"This book critically examines the main features of intercultural communication. It addresses how ideology permeates intercultural processes and develops an alternative 'grammar' of culture. It explores intercultural communication within the context of global politics, seeks to address the specific problems that derive from Western ideology, and sets out an agenda for research." -- Publisher description.

Preface and methodology -- Key Discussions -- Essentialism -- Neo-Essentialism -- Cosmopolitanism -- Imagined Certainty versus Acknowledged Complexity -- Summary -- Notes -- Critical Cultural Awareness -- Models of Awareness -- A Reconstructed Narrative -- Critical Interpretivism -- A Decentred Reading -- Opening up Cultural Possibilities -- Summary -- Investigation -- Notes -- Cultural Complexity -- Informants -- An Emergent Methodology -- Statements of Cultural Identity -- Competing Social Theories -- Complexity and Politics -- Thinking about China -- Summary -- Investigation -- Notes -- The Indelible Politics of Self and Other -- Othering -- The Morality of 'Helping' -- Struggling with Identity Recognition -- Understanding the Discourse Politics of Othering -- Summary -- Investigation -- Notes -- Un-Noticed Periphery Identities -- Claiming the World -- 'Westernization' and Modernity -- Summary -- Investigation -- Notes -- A Grammar of Culture -- Negotiating Culture -- Particular Content and Universal Process -- Particular Social and Political Structures -- Particular Cultural Products -- Underlying Universal Cultural Processes -- Summary -- Investigation -- Notes -- Discourses of Cultural Disbelief -- Penetrating Professional Discourses -- Sustained Disbelief -- The Intercultural Line and the Third Space -- Summary -- Investigation -- Notes -- Creative Cultural Engagement -- Qing and the Seminar -- Learning from the Margins -- Summary -- Investigation -- Notes -- Culture, Real or Imagined? -- The Centrality of Ideology -- The Fact of Ideology -- Cultural Realism -- Summary -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography