CROSS CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

Taught by :

Adelce Ferdinandus, S. Pd., M. A

NICOLLAS GARY LAMAG

(20160111024039)

ENGLISH FOR EDUCATION PROGRAM

Culture is social habits. Culture has been there for someone since h/she was born in
this world. Because by culture, someone cannot act arbitrarily to other people. Culture has
been defined in many ways. Culture is not only a culture. First, by culture the charateristic
and the attitude of someone is formed. That is the most important thing in someone even
h/she is normal or defect. Culture is the key for that. Like first, culture is learned. Culture is
the great key to someone who has learned to eat , sleep , seek shelter , because h/she is
American or Japanese , male or female , and so on. That is why culture is learned by
someone. Culture is also about perception and values. These are also important. Because
every personal has their own perception to be expressed and someone has to understand.
Without culture, h/she cannot understand what its expression. Emotions or feelings play a
critical role in interpersonal relationships and how people relate to each other. When someone
is in his/her own cultural surroundings h/she feels a sense of familiarity, and a certain level of
comfort in the space , behavior , and actions of others. The cultural lens or computer program
influences not only his/her perceptions and beliefs but also his/her behavior. That is so right.
His/ her behavior is determined by culture. For example, like Indah is Javanese, but she just
moved to Papua. Then, her dialect , attitude , action , behaviour is bitter different when she in
Java. She have to understand the situation or the environment in Papua. Like the weather. The
hot temperature in Papua and Java is more different. Papua is hotter than Java. How she act
to someone else that must be looked. Because every personal of someone is different. For a
culture to be dynamic, it has to be relevant. The whole point of culture is for the older
generation to transfer their culture and traditions to the younger generation. If the younger
generation thinks these customs are “old school” and not cool, culture stops being relevant.
To be relevant the culture has to adapt and change with times. This is how the new generation
would absorb the culture and make it suit its tastes. Otherwise culture would become
obsolete. For example, Mongols love their deels. These long dresses for both men and
women are practical and match nodamic setting. The deel bellow is probably one of the
oldest deels to survive through ages. It is around 1100 years old. Culture is dynamic because
it represents the experiences , beliefs , norms , etc of living people. A good definition for
culture is , “Anything that can not be explained by DNA”. That means culture is always
evolving, being pushed, stretched and changed. What was a forbidden belief in the past
becomes a norm. What was a norm becomes arcane and sometimes offensive. When h/she
does not know how to correctly behave in a new context, the emotions that people familiar
with the context show in response to the behaviors of others, can help them to understand
what to do or not to do. The present study examined cross-cultural differences in how group
emotional expressions (anger , sadness , neutral ) can be used to deduce a norm violation in
four cultures, which differ in terms of decoding rules for negative emotions. As expected, in
all four countries, anger was a stronger norm violation signal than sadness or neutral
expressions. Hoever, angry and sad expressions were perceived as more intense and the
relevant norm was learned better. Communication is symbolic. That is, the words h/she
speaks and the gestures h/she makes have no meaning in themselves; rather, h/she achieve
significance only because people agree, at least to some extent, on their meaning. When h/she
uses symbols, such as words or gestures, to communicate, h/she assumes that the other person
shares our symbol system. In culture, there is also communication. Without communication,
people communicate to others. Even in village, it means that people who live in village, most
of them cannot speak Indonesia or English but they have their own language to communicate.
That is also a communication. For example, I wacth a movie about two students are from
different country. These girls’ names are Linda and Liana. Linda is from America and Liana
is from Japan. They are roommate. Liana just moved to America and she does not know a lot
to speak English. When Liana’s class is began first, she tells Linda with a note that she puts
in Linda’s desk. This is also a communcation. Then context, context might consist of the
physical , social , political , and historical structures in which communication occurs. Culture
cannot stand by itself. There must be many things inside of it. Someone cannot be himself or
herself without a context. Then is power, culture has power. For example, when two cultures
are fighting, then one culture is mocking another culture. One culture has power to defend its
culture.

Intercultural communication as a human activity has been around since human history
began. It has been a human concern for millennia. It takes place when culturally diverse
people interact. Seen in this light, intercultural communication is not a new phenomenon.
People afrom different cultures may be not able and not willing to communicate with others
due to various reasons. With this regard, dozens of studies have been conducted. One of the
researches into intercultural communication. Next is about the arries to intercultural
communication. Ethnocentrism, is the belief that one’s own cultural group-usually equated
with nationality is the superior to all other cultural groups. For example, when people are
acting in a home manner in the different culture it might cause a lot of problems. In order to
prepare yourself for various circumtances it is very important to assume lawas, habits, and
attitudes or another society. Stereotypes are stumbling blocks for communicators because
they interfere with objective viewing of stimuli. In other words we have a certain
stereotypical preconception of a behaviour according to this preconception, whether or not
the reason for the behaviour is what we thnk it is. Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a
cultural group based on little or no experience. It is a prejudgment of sorts. Whereas
stereotypes tell us what a group is like, prejudice tells us how we are likely to feel about that
group. Firstly, it might be that prejudiced some social functions. The noisest form of
prejudices is easy to see but is less common today. It is more difficult, however to pimpoint
less obvious forms of prejudices for example, tokenism, is a kind of prejudices shown by
people who do not want to admit they are prejudiced. Maybe there is a sollution, like
stereotypes and prejudices are very difficult to undo because it operates at subconsious level
that is we often are not really aware of this fact, there has to be very explicit motivation to
change our ways of thinking. Discrimantion is the behaviour that results from stereotyping of
prejudice. It means to overt actions to exclude, avoid or distance oneself from other groups.
Discriminations may be based on racism or any of the other “isms” related to belonging to
cultural groups for example, sexism, ageism, nationalism or elitism. One way of thinking
about discrimination is that power and prejudice combine together to give rise to an “ism”. It
means it one belonging to more powerful group and hold prejudices towards another , less
powerful , group , resulting actions towards members of that group are ased on an “ism” and
so can be called discrimination.