Nonverbal Communication is Affected by Culture.

Essay by studcentUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, December 2009

download word file, 8 pages 0.0

This essay will argue that nonverbal communication and culture are affected by each other. Culture is defined as a particular way of life in given geographic settings which is changed by all forms of routine communication and social interaction. It is developed through a dynamic and interactive process of everyday life which encompasses the differences in social class, race and geographical boundaries and the verbal communication and the nonverbal forms of communication associated with kinesics, proxemics, chronemics, paralinguistics and semiotics. These genetic and learned behaviours, tastes, habits, attitudes, and common beliefs and the social systems of shared expectations, patterns of emotional relatedness, and modes of social adjustment produce the nonverbal behaviours unique to various cultures and subcultures and through interaction and the transculturation process they are affected and changed and in turn cultures and subcultures are affected and changed. Through theories of various social theorists, examples of transculturation will be given to show how cultural products are believed to be used by people in the transactional process of communication in various cultural domains and territories and not just as a blindly reproduced culture.

The affects of culture and nonverbal behaviours upon one another will be demonstrated by examples of commercialisation and the symbolism of past discrimination of black sportsmen culminating in the possibility of pluralistic subcultures, which can acquire both positive and negative consequences for culture and nonverbal behaviours. The impact on cultures by transmigration of peoples from all corners of the world and global mass media through technology and the resulting pop cultures are discussed and shown to occur through the process of dynamic interaction.

Culture is a particular way of life in a given geographic setting which is changed by all forms of routine communication and social interaction. Culture is defined by Fernando Poyatos (2002, p.