What is cultural space?

What is cultural space?  The answer of this question is not easy, because it is complex and it is defined by many factors.  As Martin and Nakayama stated, the cultural space can be physical such as home, (the place where you grew up), or metaphorical such as internet.  This  home is also defined by its location such as neighborhood, city, region and country and the relationship you have with this home .  The other factors that create the cultural spaces are religion practices, food, social networks such as schools, hospitals  (  Kama Trudgen). These factors create your identity.  The combination of these factors and how are they  used create  specific cultural spaces which is unique and has invisible boundary.  But when someone moves from one place to another, these invisible boundaries are interrupted and we face intercultural transitions.  The intercultural transitions are not usually easy and they create misunderstanding, and cultural shocks and they require time to adopt through intercultural communications and understanding.

To understand more the concept cultural space, let us see what my cultural space looks like.  My home, where I grew up, is located in Somalia (East Africa). Thus, this makes me a Somali woman.  My behavior, the food I eat, and my dress code are shaped by both my tradition and religious practices. When I came to U.S.A, I faced intercultural transitions.  The most of Somali traditional food were not available at stories.  The way I also dress was strange to the most people that were living in my neighborhood and this created misunderstanding and culture shock.  When I am walking streets some people ask me , why are you dressing like this.  I also have my own question why do you dress like this too.  When I meet someone and they try to shake my hand and I hesitate, it makes them angry.  After conversation, we seem understanding each other.


  1. Judith  N. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama. intercultural comunicationin contexts. chapter 8.
  2. Kama Trudgen.cultrual space  and example the limit condition of the people face) 2010. why worrier .com.au/2010/cultrual spaces

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

One response to “What is cultural space?

  1. Pingback: A TODA MADRE | discursive spaces

Leave a Reply


WordPress.com Logo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s