Culture And Communication

In this panel discussion on cross cultural communication, researcher Shirley Star and anthropologist Margaret Mead emphasize the need to discover where people are 'coming from,' and what they are thinking about in order to help them advance their education.

Dr. Mead describes the extremes of cross-cultural communication and technical change as it applies to people going abroad to alter or help to alter the health practices in societies very different from our own. She underscores how it is essential to respect people's intelligence and the need to give them the full reasons why we want to introduce a change in their society. She believes firmly that anybody can understand anything but she adds that in order to be able to do this people need not go through the mistakes that we went through in our own development.

Additionally, Dr. Mead emphasizes the pitfalls of short circuiting the the educational process by not by not giving people whole reasons in addition to bad practices that will only need to be corrected later, in other words, why you would introduce them to a Kleenex instead of handkerchief.

WNYC archives id: 43478