Culture from Different Perspectives. A Comparison of German and US Church Services and the Success of the TV Series ‘Party of Five‘

Essay aus dem Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Medien / Kommunikation - Interkulturelle Kommunikation, Note: 1,0, Universität Augsburg, Veranstaltung: Intercultural Communication, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: The term "culture" can be defined in many ways. In these two essays, "culture" is used in the sense of a shared system of attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviour, according to Robert Gibson‘s book on "Intercultural Business Communication" and the "Intercultural Communication". In addition, for the purpose of this work "culture" refers to the national culture of Germans and US Americans in demarcation to other stratifications of "culture" such as corporate culture, class culture or other types of culture, if not explicitly referred to otherwise. The applied specifications of the German culture and the US culture in these essays are in accordance with the findings of the course and the scrutinized and scientific findings in the book. That does not mean that all Germans or all Americans are like that and fit into these descriptions. Before the essay starts to describe the authors‘ experience in a "foreign" culture, it will introduce the author in respect to what feels like "home" or "native" culture, in order to display the differences between her home and the foreign culture. Then it will mention the differences between German and US culture and then move on to compare the US national culture with those of a religious subculture in the US by using the diagram by Kluckholm & Stodtbeck. After all, any individual comprises numerous cultural values and is formed by many different types of culture. Comparing and contrasting the two church services will not reveal the national culture of Germany and the US. However, on first sight, the two different styles of church services seem to correlate exactly with their respective national culture.