Cross Cultural Contact with Americans

Intercultural CommunicationRini Anggun Pertiwi 2 chsEducation A 0902443 Chapter Report: Chapter 1 Cross-Cultural Contact with Americans American, as it is explained in the beginning of chapter 1, is described as the people who were born, raised and lives in the United State. We will find that Americans are consists of many people from different races, religions and ethnics. A lot of culture, might be, live together in the same area. Before, they called it as “melting pot” where so many different culture are blending, mixing each other without decompress the culture it self.
However, the term “melting pot” is no longer use by the American because, in fact, the culture is not blending or mixing to each other. They are stand side by side and keep their own color like mosaic. With this kind of variety, it is hard to explain who Americans are. Some different culture value perspective about American often occur when someone from the outside of American society exaggerate to much even though they lack of information or contact with the member of American society.
This kind of stereotype, for some reason, gives a yin-yang effect when someone divides the society into “we” and “they”. They will compare about what “we” have with something that “they” have. Sometimes, “they” becomes a negative side of the comparison because the “we” see them has too much differences. With such culture variation, United States is seen as a vast country. However, America still has mainstream value that will generalize American to make them exposed the same society value, it is called as Americanization.

Furthermore, American has their own way to describe the value of their culture. For example, firstly, the attitude towards privacy which sometimes miss interpreted by foreigners or non American. As it’s explained in the book, for Americans privacy doesn’t mean isolation or loneliness. They considered it as the way of respect to the individual needs. Secondly, American likes to minimize status differences in their society. Without allaying the power status they make themselves equal with other. Thirdly, American focuses on progress and change.
This future orientation behavior makes them want to fulfill their future needs, their value of responsibility to the life change are essentials. As this book already figure out, cross-cultural communication with American who has various ethnic groups and culture from different ancestor will shows the differences between cultural behavior and individual behavior of them. Reference: Levine, D. R. , & Adelman, M. B. (1993). Beyond Language: Cross-Cultural Communication. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Regents.