Reviews for Ethics in Intercultural and International Communication

The average rating for Ethics in Intercultural and International Communication based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-28 00:00:00 Lashima Sharpe I wasn't entirely sure what to expect when I first opened this book. I found it through Goodreads and quickly ordered a used copy online. The title and description caught my interest and I thought I'd take the plunge and read something new, far outside my field and (seemingly) erudite. As I found, this book is indeed erudite, thick, and challenging. For me it felt like a chore to read more often than it did an exciting or enlightening text. If anthropology isn't your forte then this might not be 'fun' reading for you. The book contains a prologue, ten chapters, and a brief epilogue. Each chapter is itself a reprint or reworking of an essay Fischer published in various venues. The content of these chapters are quite far flung: chapters on Iranian and Polish cinema; one chapter detailing the oeuvre of Eric Avery, doctor and woodblock print artist; several chapters and parts of chapters which review the progress of the STS field in analyzing scientific communities and practices, biomedical advances, ethnographic practice, etc.; a chapter on identity and autobiographies; one detailing the many facets of cyberspace; and finally a two part chapter that situates our current state of modernity then details MIT's STS curriculum and its design aspects meant to promote cross-disciplinary, global approaches in anthropology. While this is a broad selection, the chapters are neatly tied together by the paradigm laid out in the prologue: anthropology is now thrust into rapidly shifting world of increasingly interconnected cultures, mediated experiences, risk, and ethical plateaus (spaces where no clear ethical choice exists and multiple stakeholders engage in complex scenarios; the prime example given by Fischer being the Yanomami of Brazil, where pharmaceutical companies, governments, activists, anthropologists, and more have a stake in the collection of various data, but are confronted with the dilemmas of representation, disease, first nation rights, etc.). Cinema, medical art, scientific autobiography, the legality of electronic copyright, Spielberg's portrayal of the Polish resistance, and more all can snugly fit into a view of anthropology that necessitates thinking in multiple dimensions, ethical plateaus, unsettled language allowing for connection between fields of thought, etc. While these disparate topics can be easily read in light of the paradigm set out in the prologue, the connection between them is often unwritten or at best tenuous. The chapter on Eric Avery's art seemed to suffer from this the most. Much of chapter were lengthy quotes of Avery taken from an interview by the author. Avery described some of the traumatic experiences he had working as a doctor in regions struck by conflict, disease and poverty from Africa to Indonesia, and the role his art had in essentially re-traumatizing him but also communicating some of the realities of medicine that are invisible to and through artistic, medicinal, and educational institutions. This would all seem to couple nicely with the prologue's paradigm, but that connection is not even graced a paragraph or two at the chapter's end, and it's left up to the reader to make the synthesis themselves. And of course I'm not against exercising your gray matter to make those connections for yourself, but this was sometimes difficult for me, someone not trained or well educated in anthropology, as I imagine it could be for others who like me pick this book up because of a general interest in anthropology and STS. And, when Fischer delivers on synthesis, conclusion, and bird's eye surveying of the topics presented they are often engaging sections that frequently captured my interest and pushed me through the book. But, again, the synthesis is sparse. And between are long passages that describe prior research, novels, various policies, curricula, institutional histories, etc. that are reference and information dense but didn't offer much to me as a lay reader. Adding to the density of the book are long sentences, rich with citations, jargon, reference, and viewpoints. For example, in the chapter Worlding Cyberspace we get this sentence (here without in-text citations): "Among these 'effective dreams' of theory are the ways in which technologies change temporal and power relationships; provide sensory prostheses, object relations for libidinal investment, evocative objects for self-definition and social engagement; operate through language games of paralogy, mutation, modification, rhizomatic generativity, play and dissemination; and illuminate the tensions between intensification of old political economic mechanisms of restructuring and potentially new economic logics and flexible capital accumulation at the expense of atomized professionals as well as manufacturing labor." Quite a sentence. It doesn't always help that the ultimate arguments of some of these chapters are equally sprawling. Worlding Cyberspace is essentially a view of how that worlding is accomplished in the dimensions of theory, language, time, place, and exchange, with no hard and fast ties between those perspectives. Filmic Judgement and Cultural Critique works up to the contention that Iranian cinema is composed of six dimensions (which themselves aren't simple either e.g. "4. There remain traces of the master narratives of the moral discourses of traditional Iran, such as the Karbala master narrative of Shiism…"). The cherry on top is some strange formatting choices: what I think are footnotes that appear in the margins instead of the bottom of the page in the chapter on Polish film, hyperlinks included in the text, etc. That's quite a bit of critique and complaint on my part. It wasn't always an easy or enjoyable read, but I am glad I finished this and that it's on my shelf, because there are some valuable take-aways for me. This collection shows Fischer to be a tremendous scholar, and I look forward to returning to the chapters on the progress and challenges of STS to follow the citations to learn more of some of the fascinating work reviewed therein. More importantly this book offered me a perspective of how to frame modernity and social systems'with concepts of ethical plateaus, multiple dimensions, mosaics, networks of desire, capital flow, knowledge; ports between disciplines and rhizomatic structures. As an (ecosystem) ecologist I'm accustomed to using the concepts of my field in approaching how I frame and grapple with thinking on other systems, with concepts of network connectivity, effect cascades, pools and fluxes, tipping points and discontinuities, etc. I sample this conceptual toolbox maybe a little more frequently than I should when I discuss topics far outside of my academic footholds, so I am excited to throw in some of these new conceptual tools of ports, mosaics, multiple dimensions and plateaus, and hopefully become more acquainted with them over time. Cheers.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-06 00:00:00 Tom Fitzgerald This book is currently my hero