Intercultural Communication: A Guide to Men of Action

with the Washington School of Psychiatry. He has done field work on several continents. William Foote Whyte is a Professor at the Cornell University New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He has done field work in Latin America. This article is reprinted by permission from Human Organization, Vol. 19, No.1 (Spring 1960). How CAN anthropological knowledge help the man of action in dealing with people of another culture? We shall seek to answer that question by examining the process of intercultural communication. Anthropologists have long claimed that a knowledge of culture is valuable to the administrator. More and more people in business and government are willing to take this claim seriously, but they ask that we put culture to them in terms they can understand and act upon. When the layman thinks of culture, he is likely to think in terms of (1) the way people dress, (2) the beliefs they hold, and (3) the customs they practice with an accent upon the esoteric. Without undertaking any comprehensive definition, we can concede that all three are aspects of culture, and yet point out that they do not get us very far, either theoretically or practically. Dress is misleading, if we assume that differences in dress indicate differences in belief and behavior. If that were the case, Ed~ard T. Hall William Foote Whyte