# Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6/2, 2002: 275±285 REVIEW ARTICLE In search of the intercultural Claire Kramsch University of California at Berkeley Fred E. Jandt. Intercultural Communication: An Introduction. 3rd edition. Thou- sand Oaks, California: Sage. 2001. xii + 532 pp. Paper (0±7619±2202±4) £27.00. Young Yun Kim. Becoming Intercultural: An Integrative Theory of Communication and Cross-Cultural Adaptation. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. 2001. xiii + 321 pp. Cloth (0±8039±4487±X) £47.00 / Paper (0±8039±4488±8) £19.99. Tony Schirato and Susan Yell. Communication and Culture: An Introduction. London: Sage. 2000. xv + 204 pp. Cloth (0±7619±6826±1) £45.00 / Paper (0±7619±6827±X) £15.99. Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. 2nd edition. (Language in Society). Oxford: Blackwell. 2000. xv + 316 pp. Cloth (0±631±22417±3) £50.00/$64.95 / Paper (0±631± 22418±1) £15.99/$29.95. There is hardly a term that raises more hopes for international understanding and peaceful transaction among people, yet is more dicult to de®ne than `intercultural communication' (IC). At a time when, as Cliord Geertz noted recently, `[the world scene] is growing both more global and more divided, more thoroughly interconnected and more intricately partitioned' (2000: 246), the tension between cultural breaks and cultural continuities, and between the diverse cultures of multicultural societies, seems to call for bridges of tolerance and respect for other `cultures'. But what is `culture' in times of global economic exchanges, virtual and hybrid forms of communication, and multinational corporate identities? Whether it is called international, cross-cultural, or intercultural, communication between people of dierent languages and cultures has been an obsession of the last century. In the wake of World War I that showed for the ®rst time how interdependent the world had become, and that increased the exchanges of people and ideas between nation-states, the need for international communication led to the creation of the League of Nations as