ABSTRACT
This chapter is a personal reflection of William J. Starosta’s 45-year journey to become a transplanetary interculturalist. While Weaver (Chapter 2) recounted his own transformation through his involvement with the interdisciplinary studies of intercultural communication and international relations, Starosta marked his journey by his personal encounters with a variety of theoretical renderings of culture as a central concept of the intercultural communication field. He has travelled from the notion of culture as nation-state to the recognition of culture as an ongoing re(creation), that is, a site of contestations and intersectionalities. His “double-emic” research praxis grew out of the process of “third culture building” with scholars and students of diverse cultures. He insists that the transplanetary interculturalist (1) uncover coherence within cultural accounts and compatibility within rival accounts, (2) find ways around difference eventually, (3) listen for the emergence of differences of linguisticality and cultural prejudice and promote new and productive interunderstandings, and (4) locate sites of successful and failed interpenetration of cultural meanings.
