INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AS A SITUATED, CULTURALLY COMPLEX, INTERACTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT Donal Carbaugh Department of Communication University of Massachusetts 650 N. Pleasant St. Amherst, MA 01003 The field of intercultural communication includes a variety of productive theoretical approaches as well as different methodological commitments. <...> Some studies are built on the basis of self-report measures, aggregate tendencies, and/or resulting scores within and across national populations. <...> This article focuses on a different kind of empirical study that is based upon careful observations of actual intercultural interactions and interpretations which honor the participants’ views of those interactions. <...> The article first diagrams the process of intercultural communication as a situated, cultural accomplishment. <...> Next, distinct and complementary modes of analyses for phases of such study are presented. <...> Finally, specific goals and eventual insights are discussed. <...> I seek to keep in view what participants in intercultural communication actually do, what they believe is getting done as they do it, as it is achieved in actual scenes of social interaction. <...> Based upon a sample from a national group, one can compute a mean score for each dimension and thereby establish a snapshot of that nation’s culture, with that nation’s score on each dimension, relative to other nations, being rather stable, [at least as] Hofstede argues”. <...> I have summarized such studies elsewhere along with their critical assessments (Carbaugh, 2007, p. 21; based upon Geert Hofstede, 2001). <...> Geert Hofstede (2001), as one prominent example, provides an instrument which can rank national populations along such measures. <...> One is “individualism” with two na33 Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 tional scores relative to that dimension being 91 for the United States and 20 for China. <...> These are measures of important aspects of internal human cognition, or mental programming, as it presumably pertains to national populations. <...> The scores suggest something general according to Hofstede; that in Russia and China, relative to the US, the consciousness of the “we” is emphasized over the mindfulness of the “I” with more interdependence being presumed among society’s members; on the other measure, China and Russia strive in one’s thinking to maintain more of a link to the past, than the US, when looking toward the future <...>