Culture 11

Question 1

CROSS CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE

Answer 1

• Refers to a surface level familiarization with cultural characteristics, values, beliefs and behaviours.
• It is vital to basic cross-cultural understanding and without it cross-cultural competence cannot develop.

Question 2

CROSS CULTURAL SENSITIVITY

Answer 2

• Refers to an individual’s ability to read into situations, contexts and behaviours that are culturally rooted and consequently the individual is able to react to them suitably.
• A suitable response necessitates that the individual no longer carries his/her own culturally predetermined interpretations of the situation or behaviour (i.e. Good/bad, right/wrong).

Question 3

CROSS-COUSIN

Answer 3

Children of the opposite-sexed siblings of one’s parents, e.g., mother’s brother’s and father’s sister’s children.

Question 4

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION: (also referred to as Intercultural Communication)

Answer 4

• Is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds try to communicate.
• As a science, Cross-cultural communication tries to bring together such seemingly unrelated disciplines as communication, information theory, learning theories and cultural anthropology.
• The aim is to produce increased understanding and some guidelines, which would help people from different cultures to better, communicate with each other.

Question 5

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Answer 5

Refers to the ability to recognize cultural differences and similarities when dealing with someone from another culture and also the ability to recognize features of own behaviour, which are affected by culture.

Question 6

CULTIVATION CONTINUUM

Answer 6

A term used in cultural anthropology. It is a continuum based on the comparative study of nonindustrial cultivating societies in which labor intensity increases and fallowing decreases.

Question 7

CULTURAL ALIENATION

Answer 7

Is the process of devaluing or abandoning one’s own culture or cultural background in favour of another.

Question 8

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Answer 8

• The study of contemporary and recent historical cultures among humans all over the world. The focus is on social organization, culture change, economic and political systems and religion.
• Cultural anthropologists argue that culture is “human nature,” and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically and teach such abstractions to others. They believe that humans acquire culture through learning and people living in different places or different circumstances may develop different cultures because it is through culture that people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways.
• Is also referred to as social or socio-cultural anthropology.
• Key theorists: Franz Boas, Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Marvin Harris, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx.

Question 9

CULTURAL BOUNDARIES

Answer 9

• Can be defined as those invisible lines, which divide territories, cultures, traditions, practices, and worldviews.
• Typically they are not aligned with the physical boundaries of political entities such as nation states.

Question 10

CULTURAL CONSTRUCT

Answer 10

The idea that the characteristics people attribute to social categories such as gender, illness, death, status of women, and status of men is culturally defined.

Question 11

CULTURAL CONSULTANTS

Answer 11

Subjects in ethnographic research; people the ethnographer gets to know in the field, who teach him or her about their culture.

Question 12

CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

Answer 12

• Is an idea that increased communication among the peoples of the world via the Internet will lead to the differences among national cultures becoming smaller over time, eventually resulting in the formation of a single global culture.
• One outcome of this process is that unique national identities will disappear, replaced by a single transnational identity.
• Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA coined the term in 1998.

Question 13

CULTURAL CRINGE

Answer 13

• Refers to an internalized inferiority complex of an entire culture. This leads people of that culture to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries.
• In 1950 the Melbourne critic A.A. Philips coined the term to show how Australians widely assumed that anything produced by local artists, dramatists, actors, musicians and writers was inferior to the works of the British and European counterparts.
• The term is very close to “cultural alienation” or the process of devaluing or abandoning one’s own culture or cultural background in favour of another.

Question 14

CULTURAL DETERMINISTS

Answer 14

• Are those who relate behaviour and social organization to cultural or environmental factors.
• The focus is on variation rather than on universals and stresses learning and the role of culture in human adaptation.

Question 15

CULTURAL DIFFUSION

Answer 15

The spreading of a cultural trait (e.g., material object, idea, or behaviour pattern) from one society to another.