Histories

 In reading chapter four of Intercultural Communication in Contexts, my thinking was challenged in many concepts during my reading. While we all learn history throughout school and in college, I never thought about how some events in history may be portrayed based on the culture telling the story. I also never really thought about how a personal history event could play a part in an individual’s feelings about a particular aspect of history. In my reading I came across two terms that made me think about how much information we may be missing about history from stories that aren’t represented, absent history and altered history.

            According to Martin and Nakayama, absent history is any part of history that was not recorded or that is missing (Martin & Nakayam, 2022). In thinking about absent history, it made me wonder what parts of history we don’t know about and what parts of history are concealed that nobody knows about or what events happened before history were recorded. As Martin and Nakayama state there were 28 pages of a 9/11 Commission’s report that was hidden/unavailable for 15 years (Martin & Nakayam, 2022). Therefore, what other things are happening that we aren’t aware of.

            Altered history, according to Martin and Nakayama, is history that is changed in order to serve particular ideological goals, which results in a revised history. This type of history makes me want to dive more into the history I learned while in school from a different perspective. If histories are altered to maintain a certain ideology, then I would want to look at different cultural histories to link differences in historical events. Overall, this chapter has made me question what I actually know about history and how much of that knowledge is factual and how much is portrayed just to uphold a identity of our country.

           

 




 






 

 

References

Martin, J., & Nakayam, T. (2022). Intercultural Communication in Contexts. New York: McGraw Hll LLC.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cultural Space

Image
              While reading for a class to obtain my bachelor's degree I came across a chapter discussing cultural space. I never thought much about the space that I inhabit and how it changes. Cultural Space , according to Martin and Nakayama, is the particular configuration of the communication that constructs meanings of various places (Martin & Nakayama, 2022) . One of these spaces is the home in which we grow up in. The home usually stands as a safe, secure place for us to grow, mature, and learn. However, a home can be described in many different ways from a specific address to a particular state or nation. The importance of the home is that it has a particular tie to us as an individual and won’t have the exact same meaning for everyone. In looking at cultural space we also need to realize how it changes. There are several different ways a space can change. In thinking about those changes, it is important to consider...
Read more

Flight or Fight

Image
            In my reading for a class this week I came across a few terms that really caught me off guard. In my life I have heard about flight or fight responses but always thought mainly about animals or how people react to a startling sound or occurrence. Never had I thought about a flight approach or a fight approach in regard to adapting to ones surroundings/environment. These approaches were discussed in a transition model and one of the two I related to while the other makes me nervous to even think about doing.             Flight approach , is a strategy to cope with a new situation, being hesitant or withdrawn from the new environment (Martin & Nakayama, 2022) . Is one approach of the transition model that I can relate to and is how I tend to acclimate myself to a new or uncomfortable situation. While reading about this approach it discusses how these individuals tend to hang back an...
Read more

Communication Style

Image
  Communication is something that we all do on a daily basis, but do you ever think about your style of communication? According to Martin and Nakayama, communication style is the metamessage that contextualizes how listeners are expected to accept and interpret verbal messages   (Martin, 2022) . There are many different ways someone can differ from you in regard to communication, from being direct or indirect or being elaborate or understated. In completing some reading in an intercultural communication class I gained insight to another way of differentiation communication styles, high-context, and low-context communication. High-context communication is a style of communication in which much of the information is contained in the contexts and nonverbal cues rather than expressed explicitly in words (Martin, 2022) . While on the other hand low-context communication is a style of communication in which much of the information is conveyed in words rather than in nonverbal cu...
Read more