Studying Culture

Abstract

This chapter uses a social action grammar of culture to indicate the different and interconnected forces that act on culture and intercultural communication and provide different foci for research. The study of culture moves away from differences between cultures and towards the question of how people construct and use culture to make sense of each other. Underlying universal cultural processes imply that everyone is equally engaged in the everyday construction of and engagement with culture wherever it is found. The chapter examines the constructivist interpretive approach and shows how each part of the grammar generates research projects. Moving into the center of the grammar, personal trajectories comprise the individual's personal travel through society, bringing histories from their ancestors and origins. Through these trajectories they are able to step out from and dialogue with the particular social and political structures that surround them and even cross into new and foreign domains.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.