Culture Shock
Definition:
The disorientation and anxiety experienced when an individual encounters an unfamiliar cultural environment and loses the familiar signs and symbols of everyday social interaction. Commonly described in stages: honeymoon, frustration, adjustment, and adaptation.
Comparable terms:
Cultural adjustment (HR/mobility, education — broader, less pathologizing) · Cultural disorientation (counseling — clinical variant) · Cultural transition stress (coaching — preferred by practitioners seeking to avoid stigma) · Culture fatigue (see separate entry — overlapping but distinct, referring to cumulative exhaustion rather than initial disorientation)
Sources:
The term culture shock may have been first used publicly by Cora Du Bois in a 1951 speech, though it was Kalervo Oberg who first applied it broadly to all individuals crossing cultures, defining it in a 1960 article as precipitated by the anxiety of losing familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse. ResearchGate Oberg, K. (1960). Cultural shock: Adjustment to new cultural environments. Practical Anthropology, 7, 177–182.
The pathologizing framing of Oberg’s original formulation has attracted critique. For a more constructivist perspective, see: Adler, P.S. (1975). The transitional experience: An alternative view of culture shock. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 15(4), 13–23.
See also:
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