Intercultural Communication in Avatar Movie
Considering Intercultural communication as sending and receiving messages across languages and cultures, allows us to understand different experiences through social systems and societies. In reality, Avatar movie allows us to meditate about intercultural matters especially when it comes to the confrontation of the two cultures shown in the movie. Besides the major intercultural issue about Na’vi and humans, we can still consider the attitudes of the main character Jake Sully, as an isolated topic to discuss instead of including him in human’s culture category.
In the first place, the Avatar movie presents us two different cultural positions that are completely antagonist to one another. In one hand, we are confronted with a nature oriented culture, composed by natives that developed a symbiotic relationship with the environment that surrounds their living places. In reality, Na’vi are concerned about their sustainable living which depends on a strong community feeling of inter-dependency. In the other hand, humans appear as a selfish culture, worried about technological development and monetary growth, which are up to everything to fulfil their goals. In addition, they are not bothered about the sense of community as there is a feeling of individualistic way of living.
In fact, those differences pointed out about the two cultures wouldn’t be important if it wasn’t for their way of interaction. Through an intercultural communication lens, Avatar movie provides material for understanding concepts; one of those concepts is ethnocentrism which is behind the two culture’s interaction, but with more relevance in humans. Actually, ethnocentrism means judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture, it is considered a natural thing by experts, as we are compelled to evaluate someone’s attitudes based on what we believe it’s right, in other words our culture patron. For this reason, in...