Introduction

New Directions for Intercultural Communication Research

Molefi Kete Asante, Yoshitaka Miike, and Jing Yin

The intercultural communication enterprise has been driven by an emphasis on the relationships between the modern European world, as expressed by the dominant cultures of North America and Europe, and various native peoples of America, Asia, and Africa. From the outset, the field’s academic emphasis, following general commercial and trade interests, has been on interpreting “other” cultures in search of the most productive pathways to the consumers of those societies. This strategic alterity has proven significant in theoretical and methodological developments in the field. Indeed, it is the basis for the work of many contemporary scholars in intercultural communication. As globalization and localization intensify in every corner of the world, however, the field is increasingly confronted by more fundamental issues of identity, community, and humanity. In effect, intercultural communication is the only way to mitigate identity politics, social disintegration, religious conflicts, and ecological vulnerability in the global village. Human survival and flourishing depends on our ability to communicate successfully across differences.

In response to this worldwide sense of urgency, the intellectual nature and scope of the inter-cultural communication field are evolving and transforming. Intercultural communication studies are at a crossroads today. Certainly, the field has gone through many changes toward theoretical and methodological pluralism and has reached the turning point of thinking dialectically about culture and communication (Martin & Nakayama, 2010, 2013). But the question still awaits an answer: Is the intercultural field truly intercultural? Notwithstanding the fact that the field is rapidly growing and expanding outside the United States (see Martin, Nakayama, & Carbaugh, 2012; Hu, 2010; Kelly, 2006; Kim, 2010; Rogers, Hart, & Miike, 2002; Takai, 2003), one may wonder if “the topics we pursue, the theories we build, the methods we employ, and the materials we read adequately reflect and respond to the diversity of our communicative experiences in a globalizing world” (Miike, 2003, pp. 243–244). If the field is in ferment, as Starosta and Chen (2003) proclaimed, it is imperative for intercultural communication researchers to further formulate critical reflections on established theories and proven methods, and to contemplate on past achievements and future directions.

We co-edited this expanded second edition of The Global Intercultural Communication Reader with the same spirit as we had for the first edition. Our aim in the present volume is to assemble the best works of some of the principal scholars on the subject of intercultural communication in order to provide an impetus for the field’s future. Most of the essays selected for this collection are fugitive pieces scattered across different journals and books. They are essential readings that deserve due attention in the current intercultural communication literature. For the present anthology, we strived to cover a wide range of continents, countries, and cultures. However, we did not include the essays published in major intercultural outlets such as Intercultural Communication: A Reader (now in its 13th edition) and the International and Intercultural Communication Annual (Vols. 1–31) as they are readily available. This edited reader is designed primarily for graduate seminars and upper division undergraduate courses related to the study of culture and communication.

New Directions for Future Research

In selecting readings for this compilation, we focused specifically on four future directions for intercultural communication research: (1) the integration of micro- and macro-levels of culture and context; (2) the incorporation of indigenous theoretical perspectives into culture and communication studies; (3) the examination of power and privilege and their impact on communication equality and mutuality in intercultural contexts; and (4) the articulation of local and global ethics for humanistic connection and community building. The fact that these challenging areas of inquiry remain relatively unexplored in the field has little to do with the methodological expertise of intercultural communication researchers.

The first direction for future research is the integration of micro- and macro-levels of culture and context. With the rise of critical intercultural communication studies (see Halualani, Mendoza, & Drzewiecka, 2009; Holliday, 2011; Holliday, Hyde, & Kullman, 2010; Nakayama & Halualani, 2010; Nakayama & Martin, 2007; Piller, 2011), the field can no longer ignore macro-contexts (i.e., historical, institutional, economic, political, and ideological factors) that frame the conditions of (inter)cultural communication and the positions of (inter)cultural communicators. Critical intercultural communication scholarship deals primarily with larger structural forces in reconceptualizing the dynamic, heterogeneous, and complex nature of culture and in reconsidering the past and future of intercultural relations. Critical interculturalists are, therefore, committed to more contextualized, historically situated, and politicized scholarship about culture and communication (Miike, 2010b). A challenge that lies ahead for intercultural communication theoreticians and practitioners today is to articulate the links and nexuses between macro-level communication contexts and micro-level communication behaviors. It can be said that this challenge is also the difficult task of reconciling and integrating conventional and critical approaches to intracultural, intercultural, and transcultural communication.

The field of intercultural communication has initially developed in alliance with the fields of international and development communication (see Rogers & Hart, 2002). The field gradually differentiated and separated itself from these fields of study by emphasizing the face-to-face aspects of interpersonal and intergroup communication between people from different cultural backgrounds and by stressing social categories, sources of otherness, and intersectionalities of difference other than nationality and ethnicity. In commenting on the communication discipline as a whole, Everett M. Rogers (1999) maintained that communication theory and research have suffered from the long-standing divide between the subdisciplines of interpersonal and media studies. This pervasive and persistent disciplinary bifurcation, in his opinion, has tremendously slowed theoretical advances in communication research. Rogers (1999) observed that “[b]ecause most individuals use both mass media chancels and interpersonal communication channels for interrelated purposes, the total process of human communication cannot be adequately understood by only one of the two subdisciplines” (p. 627). He predicted that “[i]n future years, the rising importance of the interactive communication technologies will be a force for the closer integration of the two subdisciplines (or, perhaps, for formation of a third subdiscipline)” (p. 627). Rogers’ prediction is becoming a reality especially about the fields of international, intercultural, and development communication.

Given that the unprecedented ubiquity of new media has made interpersonal and mediated channels of intercultural communication inseparable (see Chen, 2012; Chen & Zhang, 2010; Cheong, Martin, & Macfadyen, 2012; Shuter, 2011), and that the marks and imprints of macro-level contexts and structural forces on human interactions across cultures are indelible, it behooves the intercultural communication field to direct renewed attention to contemporary studies in global and development communication. Hamid Mowlana (1996) argued for the need of a more integrated approach to culture and communication more than 15 years ago:

Although critical intercultural communication studies is closer to critical media studies in its theoretical orientations and research foci, the time is right for interculturalists to re-connect to the fields of international and development communication for mutual enhancement. The field of intercultural communication will be able to benefit from global and development communication scholarship (e.g., Gunaratne, 2002, 2005; Melkote & Steeves, 2001; Mowlana, 1996, 1997; Okigbo & Eribo, 2004; Roach, 1993; Servaes, Jacobson, & White, 1996; Thussu, 2006, 2010; Tehranian, 1999, 2007; Yin, 2006a, 2007), which provide refreshing insights into the multilayered nature of culture and context, the national and international impact of governmental policy-making, and the global trend of non-governmental intervention and civil resistance, the uneven diffusion of information technology and social media, and the local mechanism of cultural continuity and change.

The second direction for future research is the incorporation of indigenous theoretical perspectives into culture and communication studies. The field of intercultural communication has produced some of the most outstanding intellectuals. Their work is used in anthropology, history, literary criticism, political science, psychology, sociology, and social work. Nevertheless, there is a lacuna in the extant literature about the impact of communication imperialism on the communicative situation itself. There seems to be a presumption in most cases that Eurocentric communication scholars have found the truth, and the only thing left is the application of that truth to various cultures of the world. They “would simply pack their tools from Western organizational or interpersonal theory, make camp at the intercultural interaction, and unpack the same instruments for work” (Asante & Vora, 1983, p. 294). It is like saying that your mother’s cooking is the best cooking without ever tasting anyone else’s food. Consequently, in the words of Robert Shuter (2008), “culture serves principally as a research laboratory for testing the validity of communication paradigms” (p. 37).

One only has to point to numerous articles and books that have sought to provide the Western reader with an understanding of the East or the South in Orientalist ways. As the late Edward W. Said (1993) once said, what is striking about these discourses is the prevalence of such terms as “the Asian or African mind,” “mysterious China,” and “force as the best measures for some of these people” (p. xi). Thus, the theoretical and methodological plinth retains some of the more naive perspectives that one would find during the era of Western imperialism. We “must not impose Western categories, otherwise we make the mystification of the intercultural encounter insoluble because we operate in a cultural closet. By misunderstanding the complexity of the intercultural questions, we short-circuit all reasonable answers” (Asante & Vora, 1983, pp. 293–294). We should be alert to the fact that “The cultural values of the scholars who study inter-cultural communication affect what they investigate, with what methods, what they find, and how they interpret the findings” (Rogers & Steinfatt, 1999, p. 74).

It should not be expected, in the first case, that all writers from non-Western cultures have been untouched by the phenomenon of defining their own cultures by the boundaries set by the West. Too often, they have failed to utilize the experiences of their own cultures to add to the discourse on communication. This failure has produced a troubling deficit in theoretical developments from those cultures because some scholars have been eager to demonstrate that they, too, have been able to see through the same eyes as those European and U.S. American scholars who have pioneered in this field. One of the dangers often discussed by the late Rogers was that students arriving from Africa or Asia would accept the given molds of communication rather than bring to the forefront the gifts that they have from their own cultures. As Ev and others have understood it, this acceptance would be a rational response to cultural and communication imperialism, not a rejection of the platform that had been established, but an enlarging, re-mixing, and re-creation of it with a view to including ideas, concepts, theories, and methods that may have prevented communication scholars of the past from examining other ways of creating and maintaining communication.

Asante (1998) stated that “Any interpretation of African culture must begin at once to dispense with the notion that, in all things, Europe is teacher and Africa is pupil” (p. 71). He used the teacher–student metaphor to refer to the issue of “culture as text and culture as theory” that Miike (2010b) pinpointed. There has been an implicit tendency to approach Western cultures from a student’s perspective and non-Western cultures from a teacher’s perspective in the study of culture and communication. In fact, much intercultural communication research deals with non-Western cultures as targets for analysis and critique, but not as resources for insight and inspiration. Even critical intercultural communication scholarship often fails to approach non-Western cultures from a student’s perspective and sees cultures as texts for deconstruction rather than theories for reconstruction. Therefore, it also promotes a teacher’s perspective on non-Western cultures, which decenters and dislocates non-Western communicators as subjects and agents. We cannot appreciate cultures when we always analyze and critique them. We can appreciate cultures when we learn from them. As there are more and more debates and discussions over de-Westernization in the discipline of communication (e.g., Gunaratne, 2010; Miike, 2010a, 2011; Ray, 2012; Wang, 2011; Yin, 2009), the time is long overdue for intercultural communication professionals to challenge and change this problematic structure of culture learning. “Let us hear all music, let us sing all songs, let us dance to all rhythms, and let us discover, in the most inner sanctums of social discourse, the agency of every human culture” (Asante, 2007, p. 74).

The third direction for future research is the examination of power and privilege and their impact on communication equality and mutuality in intercultural contexts. It is impossible to have communication equality, that is, an appreciation of the nuances, philosophies, and bases of communication without confronting communication imperialism (Asante, 2006, 2008; Miike, 2008, 2012; Yin, 2008, 2011). It is essential for humans to attempt to “feel” into other cultures if we are to be abundant communicators in intercultural contexts. Of course, feeling into is not enough. We must seek to know the way individuals think and the nature of communities’ philosophies of life if we are to be satisfied that our messages have been adequately delivered and received. It is one thing to deliver a message to someone; it is another thing for that message to be received, and yet another for it to be received as you intended it.

Understandably, communication scholars trying to appreciate the varieties of cultural differences become subscribers to the most elaborate and complex theories about human relationship. If one examines the early works in intercultural communication, what is clear is the singularity of their progressive agenda, to construct a world of human cultures, without hierarchy, in the best tradition of communication scholarship. Since the late 1970s, we have seen an explosion of intercultural work. Scores of articles and manuscripts have been produced. Unfortunately, we have often become victims of provincial and narrow attitudes about world cultures and therefore have produced a plethora of papers that detail ways to influence at a pragmatic level without the necessary emphasis on substance in communication.

In 1979, the Handbook of Intercultural Communication was produced with Molefi Kete Asante, Eileen Newmark, and Cecil A. Blake as editors. This book was the first attempt to explain communication between cultures in a coherent manner. The editors were interested in calling into question some of the old habits in the discipline of communication. The work was a success in that it set the intercultural field on a more theoretical path. Nonetheless, by the time of the second Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication edited by Asante and William B. Gudykunst appeared in 1989, the field’s character had changed, becoming far more interested in socio-psychological dimensions. Books that concentrated on cultural learning, particularly as it related to Asian societies, were popular. In one sense, communication interaction may be said to have followed commercial interaction.

Despite the fact that recent critical intercultural communication inquiries are raising consciousness of the ahistorical and apolitical nature of conventional theory and research, the impact of power and privilege on communication equality and mutuality themselves has not been scrutinized and interrogated in many intercultural communication studies. Asante (1980) expounded on the nature and role of power in communication across cultures as follows:

One of the formidable challenges that intercultural communication researchers are facing in the second decade of the new millennium is to find a way to properly account for complex issues of power and privilege embedded in communication itself because, as Asante (2008) tersely put, “Intercultural communication as a harmonious endeavor seeks to create the sharing of power” (p. 50). It goes without saying that the privilege–disadvantage dynamics is always complicated by the intersectionalities of age, socio-economic class, ethnicity, gender, language, mental/physical ability, nationality, race, religion, and sexual orientation (Halualani, 2008; Martin & Nakayama, 2013).

The fourth direction for future research is the articulation of local and global ethics for humanistic connection and community building. As Tu Weiming (1995) pointed out, the contemporary world is heavily impacted by the Enlightenment mentality of the modern West, whose core values are instrumental rationality, individual liberty, calculated self-interest, material progress, and rights consciousness. This mentality has undoubtedly influenced our ideas and ideals of the individual, the society, the nation-state, the world, and the cosmos and has crept particularly into the dominant U.S.-centric thinking and theorizing about intracultural and intercultural communication. The debilitating problem with such knowledge construction is “the conspicuous absence of the idea of community, let alone the global community, in the Enlightenment project” (Tu, 1995, p. 84). Tu (2008), for instance, made the following assessment of the U.S. American situation (see also Said [2008] for his personal account of the United States and “the Middle East”) and commented on the necessity of going beyond the Enlightenment mentality:

The deconstruction tendency of poststructural thought in vogue further obscures this problem of the Enlightenment legacy and perpetuates the elitist illusion that unlimited self-reinvention is possible and desirable by freeing oneself from any form of “restrictive” primordial ties and inherited traditions and by pursuing convenient free-floating associations without any commitment and obligation to communal collectivity (Asante, 2005; Karenga, 2006b; Yin, 2006b). Whereas “intersectionalities” of individual identity, “intercultural personhood” through individuation and universalization, the “third space” through cultural hybridization, and creative “in-betweenness” of marginality may highlight complex realities in which we all live, they can offer very few insights into actual community building and concrete collective solidarity.

The social disintegration of the local community, the uneven and fragmented nature of the global society, and the ecological crisis of the endangered earth demand that intercultural communication specialists ruminate on how to foster connections and build communities not in highly abstract theory but in ordinary concrete practice. Needless to say, new media adds great potentials and complications to this process of community formation for human connections both in global and local contexts. The emerging technological environment compels us to seriously reflect on the question of how to make the best out of social media by combining these new forms of communication with the traditional modes of communication without replacing the latter with the former. Faster and easier mechanisms of information transmission can undermine the art of listening and face-to-face communication for deep interpersonal connections and long-lasting social relationships (Tu, 2009). Sporadic and scattered information about the peoples and cultures of unfamiliar lands is neither experiential and holistic wisdom nor coherent and systematic knowledge about their ways of life. As numerous development communication research reports concertedly indicate, intercultural implications of the use of technology for the building of a global community are always complex and unexpected for better or worse.

It is Barnlund (1985) who characterized the intercultural space as an “ethical void” or a “moral vacuum.” Although it touches on ethical and moral issues in general terms, the field of inter-cultural communication has engaged in a surprisingly limited number of indigenous and comparative studies of local communication ethics in different communities of the global village. Moreover, most intercultural communication research does not incorporate the communication ethics literature into discussion (e.g., Christians & Merrill, 2009; Christians & Traber, 1997; Cooper, 1989; Munshi, Broadfoot, & Smith, 2011). While such buzzwords as social justice and social responsibility are frequently mentioned in the recent literature, intercultural communication scholarship has rarely explored the context-specific meanings and different behavioral manifestations of these supposedly sharable values. The question of global ethics and common values is central to the development of a global community. It is evidently fallacious to assume that transnationalism and borderless postmodern society will self-organize the troubled world and bring us individual liberty, social equality, civil order, and global peace in the foreseeable future. Cross-culturalists and interculturalists must diligently study and carefully examine different ethical systems based on different religious-philosophical traditions toward global ethics and humanistic connections (see Asante, 2010, 2011; Babbili, 2008; Bakar & Cheng, 1997; Baudot, 2001, 2002; Bond, 2004; Gunaratne, 2009; Karenga, 2006a; Macy, 1985; Miike, 2009, 2012; Picco, 2001; Schmidt, 2008; Shuter, 2000, 2003; Tehranian & Chappell, 2002; Tu, 2009; UNESCO, 2006; Yin, 2006b). Barnlund (1985) concluded:

In one way or another, the 32 chapters that follow in the present anthology locate intercultural communication scholarship in broader perspective, especially in relation to the fields of international and development communication, provide indigenous insights into the intersection of culture and communication, address equality and mutuality in intercultural communication contexts, and explore local and global communication ethics for humanistic connection and community building. These chapters, 25 of which are new essays for the second edition, are accompanied by an 870-item updated bibliography on intercultural communication theory and research. Scholars and students who wish to further pursue their academic interests can consult the bibliography for additional readings.

Organization and Overview of the Book

For this second edition, we reorganized The Global Intercultural Communication Reader into five parts for easier classroom use: (1) the emergence and evolution of intercultural communication; (2) issues and challenges in cross-cultural and intercultural inquiry; (3) cultural wisdom and communication practices in context; (4) identity, multiculturalism, and intercultural competence; and (5) globalization and ethical issues in intercultural relations. We have also provided a concise summary of each selection.

Part I, The Emergence and Evolution of Intercultural Communication, consists of six historical overviews of intercultural communication scholarship. These informative reflections and reviews of literature unfold the past and present purviews of the intercultural communication field especially in light of its conceptualizations of culture and communication. In Chapter 1, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz historicizes the origin of the intercultural communication field by documenting the role of the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State and its key players in determining the scope of theoretical parameters and the range of practical concerns. In Chapter 2, Gary R. Weaver proffers another historical account of the development of international and intercultural communication studies in the broader U.S. political milieu and the academic climate of international relations. In Chapter 3, Robert Shuter demonstrates through his content analysis of the 1980–1990 and 2006–2011 literature that, although the post-positivist paradigm, which treated culture as a laboratory for theory validation research in the 1980s and the 1990s, is no longer dominant in the field, an intracultural communication research imperative remains of critical importance on neglected regions and areas of the world. In Chapter 4, Bradford ‘J’ Hall compares the three paradigms predominant in the 1980s and the 1990s (i.e., the post-positivist paradigm, the Coordinated Management of Meaning paradigm, and the Ethnography of Communication paradigm) and their theoretical perspectives on culture and communication. In Chapter 5, Ronald L. Jackson maps out the state of the art of intercultural communication scholarship by examining intracultural, intercultural, cross-cultural, and critical-cultural articles in the six U.S. mainstream communication journals from 1953 to 2005. In Chapter 6, William J. Starosta takes a retrospective look at his 45-year personal journey as an intercultural communication scholar and recounts how he has come to arrive at his “double-emic” research praxis characterized by the merging horizon of internarrativity.

Part II, Issues and Challenges in Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Inquiry, includes six enlivening and empowering pieces that guide future theoretical development and methodological refinement in culture and communication research. In Chapter 7, Molefi Kete Asante articulates the need for the Afrocentric archeology of knowledge, discusses the African origin of philosophy and earliest African philosophers, and explicates Afrocentricity and its five defining characteristics. In Chapter 8, Yoshitaka Miike clarifies and crystallizes the metatheoretical idea of Asiacentricity as an evolving alternative paradigm while addressing the importance of cultural traditions, the issue of cultural hybridity and ecology, and the question of criticality and ethics. In Chapter 9, from the perspective of indigenous Hawaiian wisdom, Manulani Aluli-Meyer propounds “the triangulation of meaning,” or “holographic epistemology,” through the integration of the mind, the body, and the heart as a holistic, spiritual, and experiential way of knowing. In Chapter 10, Amira de la Garza explores the intersection of ontology and methodology and proposes the “four seasons of ethnography” as a context-sensitive, co-creative method of inquiry. In Chapter 11, Britta Kalscheuer critiques U.S. traditional and postcolonial paradigms of intercultural communication from a German standpoint and advances the concept of transdifference as a new theoretical lens for future research. In Chapter 12, Judith N. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama map out four contemporary approaches to the study of culture and communication and delineate six dialectics of intercultural communication practices that may be able to integrate the field’s metatheoretical diversity.

Part III, Cultural Wisdom and Communication Practices in Context, assembles six culture-specific inquires. These emic studies delve deeply into cultural resources and contextual discourses and yield indigenous theoretical insights into communication practices in particular communities. In Chapter 13, based on his Kawaida framework, Maualana Karenga characterizes African rhetoric as a rhetoric of community, resistance, reaffirmation, and possibility, stresses the importance of nommo in the Afrocentric movement, and details the Kemetic foundation of African speech acts as ethical communication conducts. In Chapter 14, Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu defines and delimits the pan-African concept of ubuntu and its humanistic implications for communication in local and global contexts. In Chapter 15, Hamid Mowlana offers an Islamic perspective on ethics, communication, and community by highlighting the theory of tawhid, the doctrine of tabligh, the concept of ummah, and the principle of taqwa. In Chapter 16, from a Hindu viewpoint, Nemi C. Jain and Anuradha Matukumalli examine the role and value of silence in intrapersonal, interpersonal, and public communication in India and identify future directions for research on silence and intercultural communication in the increasingly “talkative” age of globalization. In Chapter 17, through her close reading of the Analects of Confucius, Hui-Ching Chang outlines four guidelines for speaking with Confucius’s actual statements about verbal communication, points out some weaknesses of previous research on East Asian language behavior, and underscores the importance of understanding Asian philosophical thought to appreciate Asian styles of communication. In Chapter 18, Guo-Ming Chen surveys and synthesizes the past literature on Chinese culture and communication, elucidates his harmony theory by connecting many indigenous concepts into a holistic picture, and portrays a dark side of Chinese communication when the harmonious code of behavior and the courteous reciprocity of accommodation are violated.

Part IV, Identity, Multiculturalism, and Intercultural Competence, consists of eight essays that problematize cultural representations in theory and practice and challenge past models and modules of multicultural identity and intercultural communication competence. In Chapter 19, Jing Yin compares classical Chinese and Disney stories of Mulan with the aim of opening up the possibility of genuine intercultural dialogue and understanding by subjecting the Western appropriations of non-Western texts to critical scrutiny and deploying non-Western original sources as counter-narratives for multicultural literacy. In Chapter 20, Susana Rinderle explores the meanings of five identifying signifiers (i.e., Mexican/Mexicano, Mexican American, Chicano/a, Hispanic, and Latino/a) as Mexican diaspora groups employ them and draws out their intra-cultural and intercultural implications for cultural identification, social affiliation, and political consciousness. In Chapter 21, James W. Chesebro, David T. McMahan, Preston Russett, Eric J. Schumacher, and Junliang Wu shed light on increasing media representations across cultures that go beyond the traditional dichotomy of sexuality and gender and introduce the concept of androgyny in an attempt to reconceptualize the masculinity–femininity construct in cross-cultural communication research. In Chapter 22, Gust A. Yep provides a thorough review and critique of the Eurocentric literature on intercultural communication competence and argues for the necessity of incorporating issues of power, ideology, history, and culture-centeredness in reconsidering what it means to be interculturally competent from non-Eurocentric perspectives. In Chapter 23, William Kelly applies a critical approach to interpersonal communication between White U.S. Americans and the Japanese and shares his own personal narratives to illustrate alternative visions of intercultural identity and competence. In Chapter 24, through her ethnographic interviews, Phiona Stanley probes into the “superhero” phenomena of Western men who were English language teachers in Shanghai and reveals the Occidentalist construction of Western masculinity in a non-Western context. In Chapter 25, Lise M. Sparrow challenges Peter Adler’s widely accepted model of “multicultural man” and questions if “marginality,” “in-betweenness,” and “uniqueness” are indeed essential characteristics of multicultural identity. In Chapter 26, S. Lily Mendoza, Rona T. Halualani, and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka put forth the theoretical view that identity is a dynamic process of negotiation and performance between the creative multi-faceted self and structural constraints and present three case studies on Polish, Hawaiian, and Filipino/a identities so as to substantiate their invigorating communication-based framework of identity.

Part V, Globalization and Ethical Issues in Intercultural Relations, collects six insightful and inspiring writings on future prospects of a multicultural society. They concern themselves with the impact of globalization on local communities and ethical imperatives in local and global communication. In Chapter 27, Majid Tehranian offers a useful conceptual framework for understanding the complex and chaotic world of different ideologies and advocates communitarian globalism, inclusionary regionalism, democratic-benign nationalism, liberal localism, and ecumenical spiritualism in contrast to hegemonic globalism, exclusionary regionalism, totalitarian-aggressive nationalism, parochial localism, and fundamentalist spiritualism. In Chapter 28, Yukio Tsuda problematizes the frequent choice and use of English in intercultural interactions as a form of hegemony, which, in his opinion, is linked with globalization as Anglo-Americanization, transnationalization, and commercialization. In Chapter 29, Rebecca Blum Martinez addresses important ethical considerations for institutionalizing heritage language education by telling a thought-provoking story about New Mexico’s Pueblo Indian community’s resistance to the Pueblo–English bilingual program planning. In Chapter 30, Wimal Dissanayake focuses on the Sarvodarya movement initiated by A. T. Ariyaratne—who is sometimes called the “little Gandhi” of Sri Lanka—and presents an interesting case analysis of harmonious communication through compassion and non-violence, communal cooperation through self-transformation, and sustainable development through self-reliance according to Buddhist ethical ideals. In Chapter 31, Kuruvilla Pandikattu paints an alternative picture of the global village by engaging in Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha philosophy and highlighting the priority of “putting the last first” and the principle of self-sufficiency (swadeshi) symbolized by the salt, the hand-spinning wheel (charkha), and the hand-woven cotton cloth (khadi) in the context of India’s independence from the British rule. This edited reader concludes with Chapter 32, where Tu Weiming deciphers the paradoxical process of globalization and localization and delineates an ethical foundation for human freedom and flourishing in the conflict-ridden world by thematizing justice, sympathy civility, and responsibility in addition to liberty, rationality, legality, and rights.

Toward Harmonious Co-Existence

Consciousness expands with time and experience. Intercultural communication scholars have seen tremendous advances made possible by expanded consciousness. What those living in the West knows about the civilizations of Africa, Asia, and South America is far more than what they knew just a few years ago. Connected to vast regions of the world by the Internet, we all have become organically linked to information. No one needs to declare provinciality anymore. We are truly the world, and more immediate and contemporary images can replace the old worn-out ones that we may have once had about ourselves and others. In this regard, a form of globalization has already taken place. We can never be naive again about our own place in the world. We are not just who we think we are. We are also who others think we are. Somewhere in the convergence of the two perceptions, we always discover the meaning of our existence. We continue to “learn how to see things through the eyes of others and add their knowledge to our personal repertories” (Chen & Starosta, 2008, p. 215).

So what are the implications for intercultural communication in this type of new world? Implied in all of the selections in this collection is the idea that the people of the world can communicate. There is a sense that we are against conflict and violence and in support of the harmonious co-existence of humans. One does not become involved in communication at the interactive level without some optimistic perspectives in mind. The aim of the scholar as much as the communicator in an ordinary interactive situation is to create a way to engage in harmony. This is no pipe dream. It is, in actuality, the only reason why we communicate, that is, to make ourselves understood in ways that produce harmony.

No one believes that harmony will occur all the time, but we do believe that it is essential that the communicative doors are open to the possibilities of human co-existence. Once the doors are closed to communication, one cannot have dialogue or discourse. The attitude of the communicator in this new world should include an openness to the great varieties of human creativity (Asante, 2006). The fact of the matter is that Jerusalem is no more sacred than Mecca, or Benares, or Kyoto, or Ile-Ife to those who see their connections in those places. But neither are any other places more sacred than Jerusalem. An enormous human creativity sits at the very gate of our communication process. Until we are able to establish this type of consciousness in the literature, we will not create it in the commonplaces of ordinary conversation.

To claim that there is something of Tokyo in every city and something of Lagos in every city is to make a claim for international connectedness based on the exchange of ideas, thoughts, myth, and goods. We are participants in a world running full speed toward a common language transmuted, but not because it becomes a language embedded with world ideas rather than those of a single culture. Of course, this is a new view, but an essential one in the sense that we are determined to demonstrate by the present volume a variety of ways that we can approach human communication in a global manner. The global cannot mean the prosecution of a single cultural reality as if it is global. It must mean the acceptance of an integrative global system where those who communicate are able to bring into consideration the yuan-fen and nkrabea as well as Western concepts.

Our work as scholars is to assist in mapping where we have been and where we are going as human beings. However, only a radical re-assessment of our traditional patterns in communication can provide us with a model, a scheme, and an understanding of our future (Asante, 2005; Miike, 2012; Yin, 2011). As simple patterns of Western communication universalized to resemble a world system, the communication models of the past have brought us to the brink of chaos. There is general agreement that we cannot order and generalize about the nature of the human reality without assembling more information from other than Western cultures. This is our challenge, and it is one that we must confront fully if we are to appreciate causal relationships among phenomena in different cultures and nations. Our map, therefore, is not simple; it is complicated, and the work of the scholars we present in these pages is difficult but rewarding for those who wish to enter the world of the complex, which, after all, is the world we live in.

References

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Asante, M. K. (1998). The Afrocentric idea (Rev. ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Asante, M. K. (2005). Race, rhetoric, and identity: The architecton of soul. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.

Asante, M. K. (2006). The rhetoric of globalization: The Europeanization of human ideas. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 1(2), 152–158.

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