Time tends to clarify some of our experiences and relegate others to the very depths of obscurity in our memories. The experience I had in India over three decades ago still remains vivid today in my mind and contains lessons in culture shock and reverse culture shock that I will never forget. Upon my return to the United States after three months in India, I had to pack up and prepare my family to move to Puerto Rico to begin a visiting professorship. This was within less than a month after my arrival back home and started a culture shock/reverse culture shock cycle that took some time to end.
After being away from my family for nearly three months while living in a cultural tradition totally alien to my own, I was looking forward to getting back home. But upon my arrival, it was as if I did not fit in anymore. My values had been modified by the experience and I found myself questioning my lifestyle, values, and even self-identity.
Much had happened while I was away in India. Final acceptance of my application to spend the following academic year teaching in Puerto Rico had been approved. My leave of absence from my present position for the upcoming year had been approved. My wife was having to take care of the tasks that I normally took care of and continue to work. My daughter had contacted staph pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. That hospitalization resulted in my having to catch an early exit plane from India without completing my planned stay.
The result. I returned from the culture shock of India to the reverse culture shock of returning home. Many of the things I had seen in India, although exciting to me as an anthropologist, were depressing to me once I was back at home in Florida. Having seen the poverty, especially in Benares (now Varanasi) and Calcutta (now Kolkata), the very lifestyle benefits that I had previously enjoyed, depressed me.
One example stands out very clearly even today. Shortly after our move to Puerto Rico, my wife I had an invitation to a party at a colleague's house. Now, they were more wealthy than the average university professor family. They had an entire room set up with thousands and thousands of dollars worth of entertainment accessories. I had never seen so many electronic devices in one place outside of a store display.
The party, the music, and the social company were great, but I was overwhelmed by the "waste" of so much capital on entertainment while thousands in India went hungry. Under other circumstances -- like not just having returned from months in India -- I could have better appreciated his enjoying the fruits of his economic labors. Before my trip, I would have done the same.
And to top it off, I was having to prepare and give my university lectures in Spanish, not my first language. Even the textbook, which I had used before in English, was in Spanish. You can know your subject well, but when you find yourself having to re-learn the terminology you are so familiar with in one language by learning it in another, the mental and emotional shock can be great.
I even felt for some time as if I were physically ill and I thought I might have caught some exotic disease while in India. Well, it wasn't some exotic disease! It was the physical and emotional effects of adjusting to a new case of culture shock while not having completed my bout with reverse cultural shock from the previous culture shock of India.
It took several months of to become "normal" again. Well, in actuality, I never became "normal" again (if I ever was). It is like stretching a rubber band to its limit, it never returns to its original shape. I remained culturally stretched out.
As a result, since that experience I have been better able to adapt to new cultural challenges with less cultural shock. Will I be able to explore other cultural destinations without culture shock? No! But at least I now have a better foundation from which to cope with it and its follow-up reverse culture shock.
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