Green IslandCulture Shock
September 1st 2008 06:53
Expecting black cat services and getting a Sikh
The common notion of culture shock is of an experience that happens soon after arriving in a foreign country and of an experience that is always disorientating, unpleasant and negative. All these ideas don’t really fit the experience of having culture shock. Culture shock is the fall out caused by two worlds colliding in your brain.
The phrase ‘culture shock’ contains the noun ‘shock’ which has negative connotations. How can a shock be good and enjoyable? However, that’s exactly the case – you can be pleasantly surprised. You can open your bank statement and discover you have more money than you thought. That’s a great shock to feel. It’s all to do with expectations and if you had low expectations of a place than if the reality exceeds that then you are happily surprised. And when traveling there’s a lot that can pleasantly surprise and a lot that can disorientate you in an enjoyable way. The seductive allures of an exotic clime, the exhilaration of a buzzing metropolis, the old world grandeur of Europe, and the sheer farflungness of obscure spots on the globe – all these things are exciting because of culture shock. It’s simply not like back home and that’s a key reason why you like it. Ask a thousand expats why they have chosen exile and few will say, “Because of money.” And if they do it’s probably because they are not expats but salary men who are victims of globalization.
Making the most of culture shock
There is of course negative culture shock when you discover where you are is far worse than you anticipated, but that generally is not an immediate or surface impression. It’s a deep malaise that comes when the honeymoon period has expired and the novelty and quaintness have lost their appeal. Nine months into staying in the backers of nowhere with nothing but water buffalo and brainwashed co-workers for company and you start to develop a Bill Bryson type sentimentality about good ol' back home and falsely imagine that your home country embodies better values, that deep down all those back homers are reading from the same liberal homily unlike these crazy locals, who may even play cricket but don’t behave like ‘gentlemen’. Well something along those lines. You go all rose tinted spectacles for New York or London or Paris or Vancouver or Adelaide or Tennessee when you’re not really from those places anyway and you conveniently forget that back home it’s way too hot or way too cold and that everything costs too much and everyone you know works too much and constantly complains about taxes and new dumb laws and just how bad it all is and how there’s nothing worth watching on TV and how you’re much better off bumming around Asia or living on an organic farm kibbutz in Chile.
Perhaps paradise but Alexander's troops didn't think so
My worst culture shock was going home after a few years traveling and working abroad. How can you be shocked by your own culture? Very easily. I remember walking around a supermarket angrily muttering to myself because I couldn’t buy vegetables that weren’t pre-packed. I remember going to parties and finding it hard to keep up with all these people speaking English really quickly and wondering why nobody hitch hiked anymore and where had all the New Age Travellers gone? And feeling devastated when I discovered a packet of fags cost a day’s dole money (which I couldn’t qualify for anyway). And that’s the worst – being let down by a country you had idealized (like a prisoner cherishing the memory of his sweet heart back at home) and whose memory kept you going while you spent a year living on plantain and getting drunk on arrack.
Not only can culture shock be both positive and negative but it can also be like a disease you didn’t know you had. There are symptoms but you don’t necessarily make the right diagnosis. Your behaviour changes and you don’t realize that that is culture shock you’re dealing with. You drink too much; you smoke too much; you get high too much; you seem listless; you sleep all the time and hardly ever go out except to buy more booze; you become short tempered; you argue a lot with random locals; you get outraged when someone tries to charge you too much and immediately decide it’s because you’re a foreigner; you get paranoid, you never properly unpack; you find yourself talking to anyone who has the same first language as you. Or you go the other way and you immerse yourself completely in the local culture and shed your previous cultural skin and adopt local ways and thoughts. In the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ General Allenby complains that the eponymous hero has “gone native”. And that’s the best way I can describe it. The foreigner becomes a local. He or she becomes an adopted brother or sister and often formalizes the new incarnation with marital ties. Like Cat Stevens or those Israeli and Italian dudes you encounter in India who become babas and start to look Indian.
Going native for a night
To try to sum up, culture shock can be pleasant as well as unpleasant; it can be felt immediately on arrival or much later on; it can manifest itself in many ways; and it can be a shock of being home. When worlds collide you can give into one side and lose your bifocal experience, or let the experience tear you apart. You bring with you expectations and these expectations are like little desires of how you want things to be and like the fat guy said, desires only lead to frustration; however, you won’t catch me getting on the 8am bus in a djebella doing the durkha.
All images are scans from my photo album
Thanks to Colin and Brad for giving me the idea of positive culture shock
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Comment by Anonymous
Do you still get culture shocked after all these years of travel? Does one adapt at some point after a while and just melts into whatever context he might find himself in?... I wonder.
Nice pics there, especially Waka and you "going local".
Cheers!
Anita
Comment by Danny Boy
Love the article.