Intercultural Relationships

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Intercultural Relationship |

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Intercultural Relationships

The world as we know it is shrinking. As technological advances move the gears of globalization the world’s communication barriers are being reduced. Through the reduction of barriers human interaction has increased. Even though technological barriers have been reduced there are still social barriers that prevent humanity as a whole to reach a state of harmony and equilibrium. Such social barriers involve relations between different cultural groups. The act of different cultures interacting is known intercultural relationships. Intercultural relationships whether we are aware of them or not play a role in everyone’s life, and will continue to grow as the world become flatter and the idea of distance no longer applies when it comes to communication and interaction. As the idea of intercultural relationships is explained through this paper, you will be made aware of the different categories of groups that exist, the complexity and dimensions one can cross in these groups, a focus on interracial relationships, as well as my experience in working in an intercultural group.

Culture is a frame of reference that consists of patterns of traditions, beliefs, values, norms, symbols, and meanings that are shared to varying degrees by interacting members of a community. (Crippen and Brew, pg.107) An intercultural relationship is then defined as the interaction between different cultural groups and there frame of reference. Intercultural relationships however experienced can be either friendly or romantic. The cultural groups that are generally associated with intercultural relationships involve categories such as race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. Each of these cultural groups also comes with a set of subgroups. Now as these cultural groups can be broken down into subgroups, so can the concept of intercultural...