THE ANTHROPOCOSMIC VISION OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: LEARNING TO BE HUMAN AS THE ULTIMATE CONCERN OF INTERCULTURALITY

About twenty years ago, intercultural communication study found itself standing at a cross-road. Intercultural scholars had to decide: either to choose to thread togetherness of the fragmented world or to continue the essentialist tradition that splits the world into binary oppositions. The era of the 21st century in the field of intercultural communication is in fact an era of de-centrism, reflecting upon and criticizing“center-periphery” paradigm that has been dominating the field of intercultural communication since it was founded. Quite a number of post-modern intercultural scholars have contributed different non-essentialist paradigms to reconstructing the theories of intercultural communication. In response to the call of the 20th anniversary symposium and the call for this special issue, we would like to propose a new paradigm,“anthropocosmic”paradigm on the basis of the contemporary Confucian ideas of “learning to be human” as the ultimate concern of interculturality in order to help reorient the trajectory of intercultural communication in the 21st century.