Paradigmatic Assumptions of Intercultural Communications

Intercultural relations is an unusual academic specialty among the social sciences. This is in part because it specifies a relatively specific domain as its focus. So, unlike sociology, which claims all of social relations as its domain, or anthropology, which even more grandly claims all of human phenomena as its bailiwick, intercultural studies constrains itself to those human interactions that occur across cultural boundaries. But the more salient aspect of this field’s uniqueness is its assumption that people can be aware of their cultural experience, and further, that they can intentionally shift their experience into different cultural contexts. This focus on consciousness and intentionality differentiates intercultural relations even from cross-cultural psychology, which, while it studies comparative and some interactive phenomena across cultures, does not do so with the same assumption of self-reflexive consciousness.