Culture Shocks
Jessica Glynn

   College of the Atlantic instills a sense of a boundary-free world in its student body. We are taught to observe, recognize, and appreciate the connections, dependencies, and relationships between disciplines. This, in turn, allows us to move beyond our modern notional constructions of society, culture, place, and identity.

   It is wholly ironic, therefore, that my philosophical quest of human ecology over the past four years has coincided with my personal experiences of confronting cultural barriers and differences - that at times felt devoid of any similarity or connection to my perceptions of the world and my subsequent culture shock. Intellectually, I can grasp the concept and value of not limiting oneself to a single sphere of understanding, but what I continue to struggle with is an innate human impulse to initially reject anything that contradicts or challenges my understanding of the world.

   At COA, I found that in an intellectual environment, during class or even simply being on campus, I appreciated the varying perspectives of my international classmates and recognized the depth they provided to my own education. Consequently, I chose to live with international students each year - to experience the same intellectual and cultural stimulation that I found in class. However, I quickly found that the beauty and uniqueness that I appreciated during the day turned a different shade of "stimulating" when we lived under the same roof.

   In addition to being from different cultures, there were other differences that set my new housemates apart from others I had lived with in the past - the most significant being that they were men. Having been raised in a female-dominant household in a liberal American city, this posed new and interesting "family" dynamics for my housemates and I.

   Living with men from Argentina, Tibet, and Sri Lanka called much of my self-defined "accepting," "tolerant," and "culturally-sensitive" identity into question. My self-imposed cultural immersion was brilliant in the beginning; maté every morning, fantastic curries, and the sweet, musky scent of Tibetan incense and melodic chanting as an alarm clock. Soon, however, the maté turned bitter, the curries suffocating, and the morning incense sickly sweet. Personal space and boundaries didn't seem to exist; even in our spacious seventies-style ranch, someone was always hovering too near, talking too loud, saying things that I couldn't identify with. Connections and common interests began to blur and then fade. There became a clearly defined "right way" (my way) of doing and understanding things and the "wrong way" (their way).

   Confronting the differences between our cultures proved to be difficult for my housemates and me (admittedly, much more for me). It was not an easy process, but after a while we found ways to cohabitate a bit more peacefully. We each found refuge in our own rooms when the cultural immersion became too much. We shut the door on integration, burned our incense, watched a movie, and talked on the telephone to our families and friends from home in the sanctuary of our private worlds. The right way and the wrong way of doing things evolved into a "new" way of doing things together. And it became clear that although there were many differences in our perspectives of the world, there were also many commonalities.

   My experience living and adapting to an environment that challenged my known modes of understanding relationships and roles between people made me conscious of my own cultural biases and limitations. It exemplified to me the importance of learning about another culture, and more importantly the necessity of confronting issues that arise between cultures.

   Because of globalization, free markets, and rapid developments in technology, our world is shrinking fast. We no longer have the luxury of turning our backs on it - the suffering in Darfur or Muslim fundamentalists in an uproar about Danish cartoons - because eventually the violence will catch up with us. Just as it did on September 11th.

   We no longer live in a world that will forgive insular policymaking. India, China, and, as we are well aware, the Middle East are emerging as powerful global leaders in the race to development. We will either have to "play nicely" or be forced out of the game. The West will also have to start playing by the rules. These rules specify that the United States' patronizing and imperialist stance toward foreign modes of being will have to change. Otherwise we will not recover from what I have dubbed "Dubya's Culture Shock."

   The United States must find a way to move past the feelings of anxiety, fear, frustration, and superiority that characterize this culture shock. And while the solution to my personal challenge of living in a culturally different environment was to insulate myself, this is not an option for our country. Our "accepting," "tolerant," and "culturally sensitive" nation is being viewed as a neocolonialist intent on exporting the American Dream. But even in Bangalore, India, the world's outsourced capital of the world, people are not buying. The people will gladly take the jobs offered by American corporations, but do not be misled, they are not assimilating American ideals.

   We need to adjust the right way ("the American way") of doing things and the wrong ("foreign") way of doing things, because a new way is already emerging. Unfortunately, this new way is not peaceful and is not founded on the principles of compromise. It is a way of retaliation and anger. It is a way of fear - fear that the American way is homogenizing or "MacDonaldizing" the world.

   When we talk about culture we often mean tradition or religion. But culture is more than that. Culture is the fabric of every society, including our own, a fabric that defines "the way things are done" and our understanding of why this should be so. This more comprehensive definition of culture was adopted at the World Conference on Cultural Policies in Mexico in 1982 and continues to be used in ongoing discussions of culture and development:     

     "Culture... is... the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and      emotional features that 
     characterize  a society or social group. It includes not only arts      and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental
     rights of the human being, value      systems, traditions, and beliefs."(1)

   Culture and societies are not static. They are living entities that are continually reshaped and renewed. Cultural change occurs when societies respond to economic and community changes that are the result of forces such as globalization, new technology, environmental pressures/strain, armed conflict, or development projects.

   These influences on culture are all interrelated and interdependent and must be viewed as such when addressing the social products of culture. In my life, this is where I have found the philosophy of human ecology most helpful in making sense of the world around me. We must address the underlying forces that influence our communities and shape our identities, and furthermore we must be able to recognize the connections and interrelations between societies and cultures in order to make proactive change in the world.

   My experience confronting cultural differences during the past few years at COA has proved enormously valuable in my subsequent international experiences. My housemates taught me that, although it is important to be culturally sensitive, respect for other cultures is not merely uncritical acceptance. We should not accept a culture or tradition as a rationale for discrimination or stigmas against another group; rather, we should look for opportunities to counteract prejudice and its consequences by demonstrating our interdependence and interrelatedness. Imagine what the world would look like if only we only get Dubya to COA for a few years.
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1 http://www.unesco.org/culture/developmet/index.shtml