INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND THE NEW IMAGES OF IDENTITY. STEPS TOWARD ‘THE NEW CULTURAL HISTORY’
INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND THE NEW IMAGES OF IDENTITY. STEPS TOWARD ‘THE NEW CULTURAL HISTORY’

Summary/Abstract: In today's world, despite the fact that it is a globalized world, divergent trends and processes meet and coexist, which have different consequences in different societies, and these aspects explain the diversity of research topics, theoretical approaches and interpretations. The large-scale intercultural communication has led to the rebirth of local, ethnic and national identities, and also to an increased interest in the knowledge and explanation of cultural differences. The new global communication networks, the migration phenomenon and the new relations between and across cultures have favored the acculturation and hybridization processes of cultural patterns. The thesis of our study is that on the groundwork of these complex experiences there occurred a shift of paradigms with which the social and historical disciplines operate in the analysis of culture and cultural identities. Culture has acquired a strategic importance in the project of the knowledge-based society, while theoreticians from various domains frequently call forth cultural-type factors to explain and interpret the phenomena under study. In this context, in the last decades, a large-scale interdisciplinary research programme, called the new cultural history, has gained momentum, emphasizing the symbolic dimension of social reality, the representations and significances through which people codify their practical and cognitive experience. This new trend of the historical and cultural discourse can be correlated with the frequently debated issues in the studies on intercultural communication, such as the importance of symbolic practices, the role of identity images in the relations between „we and the others”, the analysis of the cultural differences and the social representations through which they are perceived.

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