Part 1 Introduction and Background to Intercultural Communication

Encountering diversity is an axiom involved in intercultural communication. (Photo by Attitaya Indrakanhang.)

During the Second World War, leaders were faced with a practical strategic problem. How could nations such as the United States cooperate with residents of other cultures, when the U.S. leaders knew little about other languages or cultures? Anthropologists were then invited to study and discover culture of many of these new places. Through these investigations, the focus of cultural an­thropology became more popular and took on new meaning. The study of cul­ture became more widely known, setting the stage for the importance of culture and communication.

After the Second World War, a number of programs focusing on world situ­ations and U.S. policy abroad influenced the development of intercultural com­munication studies. Of course, the establishment of the United Nations became a significant concern of foreign policy. With the United Nations occupying a prominent role in world events, the governments felt obliged to initiate new pro­grams in interacting with leaders from nations throughout the world. This situa­tion created a need to learn about the political, social, economic, and cultural life surrounding the representatives of these many nations. With the advent of the World Health Organization, the United Nation's assistance programs, the World Bank, and other agencies, the need to understand the culture of many developing nations and to interact meaningfully with citizens from these nations became a goal for some government agencies. Unfortunately, many of their attempts at communication across these cultural boundaries were superficial and sometimes dominated by economic theories of development that cast some doubt upon cross-cultural theories of social change. Often, some of the sincere attempts of United Nation's agencies and other organizations were overshadowed by the lack of cultural understanding of the peoples they were trying to serve.

Because the activity of the United Nations and other organizations inadver­tently created a need to understand the interface of culture and communication, the U.S. Congress passed an act in 1953 that instituted the United States Information

Chapter 2 Background to Intercultural Communication

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Interaction between culturally different people creates a system that demands an understanding of each participant's need to reduce uncertainty.

Agency (USIA). The name was changed in 1977 to the International Communica­tion Agency. This agency was charged with providing information about the United States through various communication media to nations of the world. The familiar broadcast "Voice of America" exemplified those efforts.

During the 1950s, early pioneers in this effort, such as Edward T. Hall, found that the USIA lacked cultural information, a point echoed in work by Leeds-Hurwitz (1990). The image of the "ugly American" seemed linked to poorly trained foreign service officers and travelers who lacked cultural aware­ness and intercultural communication insight. During this decade, Edward T. Hall drew upon his vast experience with the Hopi and Navaho Indians during the 1930s and 1940s and with foreign service officers in his capacity with the USIA and wrote the classic Silent Language, originally published in 1959. In some ways, this publication marked the birth of intercultural communication, since it synthesized what are now considered fundamental issues in understand­ing culture and communication.

In secondary education, foreign-language classes following the Second World War took on new enthusiasm, partly perhaps because language had

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