A skeptic’s guide to “intercultural communication”—debunking the “intercultural” and rethinking “culture”

Abstract

Abstract Starting with a critique of so-called intercultural communication, the present paper contests and challenges the prevalent and dominant essentialist views of “culture”. It is exposed that these views have a detrimental underlying logic that is both destructive and self-destructive. Instead, the paper proposes a radically new idea of culture, a minimalist approach supported by insights gleaned from contemporary semiotic inquiry. In this approach, culture is defined as a biological instinct to acquire information through modeling, that is, learning by models. This instinct is at work, or is realized, in specific acts of such modeling, resulting in cultural practices and cultural artifacts. In the case of humanity, a cultural practice is anything a human does that can be modeled by another human and a cultural artifact is any object that humans make and can model. The paper argues it is imperative to keep in mind that when we deal with the “intercultural”, we are only dealing with concrete yet different cultural practices or cultural artifacts. This is an effective way to completely refute essentialism. In a sense, the paper is meant to be a wake-up call, instead of a fighting talk. Its main objective is not to negate or obliterate the field of “intercultural communication”, among others, but rather to save them from themselves—a true and worthy field of “intercultural communication” is a field against essentialism, instead of an accessory to essentialism, whether the commission is “before the fact” or “after the fact”.