Cross-cultural

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Cross-cultural refers to ideas, works, and people that involve more than one culture. The field grew in the 1970s as globalization increased the need for understanding and communicating across cultures, especially in business and education.

In education and writing, cross-cultural ideas appeared in college readers and writing guides in the late 1980s, helped by the move toward multiculturalism and Writing Across the Curriculum. The goal was to connect social science studies with how we teach and write about culture.

In literature and cultural studies, cross-cultural studies look at works or writers connected to more than one culture. The term cross-culturalism is closely related to transculturation—the idea of cultural mixing and interaction. Fernando Ortiz introduced transculturation in the 1940s to describe Latin American blending. Scholars from anthropology and literary studies, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Clifford, George Marcus, Clifford Geertz, and Stephen Greenblatt, helped shape the field in the 1980s and 1990s.

Cross-culturalism is not the same as multiculturalism. Multiculturalism focuses on many cultures within one country, while cross-culturalism emphasizes exchange across borders and between cultures. It can also explore cultural mixing within a single country, as well as colonial and postcolonial contexts, travel writing, and more. The term is broad and sometimes debated about what counts as a “significant” cultural difference.

The idea traces back to the 1930s with George Peter Murdock’s Cross-Cultural Survey. In social sciences, groups like the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology study how culture shapes behavior. In the 21st century, the phrase intercultural theatre is often preferred over cross-cultural theatre.

Cross-cultural works often share common tropes like primitivism and exoticism, including Orientalism and Japonisme. Music plays a central role in cross-cultural exchange and is studied in ethnomusicology.