ABSTRACT
Intercultural communication (ICC) is usually understood in South America either as an anthropologist’s task, a foreigner’s (and maybe national) experience of local exoticism, or as the living result of biological miscegenation, i.e., the blend of different biological phenotypes (races) through human reproduction, but mostly not as concrete and distinct interactions of Self with an Other, defined by linguistic and behavioral differences, as it would happen in a modern multiculturalist setting or in an international business meeting. The underlying concepts of culture seem to differ from each other insomuch as the positions occupied by the actors vary. In a United States discourse about ICC the Self is clearly situated ‘outside’ Otherness, while in Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru or Colombia it might well be deeply ‘inside’: the result, for a considerable part of the southern subcontinent’s population of a four-century long process of miscegenation among Iberic, African, and Amerindian peoples. Thus, the 15concept of ‘a’ culture gets blurred. Moreover, the theoretical equivalence of nation to culture taken for granted in some areas of the world (US, Korea, Japan, Germany, for instance) becomes a critical issue. There is a conceptual cost when trying to fit cultural heterogeneity into a unitary nation-state; the heuristic value of almost any ICC research with pretentions of achieving nation-wide conclusions would decrease (Levine, Park, & Kim, 2007).
