Intercultural Communication and culture ?

Intercultural Communication :
"This is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds make an effort to communicate"

Here is a definition quite explicit and non-explicit in the same time.

Let's have a look on the real meaning of Culture

I particulary like this definition of culture :
"Culture is everything you learn through interaction with others during your lifetime"

In that way, I guess it means that we need to communicate with the other to share some cultural minds and aspect in order to build our own culture. Because by this way, it means that everybody owns his personnal culture, indeed, I can not compare my vision of the world with my neighbor's. But the culture also gathers everyone in one identity built during many years and many period of history.

Indeed the culture is a product of history :
We can easily explain why French people are so much "addicted" to the strike !! Did you know that France has lived one of its biggest strike of its history for few weeks ? Public transport, universities and so on. Is it not a product of the culture which is a product of history? France was the first country to have its own revolution in 1789, I guess it makes us quite dissenting !!

As I just demonstrated French culture is not only "good food, fashion clothes, cheese and wine". These aspect of the culture is only the visible aspect, we can easily find an invisible culture (the art of the strike as i described !)

A culture can hardly been summarized within a blog article or even a 10.000 pages book, some aspect of a culture can even not been described by some words and hardly explained, a culture is overall felt.


So now, let's take back the definition of "Intercultural communication" :
"This is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds make an effort to communicate"

-Effort- I think that is a quite important word in that definition. Well, it deals like two people from different cultures have normally some difficulties to communicate together. That is not wrong of course, generally a French from Paris will have more difficulties to talk with a man from the countryside than someone else from Paris, and why ?
A country can even owns so much different cultures, someone from Paris will not employ the same language than somebody from the south of France, the feelings are different, and so on...

But why does intercultural communication exist ?
In my mind, the goal is to learn, no culture is "better" than another...
Maybe if people took a look on other cultures more often, the world would be better...


Picture : Benetton advertising campaign ("Hearts", 1996)