Cross Cultural Communication Free Essays

Cross-Cultural Communication â€Å"Communication in health care is a complex issue. Language and cultural barriers complicate the situation. Language is the framework in which the world view of a culture is molded, and it describes the boundaries and perspectives of a cultural system. We will write a custom essay sample on Cross Cultural Communication or any similar topic only for you Order Now A language barrier disarms a communicant’s ability to assess meanings, intent, emotions, and reactions and creates a state of dependency on the individual who holds the keys to the entire process† (Putsch, 1985, para. 1 ). It is common for Patients in minority populations to receive a lower quality of care. Much of this is contributed to cultural communication barriers. Part of the solution maybe to incorporate the six principles of cross-cultural communication in order to communicate effectively. Differences in worldviews, values, and communication styles can all contribute to misunderstandings. We must also take into consideration that most breakdowns in communication are often attributed to cultural differences. This may lead a person to use caution when speaking to someone that does not share their cultural beliefs. This includes non-verbal as well as verbal communication. Cross cultural communication also requires an understanding of a groups â€Å"do’s and taboos† and is respectful of them. This may include removing your shoes before entering ones home or understanding cultural meal etiquette. If you frequently communicate with a certain cultural group or race of people, learning about their variations in communication style will increase your understanding of that group. This is particular important when it comes to health care. I found interest in the cultural differences of Muslim Americans (part of Middle Eastern culture). When considering the healthcare needs of American Muslim patients, require open minded views from health care providers when it comes to religious practice, rituals, and traditions. Religious values and beliefs are important to this community. They are a major influence in their health care practices, expectations of health care and medical decision making. Muslims see God as the dictator and controller of health. They believe that God decides who develops certain types of cancer, who survives the ordeal and who succumbs to the disease. Their belief that a particular illness is a disease of fate greatly influences how they seek healthcare, if at all. This is because some feel they are destined to suffer while others put all of their faith in prayer. This is why it is crucial for health care providers to be sensitive to the religious beliefs of Muslim Americans. Making an effort to accommodate Muslim patients can be crucial to their health. It will increase the trust they have for the health care community. This will encourage them to seek health care, as well as be compliant to medical treatments. Certain things to consider are customs such fasting during Ramadan and their adherence to dietary restrictions. It is also important to be sensitive to the needs of females in this community. It is not acceptable for them to be examined by a male doctor. Given them a choice when it comes to gender will encourage them to seek needed health care. Proper communication skills are key to improving the health care needs of many. This includes disease awareness, along with the prevention and spread of illness. References Padela, A. , Gunter, K. , Killawi, A. (2011, June). Meeting the Healthcare Needs of American Muslims. I. S. P. U. , (), . Retrieved from http://www. ispu. org Putsch, R. W. (1985, December). The Special Case of Interpreters in Health Care. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 254(23), . Retrieved from How to cite Cross Cultural Communication, Essay examples Cross Cultural Communication Free Essays In Beyond Culture (1976) he progressed further towards n Integral vision of culture. THE SILENT LANGUAGE People communicate through a whole range of behavior that is unexamined, taken for granted. This process takes place outside conscious awareness and in juxtaposition to words. We will write a custom essay sample on Cross Cultural Communication or any similar topic only for you Order Now What people do is frequently more important than what they say. Nonetheless, people of European heritage live In a â€Å"word world† and tend not to perceive the relevance of communication through the language of behavior. Even though language molds thinking, other cultural systems have a pervasive effect on how the world is perceived, how the self is experienced, and how life itself is organized. Culture may be defined as â€Å"the way of life of a people, the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes and material things. † Culture controls behavior in deep and persisting ways, many of which are outside awareness and therefore beyond conscious control of the Individual. Hall attempts to bring those patterns to awareness. He develops a method for the analysis of culture, through defining the basic units of culture, Its bullying blocks or â€Å"Isolates,† and then tying these isolates into a biological base so they can be compared among cultures, moving up to build a unified theory of culture. The Silent Language outlines a theory of culture and a theory of how culture came into being. Its key message is that we must learn to understand the out-of-awareness aspects of communication, our cultural unconscious. The books ultimate purpose Is to â€Å"reveal the broad extent to which culture controls our lives. † Culture hides more than It reveals and It hides most effectively from its own participants. The real challenge is not to understand foreign cultures but to understand one’s own, to make what we take for granted stand out in perspective. This can be achieved mainly through exposing oneself to foreign ways, wrought the shock of contrast and difference. Culture is not one thing, but many. Hall identifies ten primary kinds of human activity he labels Primary Message Systems. Each Is rooted in biology, can be examined by Itself, and gears Into the overall network of culture: 1 ) Interaction, 2) Association, 3) Subsistence, 4) Bisexuality (cultural differentiation between men and women: concepts of masculinity and femininity tend to be regarded as â€Å"human nature,† but vary widely from one culture to the next), 5) Territoriality, 6) Temporarily, 7) Learning and Acquisition (culture is hared behavior; most culture is acquired and therefore cannot be taught; language is first acquired, then taught; learning, a key adaptive mechanism, came into its own different cultures acquire culture in a culturally specific way, they learn how to learn differently; in the process of learning they acquire a set of tacit conditions and assumptions in which learning is embedded), 8) Play, 9) Defense, and 10) Exploitation (use of materials, development of physical extensions to the body to meet environmental conditions). Culture is a complex series of interrelated a ctivities, tit roots buried in the past, in infra-culture, behavior that preceded culture but later became elaborated by humans into culture. According to Hall’s theory, culture operates on three levels: formal, informal, and technical. While one of these modes of behavior dominates, all three are present in any given situation. Formal activities are taught by precept and admonition, through a process charged with emotion: the learner tries, makes a mistake, and is corrected. The main agent of informal learning is a model used for imitation. Whole clusters are learned at a time, usually without awareness that they are being learned at all or that here are patterns or rules governing them. Technical learning is usually transmitted in explicit form from a teacher to a student. Some societies are predominantly formal in their behavior, and invest tradition with an enormous weight. Americans have emphasized the informal at the expense of the formal. The informal is made up of activities and mannerisms that were once learned, but that are done automatically. Technical behavior is fully conscious behavior. Science is largely technical. When violations of a formal mode occur, they are accompanied by a tide of emotion. Formal yester are characterized by a great tenacity. The formal tends to change slowly, almost imperceptibly. The formal, informal and technical exist in a relationship of continuous change. Regarding change, different cultures are analogous to different species in the sense that some of them, being more adaptive than others, have a greater capacity for survival. Taken at any given point, culture seems to be made up of formal behavior patterns that constitute a core around which there are certain informal adaptations, and which is supported by a series of technical props. Change is a complex circular process. It proceeds from formal to informal to technical to new formal. Small informal adaptations are continually being made in daily life. These adaptations, when successful, eventually become decentralized as improvements, and these accumulate imperceptibly until they are suddenly acclaimed as â€Å"break- through. † All change originates in the out-of-awareness nature of the informal. Culture is communication and communication is culture. Since most of what is known about communication has been learned from the study of language, Hall projects some principles of language (language as it is spoken, not written, writing being a humiliation of a symbolization) into other less elaborated and specialized communication systems. He devises a common terminology for all forms of communication, including language. Every message can be broken down into three parts: sets, what you perceive first (for example, words); isolates, the components that make up the sets (sounds); and patterns, the way in which sets are strung together in order to give them meaning (grammar, syntax). A set is a group of two or more constituent components that is perceived as separate from other events. They are the first things to be observed, their number is unlimited, n which they are used. There are formal, informal and technical sets. Formal sets, for example, are things that people take for granted and which seem natural: words, buildings, governments, families, the months of the year, etc. A large part of the vocabulary of a culture is devoted to sets. Sets are valued, assigned to categories (which reveal patterns), and treated differently (formally, informally, and technically) in different cultures. By themselves, sets are neutral. In patterns, they take on complex meanings. The second element, the isolate, proves to be a tricky one. Hall encounters some faculties identifying precisely the constituents of cultural sets. He alludes to the isolate as â€Å"an illusive abstraction, almost a phantom† and speaks of â€Å"cultural indeterminacy’: â€Å"when working with cultural data, one can only be precise on one analytical level at a time and then only for a moment. † (Might this be a result of the projection of rules that apply specifically to language into less complex communication systems? ). The principle of indeterminacy can be extended to the whole theory of culture: the more precise the observer is on one level, the less precise he/she will be on any other. Patterns are those implicit rules by means of which sets are arranged so that they take on meaning. They determine experience, channeling people’s senses and thoughts. They are cultural, shared by a group. There is no such thing as â€Å"experience† in the abstract, as a mode separate and distinct from culture. This leads to a principle of relativity in culture: there is no experience independent of culture against which culture can be measured. The idea that people are bound by hidden cultural rules and not masters of their fate usually encounters resistance. These rules are so constant that they are not recognized as rules at all. Patterns are ruled by laws of order, selection, and congruence. There are formal, informal, and technical patterns. In the case of informal patterns, when a rule is made explicit, â€Å"put into words,† it is recognized immediately by others in the same culture since it has already been acquired. Informal patterns are learned by selecting a model and copying her/him; formal patterns are learned by precept and admonition; technical ones are spelled out. The handling of time is one of the key elements of culture. Americans tend to think of time as something fixed in nature. Their view of time is characterized by correctness, linearity, necessity for scheduling, and orientation toward the future. Formal sets of time include days, hours, minutes, weeks, months, seasons, years, etc. Formal isolates include ordering (e. G. Days of the week), cyclist, valuation (time should not be wasted), tangibility (time as commodity), duration, and depth. The vocabulary of informal time (minutes, seconds, years) is often identical with that of technical and formal time. The context usually tells the hearer wha t level of discourse is being used. Informal isolates include urgency (related to the impression of time assign rapidly or slowly), monochromes (doing one thing at a time†American culture is characteristically monochromatic), activity (distinction between active and dormant phases, whether one is busy or not; some cultures are agric, agency- something new would seem to exceed that of almost any other culture in the world today. It is necessary to an economy like ours. In these informal isolates, one finds the building blocks that make the values and driving forces of a culture visas–visas time. The handling of time is revealing of how unconscious implicit patterns work in a ultra, and how tenaciously people hold on to them. They exist like the air around Space is organized differently in each culture. In Latin America, for example, the interaction distance is much less than in the US. People cannot talk comfortably with each other unless they are very close to the dista nce that evokes either sexual or hostile feelings in North America. Every living thing has a physical boundary that separates it from its external environment. There is a second boundary outside this physical one: the organism’s territory. The act of laying claim to and defending a territory is termed irritability, which is highly elaborated in humans, and greatly differentiated from culture to culture. Culture is not only imposed upon humanity, it is humanity in a greatly expanded sense. Culture is the link between human beings and the means they have of interacting with others. By broadening their understanding of the forces that make up and control their lives, people could learn where they are and who they are. It should rekindle their interest in life, free them from the groove of habit, and prevent them from being pushed around by the more voracious, predatory, and opportunistic f their fellow humans. Bringing to awareness what has been taken for granted should contribute to increased self-knowledge and decreased alienation. THE HIDDEN DIMENSION The subject of this book is space as a system of communication. It deals with people’s perception and use of personal, social, architectural, and urban spaces. â€Å"Proteomics† is the term coined by Hall for the interrelated observations and theories of the use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture. As in The Silent Language, the main thesis of this work borrows from Benjamin Lee Wharf’s idea of language (language incentive not Just as a medium of expressing thought, but as a major element in the formation of thought) and applies it to all human behavior, to all culture. Proximity research confirms, according to Hall, that people from different cultures inhabit different sensory worlds, so that experience as it is perceived through one set of culturally patterned sensory screens is quite different from experience perceived through another. Different cultural systems are rooted in biology and physiology. Humans are distinguished from other animals by virtue of what Hall terms â€Å"extensions† of their organism. Extensions improve and specialize certain functions. The computer is an extension of certain functions of the brain, the telephone extends the voice, the wheel extends the legs and feet, language extends experience in time and space, and writing extends language. These extensions have been developed to such a degree that we are apt to forget that humanness is rooted in animal nature. Extensions have taken over, and are rapidly replacing nature. The relationship one in which both humans and their environment participate in molding each other. Humans are in a position of creating the worlds in which they live, which determine hat kind of an organism they will be. This is a disturbing thought in view of how little is known about human nature. Comparative studies of animals help to show how people’s space requirements are influenced by their environment. Territoriality is behavior by which an organism lays claim to an area and defends it against members of its own species. Among other functions, it ensures the propagation of the species by regulating density. In addition to territory that is identified with a particular plot of ground, each animal is surrounded by a series of bubbles or irregularly shaped balloons. Some mechanisms (personal and social distances) are observed during interactions of members of the same species, others when individuals of different species meet (flight, critical, and attack distances). Personal distance is the normal spacing that non-contact animals maintain with their fellows. Social distance is a psychological distance that contains a group, maintaining a bond. Hall points to the need to reconsider Malthusian’ doctrine that relates population to food supply. In the light of evidence from the study of crabs, stickleback fish, deer, and muskrats, he supports the thesis that increase and crease in animal populations are controlled by physiological mechanisms that respond to density. As the number of animals on a given area increases, stress builds up until it triggers an endocrine reaction that lowers the fertility rate, increases susceptibility to disease, and collapses the population. Predators would not play a decisive role in controlling population, but develop a subtle symbiosis with their prey, providing a constant environmental pressure that contributes to improve the species. Hall describes experiments carried out on rats (by ideologist John Calhoun) that comment the role of stress from crowding as a factor in population control. Rats under extreme conditions of population density develop what is termed a behavioral â€Å"sink†: severe disruptions of courting, sex behavior, reproduction, nest building, care of the young, territoriality, and social organization, as well as physiological effects. The dramatic results of crowding range from aggression through various forms of abnormal behavior to mass die-off. The stress generated by crowding has been an efficient device in the service of evolution because it employs the forces of interspecies, rather than interspecies, competition. In the case of humans, the shift by our ancestors from reliance on smell to reliance on vision as a result of environmental pressures (shift from groundswell to arboreal life) endowed them with a greater capacity to withstand crowding. (This shift redefined the human situation. The human ability to plan has been made possible because the eye takes in a larger sweep; it codes more complex data and thus encourages abstract thinking. ) Hall goes on to examine the nature of the human receptor systems, and how the information received from them is modified by culture. People’s relationship to their environment is a function of their sensory apparatus and how this apparatus is conditioned to respond. There are visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthesia, tactile and high capacity of the skin to emit and detect radiant heat and thus communicate emotional states and chemically influence other people’s emotions, temperature having a great deal to do with how we experience crowding. According to Hall, we live an increasingly insulated, automated, sensory-deprived life in manufactured environments; urban spaces (of North America in the ‘ass) â€Å"provide little excitement r visual variation and virtually no opportunity to build a repertoire of visual experiences. It would appear that many people are synthetically deprived and even cramped. † Perception of space is closely related with the sense of self. People can be considered as having visual, kinesthesia, tactile, and thermal aspects of their selves, which may be either inhibited or encouraged to develop by their environment. Vision, the last of the senses to evolve, is by far the most complex. Vision is synthesis. It is not passive but active, a transaction between a person and her/his environment. A person learns while he sees and what he learns influences what he sees. There is a visual field (retinal image) and a visual world (what is perceived). Sensory data from other sources, such as body (kinesthesia) feedback, are used to correct the visual field. Vision as a synthetic process means there is no stable, uniform â€Å"reality’ that is recorded on a passive visual receptor system. Perceptual worlds vary between people and between cultures. This influences their manner of orienting themselves in space, and how they get around. Art can be a rich source of data on human perception. The art of a culture reveals a retreat deal about the perceptual world of that culture. The artist provides the reader, listener or viewer with properly selected cues that are not only congruent with the events depicted but consistent with the unspoken language and culture of the audience. Artists help order the cultural universe. By studying the art of the past it is possible to learn something from our own responses about the nature and organization of our visual systems and expectations, as well as develop some notion of what the perceptual world of early people may have been like. Among several examples, Hall discuses the early Egyptian experience of space. Their preoccupation was more with the correct orientation and alignment of religious and ceremonial structures to the cosmos than with enclosed space per SE. The Western idea of a religious edifice is that it communicates spatially. Chapels are small and intimate while cathedrals are awe-inspiring and remind one of the cosmos by virtue of the space they enclose. Hall discusses several moments in the evolution of Western visual arts since the Renaissance in terms of the distinction between the visual world and the visual field, between what one knows to be present and what one sees. Literature can also be a key to perception. Hall promotes the use of literary texts as data (rather than simply as descriptions) on how space has been experienced and perceived in different cultural contexts. There are three proximity levels: infrastructural (rooted in the past, applied to behavior on lower organizational levels that underlie culture, such as territoriality, spacing, and population control), preternatural (related to the senses, the physiological base shared by all human beings, to which culture gives structure and meaning), and of monoculture has three aspects: fixed-feature, simplified-feature, and informal. Fixed-feature spaces are one of the basic ways of organizing the activities of individuals and groups. They include material manifestations as well as hidden, internalized designs that govern behavior. Fixed-feature patterns include buildings, the layout of towns and cities, and the internal spatial organization of houses. Americans have become dependent on the uniform grid pattern of their cities. Western systems stress the lines, which they name. In Japan, the intersections but not the streets are named. Houses instead of being related in space are related in time and numbered in the order in which they are built. The Japanese pattern emphasizes hierarchies that grow around centers. † People carry around initializations of fixed-feature space, which is the mold into which a great deal of behavior is cast. In discussing exemplified-feature space, Hall distinguishes between suspicious spaces (which tend to keep people apart, such as railway waiting rooms) and sociopaths spaces, which tend to bring people together (tables at a sidewalk cafe ©). The structuring of exemplified-features can have a profound effect on behavior. Distinctions between fixed-feature space and simplified-feature space, and between goofball and sociopaths spaces, vary from culture to culture. Informal space refers to personal and social distance among humans. Hall distinguishes four distances kept by people in social situations, each with a close and a far phase: intimate, personal, social, and public. These communicate not only internalized proximity patterns, but also how people feel toward each other. People sense distance as other animals do. They are surrounded by a series of expanding and contracting fields. Their perception of space is not passive but dynamic, related to action†what can be done in a given space. This proximity behavior occurs out of awareness, is culturally conditioned and entirely arbitrary. Hall provides a classification of distances (which applies to an American, middle-class, healthy adult population of â€Å"mainly natives of the northeastern seaboard† in the ‘ass): a) Intimate distance -close phase (CAP): the distance of love-making and wrestling, comforting and protecting -far phase (UP): 6 to 18 inches; b) Personal distance: the distance consistently separating the members of a noncombatant species, a small sphere or bubble that the organism maintains between itself and others -CAP: 1 _ to 2 _ feet -UP: _ to 4 feet; c) Social distance: the distance of impersonal business, the phases communicating degrees of involvement and formality -CAP: 4 to 7 feet -UP: 7 to 12 feet; d) Public distance -CAP: 12 to 25 feet -UP: 25 feet or more. Hall moves on to compare the proximity patterns for people of different cultures. Such comparative analysis is intended to serve a double purpose: first, to shed light on our own out-of-awareness patterns and, by means of this , to contribute to improved design of living and working structures and cities; and second, to contribute to intercultural understanding. Proximity patterns play a role in humans memorable to displayed behavior in lower life forms: they simultaneously consolidate the group and isolate it from others by reinforcing integrator identity and making intercrop communication more difficult. In the US, space is used to classify people and activities (e. G. Corner office), whereas important in America; in England it means nothing. In regard to the need of walls as a screen to the ego, Americans would be placed somewhere between the Germans and the English. â€Å"When an American wants to be alone he goes into a room and shuts the door†he depends on architectural features for screening†¦ The English . Eave in effect internalized a set of barriers, which they erect and which others are supposed to recognize. † The French, like other Mediterranean cultures, pack together more closely than northern Europeans, the English and Americans. Crowded living means higher sensory involvement. â€Å"The French are more inv olved with each other. The layout of their offices, homes, towns, cities, and countryside is such as to keep them involved. † For the French, â€Å"the city is something from which to derive satisfaction. † Hall emphasizes the different size of cars. American cars prevent the overlapping of private spheres inside the car and isolate the traveler from the kinesthesia experiencing of the road. There are two major European systems for patterning space. The â€Å"radiating star,† which occurs in France and Spain, is sociopaths. The â€Å"grid,† originating in the Middle East, adopted by the Romans and carried to England at the time of Caesar, is suspicious. The radiating star connects all points and systems. This pattern of flow from and into a series of interlocking centers touches all facets of French life. In Japanese culture, the concept of a center that can be approached from any direction is an important theme. Furniture tends to be located in the center of a room. American rooms can seem bare to them because the centers are bare. To Americans the walls of a house are fixed; in Japan they are semi- fixed. A house and the zone immediately surrounding it are considered as one structure. Westerners think of space as the distance between objects, as â€Å"empty. † The Japanese are trained to give meaning to spaces, to perceive the shape and arrangement of spaces, for which they have the word ma. In their perception of space, the Japanese integrate vision with other senses. A Japanese garden involves a visual and kinesthesia experience of space. Hall describes the concept of privacy in the Arab world as opposed to American culture. Pushing and shoving in public places is characteristic of Middle Eastern culture. They have no concept of a private zone outside the body. The ego is hidden inside the body. It is possible that population and environmental pressures (the desert) have resulted in a cultural adaptation to high density. Olfactory plays an important role in interaction. Arab upper middle-middle class homes, however, are enormous by Western standards. They avoid partitions because Arabs do not like to be alone. They do not mind being crowded by people, but have a high sensitivity to architectural crowding. Arabs look each other in the eye when talking with an intensity that makes most Americans uncomfortable. The implosion of the world population into cities is creating a series of lethal behavioral sinks. The growth of both the number of cars and population creates a chaotic situation without self-correcting features. In America, it is necessary to consider the cultural differences between minority groups and the dominant culture, which are basic and have to do with such core values as the use and structuring of space, time, and materials. In the major cities of the US, people of very different cultures are in contact with each other in dangerously high maintain distinct identities for several generations. Hall suggests the introduction of â€Å"design features that will counteract the ill effects of the sink but not destroy the (ethnic) enclave in the process. † This means designing spaces that will maintain a healthy density, a healthy interaction rate, and a continuing sense of ethnic identification. Psychologists, anthropologists, and ideologists should be part of city planning departments. Scale is a key factor in planning towns, neighborhoods, and sousing developments. Crowding is linked with physical and social pathologies, illness and crime. The degree to which peoples are essentially involved with each other and how they use time determine not only at what point they are crowded but the methods for relieving crowding as well. Time and the way it is handled have much to do with the structuring of space. Monochromatic time is characteristic of low-involvement people, who compartmentalize time; polyphonic people, who are more involved, tend to have several operations going at the same time. Density requirements are different. The Italian piazza and he Spanish plaza serve both involvement and polyphonic functions, whereas the American Main Street reflects both a different structuring of time and a lesser degree of involvement. City planners have built lawlessness into urban ethnic enclaves by letting them turn into sinks. They should consider reinforcing the human need to belong to a social group akin to the old neighborhood where one is known, has a place, and people have a sense of responsibility to each other. Apart from the enclaves, everything in American cities is suspicious, driving people apart and alienating them from each other. Cars play a significant role in this. They consume space in which people could meet. They create sensory deprivation, insulating people from their environment and from human contact. City planning of the future should find methods for computing and measuring human scale and involvement ratios; make constructive use of the ethnic enclave, reinforcing positive aspects of each culture that provide identity and strength; conserve large outdoor spaces; and preserve useful, satisfying old buildings and neighborhoods. The Hidden Dimension emphasizes that virtually everything that people are and do is associated with the experience of space. The sense of space is molded and patterned by culture. According to Hall, Americans suffer from an â€Å"a-cultural bias†. They direct their attention more toward content (function) than toward structure (form), and the importance of culture is minimized; â€Å"†¦ We have consistently failed to recognize the reality of different cultures within our national boundaries. † In the ‘ass and ‘ass people feared economic cycles; today (sass) we should be alarmed by population cycles. Western people have developed extensions of themselves and then proceeded to screen their senses, ignoring their animal nature, so that they loud get more people into smaller places. Hall compares the situation with the overcrowding of cities in the Middle Ages, which was punctuated by disastrous plagues. Animal studies show the operation of an endocrine control system that regulates the population. Animals stressed from overcrowding suffer from exactly the same diseases as humans: circulatory and heart diseases. Animal studies show that crowding is neither good nor bad per SE, but rather that overpopulation and distances lead to population collapse. In order to solve urban problems we must begin by questioning our basic assumptions concerning the relationship between people and their environment. They should be considered as parts of an interrelated system. The central point of this book is that people cannot divest themselves from their own culture. Even if small fragments of culture are brought to awareness, they cannot be changed because they are very personally experienced and because people cannot act or interact at all in any meaningful way except through the medium of culture. People and their extensions constitute an interrelated system. Their relationship is a continuation and a specialized form of the relationship of organisms in general to heir environment. The ethnic crisis, the urban crisis, and the education crisis are interrelated. They are facets of a larger crisis, a natural growth of humans having developed a new dimension†the cultural dimension†most of which is hidden from view. BEYOND CULTURE There are two main crises in the world today. The most visible is the population/ environment crisis. There is also the crisis of humankind’s relationship to its extensions, institutions, ideas, as well as the relationships between individuals and groups. There are no technical solutions for these crises. Solutions are related to power. The future depends on the ability to transcend the limits of individual cultures. To do so, people must first recognize and accept the hidden dimensions of unconscious culture. Unless human beings can learn to pull together and regulate consumption and production patterns, they are headed for disaster. In order to cooperate, they must know each other’s ways of thinking. People are unnecessarily hard on themselves; they waste their talents. The human species has not begun to tap its potential. Pessimism is reinforced by folklore, religion, philosophies, and institutions. Once people began evolving their extensions, they got caught in what Hall terms extension transference; they became alienated and incapable of controlling the monsters they created. Humans have advanced at the expense of that part of themselves that has been extended, and as a consequence have ended up repressing human nature in many forms, failing to develop important aspects of their capabilities. This process results in emptiness, frustration, and displaced anger. Part of the problem lies in the tension between creativity and diversity and the specific limiting needs of institutions, which have evolved as specialized solutions to specific problems. The only way to escape the hidden constraints of covert culture is cultural literacy, to involve oneself consciously with the parts of life one takes for granted. Beneath the clearly perceived, explicit culture, lies a whole other world, which, when understood, will change our view of human nature. Western people have created chaos by denying that part of themselves that integrates while enshrining the parts that fragment experience. There are many different legitimate ways of thinking. The West values, above all others, the linear system called â€Å"logic,† inherited from the Greeks, and considered synonymous with the How to cite Cross Cultural Communication, Papers