Letter to the editor: A clarification of cultural terms

By Wenshan Jia, a communication studies professor

Wenshan Jia, communication studies professor

I am pleased to have read the article “Cross-cultural center to be completed by fall” by Rebeccah Glaser on Feb. 21. I view it as Chapman’s effort for diversity and inclusion. As a professor and scholar of intercultural communication for the past 30 years with a record of teaching about intercultural communication here at Chapman University for 12 years so far, I hope the center will be conceptualized on a solid intellectual foundation, guided by the right vision, and run coherent programs.

While I do not intend to advocate for how the center should be named, I would like to provide the following clarification of terms using my expertise to inform a more educated naming of the center.

Multiculturalism: This is a “salad bowl” type of society, organization, or a personhood in which cultures may coexist equally and peacefully but relatively independent from one another with not much interaction in-between. This term is used more frequently in educational studies such as in “multicultural education” or “multicultural counseling.”

Cross-cultural: This term originates in disciplines such as psychology as a branch such as cross-cultural psychology which tests research hypotheses by collecting survey data across different nations and cultures to achieve a higher level of validity and reliability of such hypotheses. As it tends to limit its definition of culture as a relatively or superficially different set of behavioral and mental constructs under which truth is assumed to be discovered across “veneers” of culture, the use of such a term is on the decline.

Intercultural: This term describes the interface of cultures at various levels and in various contexts. This has been especially true since the deepening of globalization since the early 1990s after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the booming dot com businesses around the world since 2000. This is because interfaces of and encounteres of cultures have been in dramatic increase both offline and online. In fact, the early 1980s witnessed the adoption of “cross-cultural communication” in the field of communication studies only to be replaced by the term “intercultural communication” to reflect such a new reality of interfaces among cultures in the early 1990s. Nowadays, rarely a communication course or textbook is titled “cross-cultural communication;” they are typically titled “intercultural communication” as the term focuses on the nature, structure and dynamics of intercultural interactions.

Transcultural: A term created by Fernando Ortiz, a South American scholar and endorsed by Dagmar Reichardt, a German scholar. This term is of a higher order than the concept of intercultural as it refers to one’s ability to overcome ethnocentrism and transcend national/racial and ethnic boundaries. It involves both deculturation of one’s birth culture and reincarnation of a new culture which is expectedly more cosmopolitan.

So now, based on the above differentiations in meaning among these apparently similar terms, how would you best name the center?