Who On Earth Are We?

Rajni Badlani: When I first went to England I was absolutely, absolutely shocked. There were three of us. Two of us Indians and there was one English person. Right in the middle of the conversation he takes out a banana, peels it and starts eating it, without even saying ‘excuse me’ or whatever. We expect to be offered.

Marc: Dr Badlani describes a moment when two cultures collided, a moment of ‘culture shock’. People who spend time living in another culture have many moments like this. But ‘culture shock’ isn’t simply a series of small incidents that upset or puzzle us. It’s more a process – and, in fact, it’s a process that many of us experience without ever leaving home. To explain further, here’s Rebecca Fong, a teacher of intercultural communication at the University of the West of England.

Rebecca Fong: Most of us tend to think of culture shock as a kind of exotic illness that we get when we get to far-off places. Actually it’s extremely similar to something when we go through any kind of change in our life. We’re constantly having to deal with the kinds of changes that come with different stages of personal development and different events in your life like moving house or getting a new job or divorce and all of these things involve us giving up something that we were familiar with and trying to adjust and adapt to something new. Obviously changes like this are traumatic in different degrees and they’ll be worse for some people than others.

Callum: The degree to which people experience culture shock when they visit a foreign country depends on several things. One of the most important of these is ‘cultural distance’ – how different is the culture that you’re visiting from the one that you’ve grown up in. Then, what is your role in the new culture? Do you have people to talk to or do you feel terribly lonely? To some extent, this will depend on your personality. But despite these individual differences, there are certain stages to the process of culture shock that most people experience. Rebecca Fong guides us through those stages now, with help and comments from people from around the world. We begin in a positive frame of mind.

Rebecca Fong: Culture shock has roughly five different phases. The first is euphoria or exhilaration, or the honeymoon period. It often takes from a few weeks to a few months depending on the cultural distance, your personality and all the factors that we’ve already mentioned. You’ve got over the panic of the travel and the departure and saying goodbye to your friends and the journey was very exciting and you’ve got lots of things to look forward to – and you arrive and you’re so busy looking for accommodation and the things that you need in that country and getting to know the new people at work, and you tackle all your problems with good humour – and you are far too busy to get at all negative or depressed. It’s not until after this has worn off a little bit that you start to run into some of the problems. The climate will be different, the traffic problems may be very different or you may find that the food is not to your liking.

Mahmoud Jamal: When I was about 18 my aim was to go abroad to study. I decided to come to London. When I first arrived I was only probably about 19 – what surprised me was the journey from the airport, it was drizzling, it was middle of October, I was in a bus, I was looking at the dark rooftops – it all seemed very, very strange. But soon enough I managed to find my ground – I managed to find a place to live in and go and start working in the City of London. Now the interesting thing is that I did not know that I was that different – which is so obvious now – but at the time somehow the issue of race was not an issue that I had ever confronted in my life – so I think this is something that can happen to people who move from one racial group or culture to another.

Rebecca Fong: You begin to realize that you are an outsider and although the people from that country are being polite and fairly kind to you, you start to realize that they don’t actually understand what the problems are for you. And you start feeling yourself being critical about the culture. You might begin to lose your sense of balance, you might begin to lose your sense of humour. You might begin to think about your own culture very fondly and you might without knowing it idealize or overidealise your own culture, romanticize it, think about how everything at home is wonderful, you could get quite exaggerated ideas of how it is back home in this particular stage. A lot of people get to this stage, suffer it for a while and then give up.

Devon Krohn: When I was abroad I started to feel quite homesick for England, which is part of the reason why I came back. I was missing the kind of politeness that you get in English society in everyday life in the supermarket, in the post office, where people greet you and they say thank you and goodbye. When I came back to England I found it’s not really that different, but actually it’s the same as it was abroad.

Rebecca Fong: If you can get past this stage you come into recovery or acculturation – the learning process, the process of change over time where your contact with that culture seems to improve and you integrate better with the culture. Language skills of course improve over time and this is one of the things that helps you in this stage. You might find your sense of humour coming back and you actually make more effort to become part of the community – make friends and find out about the manners and customs of the particular place that you’re in. So in this stage you’re learning and that brings you rewards which will eventually help you recover from your culture shock. But at this stage you can still feel superior to the host culture and have some difficulty in completely letting go of your own ideas and supplanting them with the ideas of the new culture.

Mahmoud Jamal: When I first came to Britain I did not know who I was. As I discovered Britain I also discovered myself – and this is also very important when people move from one culture to another, one place to another. You know you wanted to be embraced by the culture you went into – you wanted to feel at home – then you had a sense that oh well they were not quite accepting you – so you had to find out who you were in order to relate to something that belongs to you. So it can be quite a severe battle between the culture you are in and the culture that you belong to – and then slowly you reach a compromise and you learn to live with it and you learn to live with yourself.

Rebecca Fong: It’s not until the next stage – which is stage four – that you really adjust properly and start to appreciate the culture for what it is – you start to understand the values and the norms of that culture and its customs for what they really are. You might even begin to believe that some of their values are better than your own. But that’s not necessarily the end of the wave because if you ever find yourself going back home after your period abroad you might find quite some difficulty re-adapting to your own culture. People will be pleased to see you of course and you’ll long to talk to your family and friends about your experience – but pretty soon they won’t be interested in asking you questions about your having living abroad and you’ll find yourself wanting to convey the information that you’ve learnt but having no real audience to do it with. So it can be quite a challenge going back home and sometimes this can be referred to as re-acculturation or re-entry shock.

Kyung-ja Yoo: People change. I’m really conscious of changing. Every year I go back to Tokyo and then as soon as I see my family my friends – first couple of hours, that’s all right, but after that I feel that I’m distancing myself from their emotion. Sometimes even my parents say that I get cold towards them. I’m not but the way I show my affection is changing. But you can’t really explain that to the people who’ve never been out of the country.

Rebecca Fong: If we go on holiday for a couple of weeks to another culture we don’t necessarily need to go through any of these phases – we’ll really be in phase one – the euphoric stage and not get past that. We’ll never really have to deal with the culture – we’re actually cushioned from it during our time there. People who stay a bit longer – periods of say up to 6 months to about 5 years – have obviously got a much more demanding job on their hands. You’ll have to find accommodation, you’ll have to learn the language, you’ll have to learn the culture but you know that at the end of that time you will be able to go home. There’s an escape clause if you want one. There are groups of settlers however who’ll stay for long periods – immigrants, for example, whatever the reason they come – they’re not planning on going home.

Task 11. Find English equivalents for the Russian phrases from the text above.

Чистить банан, приспосабливаться к новым условиям, показывать свои чувства, быть знакомым с чем/кем-либо, не по вкусу, ждать с нетерпением чего-либо, расстраиваться, скучать по дому, стать частью сообщества, искать жильё, проводить время, сталкиваться, заводить друзей, зависеть от, иметь склонность думать, улучшать, ценить, сталкиваться с проблемой, испытывать культурный шок; работа, требующая огромных усилий; ряд мелких происшествий, далёкие места, иметь дело с, начать осознавать, прийти к компромиссу, быть похожим на что-либо, решать проблему, личностный рост, чувствовать себя очень одиноко, озадачивать, отказаться от чего-либо, приветствовать, чувствовать себя как дома, уехать в отпуск, приложить больше усилий, осознавать, становиться холоднее (об отношениях), утратить чувство юмора, жить в мире с собой, отдалять от, очень хотеть поговорить о своём опыте, принимать (воспринимать) кого-либо, сталкиваться с расовым вопросом,

Task 12. Answer the questions to the text above.

1. What is a culture shock?

2. What are its five stages people experience?

3. What is each of the stages characterized by? Provide your own examples.

4. Do people always go through these five stages?

5. Which stage of the culture shock is the most traumatic? Why?

6. Do people experience a double culture shock or re-entry shock when they return home after living in a foreign place for a certain period of time? Why does it happen?

7. What does it mean to be an outsider in an alien culture?

Task 13. Act out a conversation with your colleague about your experience in dealing with representatives of different cultures. Speak about difficulties, hurdles and misunderstandings you faced when doing business with your counter partners. Say what you did to promote this cross-cultural dialogue and end it successfully. Mention if you experienced culture shock communicating with foreign colleagues.