HISTORY
Relativism
The degree to which an individual judges another culture by its context is cultural relativism. Stated another way, cultural relativism evaluates the actions in a culture by the premises of that culture—by its assumptions about society, the environment, technology, religion, and science. A fundamental notion of cultural relativism is that cultures tend to be internally consistent. That is, one element of a culture, which by itself may seem strange to an observer from another culture, generally makes sense when considered in light of the other elements of that culture. For example, the Old Order Amish in the United States refuse to allow their children to attend public schools. Instead, the Amish provide their own schools, with the instruction taught in the German dialect spoken by the Amish. These schools are intended to maintain Amish cultural values and to prevent the assimilation of the Amish into the melting pot of U.S. society. State laws require that parochial schools provide a comparable education to that of public schools, and school officials often rule that Amish schools are inferior. Amish parents are then ordered to send their children to public schools. When the parents refuse to do so, they are jailed for breaking the law.
If school officials viewed this situation in terms of cultural relativity, they might understand that the Amish schools are functional in preparing Amish youth to be farmers, carpenters, housewives, and for the other manual occupations available to them. The Amish strongly value their religion, the German dialect they speak, and their pastoral way of life. The Amish resist efforts like mandated public schooling, which they feel are intended to assimilate them into US society.
Intercultural communication as a scholarly field of study began after World War II in the United States. American diplomats seldom knew the language of the nation to which they were assigned and had no understanding of its culture, so in 1947 the U.S. Department of State established the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in order to retrain its diplomats. In essence, what the FSI participants wanted to learn was the cultural aspects of intercultural communication. They wanted to know how to communicate with individuals in a specific culture.
One of the leading anthropologists at the Foreign Service Institute, Edward Hall, decided that a radical change was needed. First, he focussed on micro-level cultural aspects of vocal tone, gestures, time, and many of the main elements of what we today call nonverbal communication. Edward Hall taught the participants how to exchange information across cultures, that is, communication between individuals who were culturally unalike. He labelled what he was teaching "intercultural communication"— so it was he who coined the expression. Until Hall, anthropologists had not paid very much attention to human communication. While teaching at the FSI, Hall realized that "Culture is communication and communication is culture."
What were the major intellectual influences on this conceptualization? Hall's early life experiences as he grew up in the culturally diverse state of New Mexico, and commanded an African American regiment in World War II, were important influences. Hall says that from his work with the Hopi and Navajo he learned "firsthand about the details and complexities of one of the world's most significant problems: Intercultural relations".
Hall's graduate training in anthropology at Columbia University and his work as an applied anthropologist in the Foreign Service Institute brought him in contact with scholars who influenced his conceptualization of intercultural communication. Hall identified four major influences on his work: (1) cultural anthropology, (2) linguistics, (3) ethology, the study of animal behavior, and (4) Freudian psychoanalytic theory.