...Photographers lean forward over the rails, and then settle back again when they realize it's just me frozen in the doorway: clearly not the famous person they awaited. Greeters wave signs at me, but none bear my name. Am I adrift in India? Nope. I missed it during my first dazed sweep: Welcome Ms. Andrea. The adventure begins.

For the next 18 days, I immersed myself in a culture with a 5,000-year-old history. The India I found was one of close quarters, fragrant food, colorful saris, intricate temples, blazing sun, and, of course, people interested in exploring general semantics--the reason I came to this amazing place.

How did I prepare for this experience? This enormous opportunity to present general semantics to so many people and the temerity of doing so within a new (for me) cultural context spurred me to intense research. I plowed through web sites about India, skimmed blogs, joined message boards, dug into books about Indian history and culture, and, yes, watched videos. Hooray for Bollywood! I pulled books from my shelves. I combed through Korzybski, Lee, Bois, Hayakawa, Johnson--both Wendell and Ken--and Read. I reviewed my notes from twenty-plus years of teaching gs at the university level, in workshops and in seminars. From another bookshelf, I grabbed texts on cross-cultural perspectives by Gudykunst, Samovar, Hall, Kim, and Koester. In the nights leading up to departure, intercultural theories and general semantics frameworks danced in my head.

Peeling the cultural onion. Using general semantics gave me ways to think about my experiences within this culture while planning presentations to teach general semantics itself. To help me evaluate my experiences in a new cultural context, I turned to intercultural communication theories, which also helped me to craft appropriate examples (and weed out inappropriate ones) when presenting general semantics to Indian audiences.

Edward Hall is generally acknowledged as having founded the field of intercultural communication by fusing theories and frameworks from various earlier disciplines. To pare it down to bare roots, I would say this field of study tries to understand and explain how people from different cultures perceive, behave and talk differently about their experiences. Hall stated that merely hypothesizing about and studying culture did not produce effective intercultural communication. One had to DO intercultural communication. I didn't have to look very hard to see the parallels between general semantics and intercultural communication theories.

Baggage and cultural awareness. Too bad the airlines don't have a "cultural baggage" inspector who could check to see if I packed too many cultural assumptions. After all, I know how the perceptual bias of my home culture...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from ETC.: A Review of General Semantics
The bridge at Neverwas: closing remarks at Baroda.(Workshop Materials), January 01, 2008
National workshop on general semantics., January 01, 2008
An emergence., January 01, 2008
Gandhi values and terrorism.(Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)(Excerpt), January 01, 2008
Retrospect.(Reprint), January 01, 2008

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