Culture shock
May. 22nd, 2007 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatarperegrineWhen you go to live abroad, you generally sit through lots of presentations on the Stages of Culture Shock. The presenters tell you a story that goes like this: when you arrive in the host country you'll be really excited and everything will seem wonderful. Then things will start getting stressful, and you'll find the host culture strange and frustrating. Eventually, though, you'll adapt to the new culture and feel at ease in it, and even become bicultural. The presentation will probably include a graphic much like this one:
The presumption is that the end result of living in another country is having warm fuzzy feelings about that culture.
(The irony seems lost on the presenters of such information that this very story -- "the individual struggles, overcomes, and lives happily ever after" -- is a quintessentially Western narrative. I wonder how people from other cultures characterize their crosscultural experiences?)
For me, the Adjustment phase came with the realization that my own expectations were culturally bound, and that it was therefore both unfair and unhelpful to judge my host culture by my own culture's standards. Of course, I would have said I believed this statement before I moved to Qatar, but in reality it took several months for me to really grok its implications. Adjustment is when I stopped feeling irritated when people cut in front of me in line at QTel, because I understood that they were just following their own culture's standards of etiquette instead of mine. It's when I realized that Westerners dislike the abaya because we see our own level of dressed-ness as "normal" and anything more than that as "oppressive," which is silly given that lots of people in the world cover less of their bodies than we do, and would see us as similarly oppressed.
It's a very cool thing, reaching Adjustment stage. Everything becomes relativized, and weird things about your host culture start making more sense and stop bugging you. And more interestingly, you start re-evaluating your own culture, because its "common sense" no longer seems self-evident.
I think I'm beginning to feel that there's a post-adjustment phase, though. Sometimes I jokingly call it the Bitter Expat phase, although really I think most of the bitter expats I've met never reached Adjustment. But I do think that Adaptation is not the end of the story. "It's all relative" is a realization you must make in order to understand a new culture, but in the end it's not a good ending point for one's understanding of cultural variations. (I've linked to Bagish's "Confessions of a Former Cultural Relativist" before, but it's relevant here.)
I feel like I've reached a point where I realize that, though my initial judgments about Qatar may have been off-base because they were unthinkingly based on my own culturally bound preconceptions, that doesn't mean I can never make a judgment about an aspect of Qatari culture. I am more willing now to say that the way unskilled laborers are treated in Qatar is an abomination, for example, and that Qataris' propensity for treating maids like children is simply unacceptable by any reasonable standard of decency. I am more willing to say that shari'ah is not a good basis for jurisprudence in the 21st century. Of course the U.S. is not a shining model either, in terms of either immigrant labor relations or a functional legal system. And maybe that's the key: it seems more justifiable to judge all cultures against the same standard (whatever one's personal standard is, as long as it is well thought out, as long as one makes it explicit) than to judge the host culture against one's own culture, as one tends to do on first arrival. Whatever it is, at some point I stopped feeling that being an outsider disqualifies me from evaluating parts of my host culture. It worked for de Toqueville, after all.
This whole train of thought, incidentally, grew out of a silly conversation about Land Cruisers this morning; I realized that my feelings about Land Cruisers is a good barometer of my stages of culture shock.
The presumption is that the end result of living in another country is having warm fuzzy feelings about that culture.
(The irony seems lost on the presenters of such information that this very story -- "the individual struggles, overcomes, and lives happily ever after" -- is a quintessentially Western narrative. I wonder how people from other cultures characterize their crosscultural experiences?)
For me, the Adjustment phase came with the realization that my own expectations were culturally bound, and that it was therefore both unfair and unhelpful to judge my host culture by my own culture's standards. Of course, I would have said I believed this statement before I moved to Qatar, but in reality it took several months for me to really grok its implications. Adjustment is when I stopped feeling irritated when people cut in front of me in line at QTel, because I understood that they were just following their own culture's standards of etiquette instead of mine. It's when I realized that Westerners dislike the abaya because we see our own level of dressed-ness as "normal" and anything more than that as "oppressive," which is silly given that lots of people in the world cover less of their bodies than we do, and would see us as similarly oppressed.
It's a very cool thing, reaching Adjustment stage. Everything becomes relativized, and weird things about your host culture start making more sense and stop bugging you. And more interestingly, you start re-evaluating your own culture, because its "common sense" no longer seems self-evident.
I think I'm beginning to feel that there's a post-adjustment phase, though. Sometimes I jokingly call it the Bitter Expat phase, although really I think most of the bitter expats I've met never reached Adjustment. But I do think that Adaptation is not the end of the story. "It's all relative" is a realization you must make in order to understand a new culture, but in the end it's not a good ending point for one's understanding of cultural variations. (I've linked to Bagish's "Confessions of a Former Cultural Relativist" before, but it's relevant here.)
I feel like I've reached a point where I realize that, though my initial judgments about Qatar may have been off-base because they were unthinkingly based on my own culturally bound preconceptions, that doesn't mean I can never make a judgment about an aspect of Qatari culture. I am more willing now to say that the way unskilled laborers are treated in Qatar is an abomination, for example, and that Qataris' propensity for treating maids like children is simply unacceptable by any reasonable standard of decency. I am more willing to say that shari'ah is not a good basis for jurisprudence in the 21st century. Of course the U.S. is not a shining model either, in terms of either immigrant labor relations or a functional legal system. And maybe that's the key: it seems more justifiable to judge all cultures against the same standard (whatever one's personal standard is, as long as it is well thought out, as long as one makes it explicit) than to judge the host culture against one's own culture, as one tends to do on first arrival. Whatever it is, at some point I stopped feeling that being an outsider disqualifies me from evaluating parts of my host culture. It worked for de Toqueville, after all.
This whole train of thought, incidentally, grew out of a silly conversation about Land Cruisers this morning; I realized that my feelings about Land Cruisers is a good barometer of my stages of culture shock.
| Honeymoon: | Gosh, look how many Land Cruisers there are in Qatar! And they're all white! How cute! |
| Anxiety: | Why do they keep flashing their lights at me? Should I change langes or ignore them? Argh!! |
| Rejection: | What is WRONG with these drivers? Why are they so RUDE all the time? |
| Adjustment: | The fact that it's rude in MY culture to tailgate someone doesn't mean Qatari drivers are being rude. |
| Post-Adjustment: | OK, they're not being rude, but it's a stupid way to drive, and it illustrates an underlying selfcenteredness that seems really destructive. |
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Sydney Shards
Date: 2007-05-22 08:30 am (UTC)Thanks,
Penny
Re: Sydney Shards
Date: 2007-05-23 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-22 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-22 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 07:29 am (UTC)I think culture shock was named by Oberg (pdf here) but I'm not sure why he called it that. I suppose because he was talking about the initial stressful period when someone moves to another culture and discovers that all their social cues are broken.
I like this description of his: "Instead of trying to account for conditions as they are through an honest analysis of the actual conditions and the historical circumstances which have created them, you talk as if the difficulties you experience are more or less created by the people of the host country for your special discomfort." I suppose the implication, though he never says it (and seems to contradict it later) is that it is still possible for an outsider to conduct an honest analysis of someone else's culture. And even after they've dealt with (some of) their innate ethnocentrism, their honest analysis of that other culture may not be entirely positive. :-)
What motivates that question? Is there something about the phrase culture shock that I'm missing?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-27 07:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-22 07:18 pm (UTC)i think post-adjustment is probably a part of adjustment, it's just not good for business to say at the end "and it may not have been worth it after all! :D"
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 07:32 am (UTC)lol. I don't think ANY experiences come in neatly defined phases. Maybe, say, labor.
i think post-adjustment is probably a part of adjustment
Actually, yes, I agree. When "adjustment" is well-defined, it is usually made explicit that adjustment means not rejecting everything about the host culture out of hand; it doesn't mean having a completely positive view of the host culture. (One website I looked at while writing this post even had a stage after adjustment called "enthusiasm"!!)
It's just not good for business to say at the end 'and it may not have been worth it after all! :D'"
Oh, it is entirely worth it. :-)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 01:49 am (UTC)americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 04:04 am (UTC)Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 05:18 am (UTC)Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 06:14 pm (UTC)Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 07:39 pm (UTC)If you're trying to dig up dirt, let's bring it out. Working conditions for natural born americans themselves were relatively atrocious until the 20th century.
Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 07:14 am (UTC)Actually, every single bitter expat I know -- everyone I know who has completely failed to adapt to Qatari culture and holds the entire country in contempt -- is British.
Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 06:21 pm (UTC)Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 08:17 pm (UTC)Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 02:40 pm (UTC)There's a pretty large percentage of Americans who have never been outside the country. They've never had to deal with foreign currency, different traffic laws, different languages - anything - that people in Europe pretty much take for granted. When countries aren't much different in size than larger states in the US, it makes sense that Europeans would be exposed to those things more.
So I think it's less being childish, and more just never having dealt with any of those differences at all before.
Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-23 06:29 pm (UTC)Re: americans are childish
Date: 2007-05-24 07:03 pm (UTC)Look forward to speaking with you once you reach Adjustment.
-hegemon
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 07:46 pm (UTC)A diagnosis of our national malady
by Joseph Collins
Article, January 1926, 9 pp.
it is a pity that it costs $17 . i wish to read that very much .
no subject
Date: 2007-05-24 06:53 pm (UTC)As someone who has lived in both the US and the UK, I'm stunned at the suggestion that the British are NOT childish and expect things to be the same as at home. While gross overgeneralizations aren't ideal, even Brits joke about the fact that they go off to Majorca and complain that the tea isn't good enough and the food is strange and foreign.
The biggest distinction I've seen between Americans and Brits is that Americans have a cultural expectation of being outgoing and are thus perceived as louder and more strident.
Again, very broad-stroke generalizations -- the sort of thing that needs to be footnoted with the lovely expression "YMMV" (your mileage may vary)!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-27 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-28 08:54 pm (UTC)is not it childish to think that the americans has changed a lot since tha t time?
let me be childish on my turn :
"childish americans " give 900.000 pages at google
"childish brits " only 100.000pages
no subject
Date: 2007-05-29 12:39 pm (UTC)By your implied logic, then, for every one childish brit and ten childish americans, there are twenty-eight aliens.