Which gave us the way to study these rules. As a development of this issue was that we need to look at specific items in order to understand another culture through communications, specific items in communication which brings language. Also as an object, an important central part of intracultural communication field. By looking at the language and its specifics he brought into focus descriptive linguistics as the method of research for language data. And in practical aspect he introduced certain methods of training specialists. People who work in those fields where intercultural communications was at that moment in the most demand. Foreign politics, doing business internationally and things like that. Now I would like to say a few words in terms of how the discipline was developing in the following decades. There was a spread of the term in mid-70s when intercultural communication became part of the Communications studies curriculum. So schools in communication would make these courses obligatory part of their curriculum. And it actually started spread in the American universities in the 70s. Then the new, the new terms that would, that would Add to the meaning of what is called intercultural appeared. Intercultural and cross-cultural. What's the difference? We will discuss it probably later. Now I will just say that, even now, we may look at these terms from different perspectives. Intercultural is about going across the borders And cross-culture very, very briefly for now is when we look at those specific differences that make actually, that create these borders. And when we compare these things in between. And quite of your scholars More or less suggest this opposition. But, also, intercultural communication was starting to be developing in different trends, or different directions, like studying Interethnic communication, inter racial communication, even inter gender communication. That was the heritage of the 70's that came into the 80's with certain problems. So seventh is the decade of research. The research that was accumulating data. It was accumulating variables and parameters to study intercultural communication and culture. For instance Samovar and Porter Two names now added by two more authors, with their famous book that was started in 70's, and continues to be published even today. I will also make references, probably with some assignments to this book, communicating across cultures, and their famous inter cultural communication reader. It was all started there, and it was accumulated scholarship and research on various issues on cultural communication. Then came the eighties, and this decade can be called the decade of theories. I actually use the John Baldwin's. Course you see the length of this to his page, where he suggest this nice name. I like this. The dedicate of fields or dedicate for research, very briefly and vividly. Where picturous paints this main aspects of what was happening in that. At that probably the most important idea was whether we approaching their cultural communication in terms of critically describing various practices especially in relations between society and individuals, or in terms of cultural dialog. Now what did the 90s and the noughties bring? They brought debate. They brought diversification of approaches. Critical not just academic and scientific approaches became more and more visible. And also they brought what can be called in a broader context not just in the context of their intercultural communication as a discipline. But probably in a broader context of the societies as a whole, they bought what is now called crisis of multiculturalism, culturalism. Of course, when we talk just in terms of, you know, timeline, we sort of put away differences that were different things, different processes that were taking place in various countries. So let's look at certain specifics of national intercultural communication development. European specifics. It was mostly visible in the 90s because of the influx of immigrants to Europe. Rise of most modernism and critical approaches. This is exactly what we see in Europe. The critical approach to intercultural communication conservatist approaches. And eventually as partly a backlash to this were the crisis of multi culturalism. Both politically and sometimes even ideologically. Now, we need to think we put another meaning to this term. We need to put another meaning into this term if we wanted to be really viable concept that will move our societies forward and not Bring them to pieces. Russian specifics of the field is seen that the term and the discipline arrived in this country later than in the rest of the western world. Second half of the 90s probably once we first actually meet with this term. I told you I was practicing intercultural communication before I knew how it was called, before the term was coined. And the specifics of Of discipline or area of studies is that people who came to this field and who were working in this direction mainly came from the From the philology and linguistics. And that's why we see the predominance of the philological and linguistic approaches to the study of intercultural issues. The professors of foreign languages, and teaching foreign languages was Well represented in the former Soviet Union and of course then in Russia. They were the ones who actually were developing this new field, getting new ideas and applying it to their work, to their teaching, to their research. Later research on social and political discourse became very topical for the Russian context and now we see a lot of publication and a lot of projects that are related to how we Sort of introduce how we see culture in political discourse. How it is intertwined with a social issues and the like. So what will be the future trends perspectives and probably pit falls? As I already mentioned, we need some new understanding, some new substance to what is understand as multi culturism, and what it can bring to Various nations. There are new buzz words that appeared in the last maybe ten years, and this is basically diversity and inclusion. They now became an absolutely necessary things that we cannot go without in any corporate context. We speak about the diversity of the workforce. The importance of this diversity, and how to create inclusion that will allow this diversity to flourish and bring some positive outcomes. Also, the trends that we probably will be developing any further is publications, or projects, that are called how to do things with Japanese, Russians, French, Americans. And so on and so fourth; these are actually like these manuals or instructions for projects that provide specific information and tell you what to do and what not to do in terms of being successful in this or that. Cultural country. And then there is this issue of multidisciplinary that we will be talking next. Intercultural communication is an interdisciplinary field. And there is a lot of multidisciplinary approaches in studying and teaching it and doing it. And it has of course a lot of advantages because you can borrow from different disciplines, use their methods and get results and also build on the shoulders. Stand on the shoulders of those people who worked in at the same time, there some problems with multidisciplinarity because it's a dangerous tool. You have to really, really work well with this tool otherwise it becomes shallow, not very deep, and you can cover mistakes of one field by adding mistakes or a wrong move From another field because you believe you know enough of them. But at the same time, it still is rather shallow. [NOISE] [MUSIC]
