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Perspectives on Intercultural Discourse and Communication 1
Perspectives on Intercultural Discourse and Communication
While the terms “communication” and “discourse” are in many way synonymous, they reflect two different institutional and methodological approaches to how to analyze how people from different cultures communicate with each other. What I would like to do here is briefly (and, by necessity, incompletely) trace some of the roots of the remarkable range of analyses presented in this volume, looking in particular at anthropology, linguistics, intercultural communication, and discourse analysis. While these fields have quite separate institutional foundations today, their histories are deeply intertwined.
Culture and Communication: 1900s to World War II
In the early twentieth century, anthropology and linguistics in the United States were closely related. Franz Boas, founder of the Columbia Department of Anthropology and one of the co-founders of the American Anthropological Association, set out the study of language as one of the main subfields of the discipline of anthropology. One of his earliest and best-known students, Edward Sapir, became the founding father of the discipline of linguistic anthropology. Cultures at this time were thought of as discrete entities that did not interact with each other. This is despite the fact that both Boas and Sapir were German Jews, outsiders to the Protestant academic worlds they entered and thus intercultural communicators ...
