文化、跨文化交际、文化价值观的定义

文化、跨文化交际、文化价值观的定义 Definitions of Culture Culture is learned and shared within social groups and is transmitted from one generation to another for purposes of promoting individual and social survival, adaption, and growth and development. Generally speaking, culture means both human and society that have developed to a certain level in history. It consists of all forms of human lives and activities, and all the man-made material and spiritual wealth. Specifically speaking, it solely means “areas of man’s spiritual life”. Culture is created by man; it also continually creates human beings, countries, nations, personal characters, psychologies, behaviors, ways of thinking and various values. According to Samovar and Porter (2010), culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Definitions of Intercultural Communication Intercultural communication occurs when a member of one culture produces a message for consumption by a number of another culture. More precisely, intercultural communication involves interaction between people whose cultural perception and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communication event. Intercultural communication in its most basic form refers to an academic field of study and research. It seeks to understand how people from different countries and cultures behave, communicate and perceive the world around them. The definition of intercultural communication must also include strands of the field that contribute to it such as anthropology, cultural studies, psychology and communication. According to the definition from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, intercultural communication is a form of global communication. It is used to describe the wide range of communication problems that naturally appear within an organization made up of individuals from different religious, social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. Karlfried Knapp (1987) defines it as the interpersonal interaction between members of different groups, which differ from each other in respect of the knowledge shared by their members and in respect of their linguistic forms of symbolic behavior.” Definitions of Cultural Value Cultural values are values that tend to permeate a culture. They are the goodness or desirability of certain actions or attitudes among members of the culture. They are transmitted by a variety of sources (family, media, school, church, state, and so on) and therefore tend to be broad-based, enduring, and relatively stable. They guide both perception and communication. That is, values get translated into action. An understanding of cultural values helps us appreciate the behavior of other people, knowing, for instance, that the American value of directness and the exchange of eye-contact, might cause us to apply one trick of focusing in the space between the eyebrows, and “faking it” until we can make eye contact ourselves. What is more, an awareness of cultural values also helps us understand our own behavior. For example, we can associate patience with the value of time, moderation with the value of harmony and consensus, and obligation with the twin value of friendship and sociability. Hu Wenzhong (1999), a famous cultural scholar in China, has pointed out that of all the problems discussed or studied in intercultural communication research, value is one of the most important problems and deserves great attention. Values come from social life and provide criteria for behavior. “They prescribe which actions and ways of being are better than others;they are not descriptions of fact，but possess content and emotion and contribute to social reality.” Scholars have offered many versions of definitions for values.