For Adults
A horizon for understanding our roots and making sense of belonging
Immersion in another culture may be accompanied by intense tension, confusion, and a sense of disorientation — both on arrival and on returning. The aim is not only to adjust, but also to understand your experience more clearly, so that what is happening may find its place within personal history and become more familiar, meaningful, and connected.
Culture Shock. Longing for Home and Adjustment to a New Cultural Environment
- Adjusting to an unfamiliar cultural environment is a process of becoming acquainted with, understanding, and gradually accepting different norms, values, and ways of behaving. The classical model of cultural adaptation distinguishes four stages: the honeymoon phase, crisis or culture shock, gradual adjustment, and adaptation to and acceptance of the new environment.
- Living across two cultures and two different ways of life, a person searches for their place. In the midst of this search, they find themselves between the need to adjust to the new environment and the desire to preserve what is familiar.
- A sense of confusion and detachment that may affect our feelings, desires, and values. Adaptation involves bodily and psychological responses, as well as changes in the established ways of perceiving, thinking, and responding to what is happening.
- The talisman of routine and everyday work.
It is not that we are not different. This is what I keep telling myself — we lose that difference because we are not interested in the ways in which we are not different.
A Context of Difference
- The stranger at home and the stranger abroad. It requires openness and a willingness to think of ourselves as other. Encountering our own distance from the strangeness within us opens up different ways of seeing the difference outside us. The person on a journey is both a stranger and an adventurer — a reminder of how difficult it is of remain with not understanding for one breath longer.
- Cultural differences find expression in values, beliefs, and ideas about what constitutes a good life. While many Western cultures place greater emphasis on independence, personal choice, and following one’s own desires, a number of East Asian cultures give greater weight to interdependence, relationships, belonging, and contributing to the community. These differences are also reflected in how we experience ourselves and our place among others.
- Geert Hofstede described differences across national cultures along six dimensions: individualism versus collectivism, power distance, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term versus short-term orientation, and indulgence versus restraint.