Cross Cultural Communication
Introduction
People vary in terms of beliefs, norms, personalities and cultural identities. In this regard, cross cultural communications is important to bridge the gap between these dissimilarities and differences. Cultural aspects can be seen not only on how people interact but also with what they do and what they say. Primarily, the main goal of this report is to study how people perceived joking and the relationship of joking and stereotyping. Accordingly, a joke is a kind of short story or short series of words which are communicated and spoken with the intention of laughing. In this study, cultural humour will be given emphasis.
Background of the Study
Accordingly, jokes and humours play an essential role in culturally diverse groups’ interactions. Jokes become a vital way of building relationships as well as maintaining the coherence and unity among diverse groups. Jokes and humors frequently functions to upload or create a certain group boundaries. Investigating the joke of minority or cultural groups to in a different societies, some authors concluded that jokes reflects the competing norms and moral values, uncertain social boundaries and notes impersonal power structure which exists in this society. For this analysis, the accuracy is limited to cultural minorities and any group which exists in closer contact with another group may find that sustaining group identity in the face of prolonged cultural contact is a very complex. By generating fun of peripheral as well as ambiguous cultural groups, they are able to decrease and lessen threatening on ambiguity. The two sets of boundaries that must be preserved in cultural groups are the social and geographical boundaries that determine who is included in the group and the moral boundaries determine the acceptable trait and quality behavior of members in contrast to the inadequate behavior of non-members and this is both enforced by the Cultural jokes. Cultural jokes and humors remain essential despite its potential for misunderstandings. The power of humor may lie in the notion that each person receives their impressions of others from folk sources. In this regard, the jokes group members tell to outsiders (Leveen, 1995). The initial analysis for groups interactions have revealed that joking can be significant genres which can help them enhance their social inclusion.
It is said that the joke themselves gives a discourse within, yet they can be distinctive from the rest of the conversation or dialogue as the single act of joke telling spontaneously that it grew into a joking discourse. For instance a speaker has uttered a decidedly American cultural joke. Herein, the Brooklyn accent indicated an Italian-American, while a Dubliner will drink a pint of Guinness, and not the six-pack and the stereotype of reserved Jewish women is connected to the caricature of the Jewish-American Princess. Hence, each participant in the spontaneous joking discourse identified with an cultural heritage which was inseparable from the participant’s American nationality. Herein, the notion that each participant was eager to have her/his group represented in the cycle of the joke shows that such jokes, although founded on somewhat derogatory stereotypes, served as an expression of cultural pride and an example of the need to share such cultural pride with individuals from other cultural background.
Culturality changes the basic dynamics of the joking relationship and it tends to bring additional risks as well as motivation to the joke telling. The impact of culturality on the joke can be seen by first telling a joke and then connect it with some cultural elements. These cultural elements may include the use of racial colors such as black or white. With the addition of these words, jokes can be considered as an cultural humour with race and position are the stereotypes context. These words can also connote inferiority and superiority of a specific race, social frustration.
If one would want to extend on the changes brought by culturality and its inclusion, we van consider and the student to consider the relationship between the joke teller and joke listener. It can be seen that stereotyping in a joke may also be considered depending on who is the teller and the listener of such joke. It can be said that in this type, the teller and listener may either be both in the inside or outside of the context group which is the group about which the joke is made, significantly, the noted context group is not always the butt of the made joke, since it may not be the peer or the group being ridiculed or one may be included in the group while the other is not. In this instance, the stakes change and also the power relationship. In this regard, some have considered four basic combination of joke relationship. The first is a group members who tells a joke to another group member, a member telling some joke to a non-member, a non-member telling a joke to a member or both non-members tell a joke to one another. These relationships of group joke may be implicated by some elements like the inclusion of multiple cultural groups in the text of the joke, and ambiguous and uncertain identify on the part of the teller of the joke and the listener, the relationship in which hone party is not aware of the cultural identity of the other person involved or a joke audience which contain multiple members of different cultural backgrounds (Leveen, 1995).
On one hand, humour or joking can be used by the dominant culture in their attempt to manipulate the behaviour of minorities or cultural sub-groups, specifically to give emphasis to the need of members of these sub-groups to conform to the norms or cultural belief of the dominant culture. Accordingly, cultural humors or joke cycles are seen in response to arrival of large immigrant populations which cannot or will not incorporate or absorb rapidly enough, in accordance to the mainstream population. In this regard, jokes are being uttered by the dominant culture regarding an incoming group, and attempt to promote conventionally to the norms of the foremost culture (Dorinson and Boskin 1988). A well-documented example of this joke cycles is the wide range of Irish jokes which originates in the 19th century. This is commonly known as the “Pat and Mike” stories in referral to the two usual main characters of the joke. Herein, the jokes went beyond a discussion of two different personalities to critique the status of all Irish-Americans.
For this study, the consideration of cultural humors of a peer group is considered since it emphasizes the importance of all collective identity, a kind which forged through the community of laughter. It has been noted that culturality is an individual means for having a collective identity in a heterogenous modern environment. It is said that collective identity is an individuals’ source of communal support and acceptance. In telling cultural jokes, one give focus on their own collective identity by means of sharing in a collective jokes or humours. In this regard, jokes reaffirm the boundaries which preserve collective identity for an individual and regain their cultural belongingness.
For instance, in American society, most individual go to great lengths in maintaining their social and culturalal inclusion in the line with the generations of assimilative activity. By telling cultural humor and jokes, they tend to give focus on their own collective identity while reaffirming the spatial boundaries which give assurance on the preservation of the collective identity. This is a significant aspects of the process in which an cultural joke teller utilise in-group humor to be accepted of her/his cultural group: it is only through the relation of collective identity in which these joke sharing can assist group acceptance. In addition, jokes also give a relation from personal to communal by creating a historic dimension which provides bonds of the self to cultural group’s past and an intimation of the future plausibility for the group.. For members of cultural groups who are struggling (like the ethnical minorities) with their own fluid cultural and ethnical identities, with troubled personal as well as group histories and with the necessity for a future preservation of cultural identities in the aspect of increasing assimilation, such historic perspective which is particularly valuable. Herein, the elements which can be attributed to some cultural humor exemplify the essentialities of sustaining perspective, of utilizing and applying language or communication to distance the self from reality. Some cultural humor stresses the sense of continuity as well as survival. This is done by emphasizing the cerebral created by the jokes which lead to the creation of a distance between the reality and the individual telling the joke.
The phenomenon of jokes and telling it through joke sharing is important to the combination of the powerful and aggressive aspects of laughter into a ways for coordinating a positive and empowered inclusion for the cultural individual within the dominant discourse. In this regard, the realm of the society in which these jokes are shared functions as a community of laughter. Joke sharing is considered as a culturalizing phenomenon, since it help individuals to develop a sense of belongings in laughing with others even with a different culture. With this, it is said that the laughing shared by these culturally diverse groups help them to have a sense of inclusion which can be extended to contacts and contexts beyond joke sharing. Joke sharing among peers is also considered as an instrument for having a one language which may integrate their differences.
Research Aims
Primarily, the main goal of this proposed study is to conduct an analysis on the observation of a certain groups creating or conversing jokes with each other. The main goal of this proposed study is to conduct an observation and interview with cultural groups. In this proposed research, the author will attempt to achieve the following objectives:
1. Identify the common joke that has been considered by the observed group.
2. Determine the types of jokes and the cultural setting of the jokes of the group.
3. In a social group you belong to observe the kinds of jokes that are considered in the group.
4. To know the main point of the joke and why it is considered as a funny joke.
5. T o make connections between stereotyping and joking.
Research Questions
1. What are the common jokes in the peer or group observed?
2. What is the cultural setting of the jokes of the observed group?
3. What are the types of joke common in the group?
4. Are all those jokes considered a funny joke?
5. What are the stereotyping aspects used in the observed and who is the common topic for this stereotyping?
Methodology
The importance of an effective cross cultural communication is being recognized in institutions. Since the goal of this study is to analyse how joking connects to the notion of stereotyping, the primary data will come from observation and interview conducted by the researcher in a group of people telling and conversing jokes, specifically cultural humours. In this report, the group that will be given emphasis are those groups which usually tackle cultural jokes. For this research design, the researcher gathered data, collate published studies from different local and foreign universities and articles from social science journals; and make a content analysis of the collected documentary and verbal material related to the cross cultural communication and cultural humour. Afterwards, the researcher will summarize all the information, make a conclusion based on the research objectives posited and provided insightful recommendations about the topic.
Respondents
All of these participants were selected through random sampling. This sampling method is conducted where each member of a population has an equal opportunity to become part of the sample. As all members of the population have an equal chance of becoming a research participant, this is said to be the most efficient sampling procedure. In order to conduct this sampling strategy, the researcher defined the population first, listed down all the members of the population, and then selected members to make the sample. In this research studies, a group of 5 young adults were chosen to be observed and interview to determine what kind of joke they are usually talking
Annotated Bibliography
Boskin, J. (1979) Humor and Social Change. Boston: Boston Public Library.
The book tackles how humour leads to social changes and how humor affects the society and the people that belongs in it.
Dorinson, J, and Boskin, J (1988). “Racial and Cultural Humor.” Humor in America. Ed. Lawrence Mintz. New York: Greenwood.
This paper discusses the context of racial and cultural humour which particularly focus on the cultural humours in the United States. This give emphasis on how minority groups becomes the major topics of cultural humour in the country.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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