Why I Hate The Term “Culture Shock”

Posted on 16. Sep, 2009 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Life, Musings & Inspiration
4 comments

I have a confession to make: even though I use it daily, I hate the term “culture shock” with a passion. The way I see it, if Culture Shock were a person, it would be an elitist drama queen.

There’s something so big, so dramatic about “Culture Shock” that a whole lot of expats don’t feel that they even deserve to use the term.

Sounds familiar?

You think the country where you live is not “foreign” enough. It’s too westernised. Whatever you’re feeling… oh, it can’t be culture shock, because you have it too easy here!

But if it’s not culture shock, then why are you feeling so disoriented, so overwhelmed, so drained emotionally?

You guessed it – you are suffering from genuine culture shock. Yet because you’re living in Paris and not Yogyakarta, you feel guilty. Left out. Almost like a fraud.

It’s as if Culture Shock was looking down on you and saying, “You call this culture shock? You call this difficult and disorienting? Boy, if you can’t even adapt properly in Western Europe, maybe you shouldn’t have left home to begin with. Good thing they didn’t send you to China like John from marketing – now that’s a real expat!”

Nice. Now you feel homesick, overwhelmed AND wimpy. Great. Thank you, Culture Shock.

Shock or alienation?

My other beef with culture shock (told you I hated it!) is that it tricks you into expecting a shock – that is, something big, obvious and immediate. Something that hits you in the face.

And yes, that’s what you get when you leave the plane in say, Lagos or Vientiane. The sounds, the sights, the weather – everything is so different that you immediately feel overwhelmed by these new sensations.

But if you’ve just arrived in Luxembourg City? It’s not going to be nearly as dramatic. Instead, the process will be gradual, insidious. It will sneak up on you.

You will be lulled into a false sense of familiarity, until one day you’ll realise that the Luxembourgish views on certain things couldn’t be further from yours, and you’ll start feeling very, very foreign in your host country…

This process could take months, even years, and the way I’d describe it would be cultural alienation rather than culture shock. But the symptoms are the same, and it’s just as painful as culture shock.

Can we find a better term?

So there you go. Because of the “major trauma” connotations of Culture Shock, entire categories of expats are left without a name for what they’re going through.

And since I believe that being able to put a name on your emotions (especially negative ones) is a powerful way to regain some control over them, it’s kind of a big deal.

I wish I could find a better, more inclusive term that would encompass a greater variety of expat experiences. The equivalents I come up with – cultural alienation, cultural dissonance – sound too academic for my taste and lack the effectiveness of Culture Shock.

Do you have other names to suggest? Maybe you coined your own term after experiencing culture shock – or something that felt an awful lot like it? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Emmanuelle

Images by Schlomo Rabinowitz (top) and Lab2112 (bottom), both via Flickr Creative Commons