Intercultural communication
According to Geert Hofstede, culture is the "collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another, which includes systems of values and values are among the building blocks of culture."
Cultures are actually templates for living whereby it tells us who we actually are, the groups we belong to and the way we live our lives. It is an influence on our perspective towards life, as well as it inteprets the behaviour we exhibit.
Let's look at the traditional weddings we have in Singapore, for the chinese and malays. They are people living in the same country,working in the same environment and yet have such different sets of traditional values regarding major decisions.
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The traditional chinese wedding held in Singapore is typically in a dinner setting, within a large modern hotel. The other thing you’ll see is that during the dinner, there will be a ‘toast’ called ‘Yam Seng’ where the happy couple give a toast to the crowd of a few hundred people. This is usually followed by a ‘speech’ session where the groom or bride speak about how they met and also to give thanks to the family and friends who have helped them in their preparation.This is rather important to the older generation, who feel that their children must have a ‘grand’ wedding to give their families ‘face’.
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A traditional Malay wedding is usually held in a Housing Development Board (HDB) void deck and is strewn with beautiful lights. You’ll see the happy couple in Malay garb and seated in a grand seat where they pay respects to their elders and entertain the guests. Malays in Singapore are a traditional lot, and usually you will see that they are deeply respectful to theis family and relatives.
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7 comments:
seems like you are teaching communication..... nope.. you are teaching management???
That was quite a detailed description of both a traditional Chinese wedding and traditional Malay wedding.
Thumbs up!
Basically, i feel that every culture and traditional says a lot and speaks about our past and history. This is what i infer from Inter-cultural communication. Am i right?
to chloe: i'm studying communications.
Yes, to me, our culture and traditions kind of 'forms' us in our beliefs,the way we do things and how we observe certain 'unspoken rules' within the family or our extended family..an example could be that all the children have to ask our elders to eat first before we eat,as a form of respect.
Singapore is a multi-racial country and there's many examples of inter cultural communication. Though every citizen might not be of the same race or belief and we do not share the same culture and tradition, but still we are able to communicate with each other. Your example on Chinese and Malay wedding. Well, the weddings might be held in a different manner, but ultimately their goal is the same.
Whatever it may be, no matter how different each of us are, we still can communicate with each other. That is what it means by inter cultural communication
I have learnt culture in my Sociology modules back in school as well. Culture is the deposit of knowledge, experience beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religon, timing, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universal and material objects and possessions acquired by a large group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture enables us to live in a society whithin a given geographic environment at a given state of technical development within a particular moment in time.
Intercultural relations are indispensable,especially in singapore whereby there are so many people of different races living together. Imagine the chaos if no one bothers to communicate with the other locals of a different culture? that will be terrible.
yeah, i get along very well with every race..because i don't feel that we should discriminate. I had 2 best friends who were malay and i learnt to speak malay and they,chinese! it was really fun to go.." HEY! bagus!keep up the good work!" so intercultural communication is truly important.
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