Beyond Culture Shock: Developing a Cross-Cultural Perspective

The first weeks or months spent in a foreign country can be overwhelming, thrilling, wonderful or difficult. Each visitor will arrive to a foreign country with distinct expectations and varying levels of tolerance for the new environment. Often times foreigners move through a variety of emotional responses and stages. Below are some of the most common opinions and reactions to living in a foreign country. Know that a wide range of emotions upon moving abroad is common. Be patient with yourself; you will need time in order to fully acclimate to your new surroundings.

Forms of Denial

Denial is the most basic ethnocentric state, reflecting an orientation (or "worldview") which assumes there are no real differences among people from other cultures. This state may be somewhat rare in educated, traveled groups; but it may still be found among people who separate themselves physically from others who are culturally different. Spending most of their time among small groups of people with very similar backgrounds, interaction with foreigners or people of diverse ethnic heritage is often at a minimum. A common expression of denial might be called provincialism, when a low level of exposure to different ethnicities leads to negative views about new cultural experiences. Here generalizations are too easily drawn, e.g. "Asians" are assumed to be different from "Westerners," without coming to a realization that both "Asians" and "Westerners" are different among themselves. Likewise, "Hispanics" fail to be differentiated into the many cultural groups of which they are comprised.

The Defense Stage

In the next stage, defense, differences are recognized, but one's own culture is deemed superior. People in the defense stage feel threatened by another culture. Typical responses include intolerance or indifference. "What do you expect, she's Vietnamese," might reflect feelings of superiority. Or "America is the greatest nation that has ever existed. Our way of life is an example for other countries."

Minimization

Minimization might be thought of as a last-ditch effort to maintain one's ethnocentricity, to the point where differences are buried under the weight of cultural similarity. Here, cultural variations are seen as trivial. For example, "We're all children under God." Difference is minimized, underestimated and undervalued. The result is that the truly valuable and interesting diversity among peoples is negated. However, minimization still represents a progression from the defense stage; at least cultural difference is recognized to some degree.

Acceptance

When one reaches the stage of acceptance, one's views of cultural differences move from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. At this stage, cultural difference is both acknowledged and respected. There are two major levels of acceptance. The first is respect for behavioral differences, which include language and communication style, both verbal and non-verbal. The second is deeper and involves a respect for value differences, such as acceptance and affirmation of different worldviews, the role of religion in society, and the sanctity of monogamous relationships.

Adaptation

A second stage of ethnorelativism is adaptation, where individuals use what they have learned about behavioral and value differences in order to communicate effectively with persons of foreign cultures. This does not mean that people "give up" their own cultural beliefs and practices, but that they make a proactive effort to use intercultural skills in order to maximize communication and the closeness of relationships with people of other cultures. This might be exemplified by a Japanese manager who uses brainstorming, confrontation, and highly interactive verbal participation to communicate with foreign associates, or a U.S. citizen who consciously puts social contact at the forefront of a business conversation with a Mexican client.

Integration

Integration, the "most ethnorelative" stage of cross-cultural development, occurs when a person can not only adapt to cultural differences, but also construe him/herself in different cultural ways. This might be possible for a person who has grown up in two (or more) different countries and can make a cultural "switch," for example, from American to Japanese (or from African-American to European-American) more or less at will, taking on behaviors and values from different cultures as the need arises. While seen as a positive and useful attribute for cultural mediation, this ability to make cultural shifts may also lead to some degree of "footlooseness" or "rootlessness," in which one does not feel anchored in any one culture. It may also be characteristic of global "nomads" who travel the world yet feel marginalized in their supposed home culture.

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