Enhancing Understanding, Advancing Dialogue

The global world is one in which cultures and religions increasingly meet and mix, engage in various ways, and where groups advocate the recognition of their cultural and/or ethnic identity. Enhancing Understanding - Advancing Dialogue: Approaching Cross Cultural Communication aims to facilitate encounters with other cultures and their members by examining how it is approached in the West. The books asks: What are some taken-for-granted assumptions brought into attempts to understand members of other cultures'' What are some of the basic premises used when we meet someone from another culture, or see theeir behaviour on TV, or read about their perspectives in the print media'' While engaging the author''s western counterparts rather than cultural interlocutors, the book explores some adverse assumptions which tend to be smuggled into cross cultural understanding, including those from popular views about science and social science, postmodernism, tolerance and neutrality. Enhancing Understanding - Advancing Dialogue argues that a first step to an increasingly sympathetic awareness and understanding of others, their cultures and religions, can be aided by examining and challenging entrenched social claims and values. Rodney Fopp teaches at the University of South Australia, Adelaide.