The term Culture Shock was coined by the world-renowned anthropologist Kalervo Oberg in the 1950s. According to this anthropologist, “culture shock is precipitated by the anxiety that results from all our familiar sings and symbols of social intercourse.” There is a notion that emerged around the time various cultures came into contact thanks to the development of modern travel, economic interconnections and the exchange of ideas and practices. In another instance, culture shock is expressed as, “the feeling of anxiety, loneliness, and confusion that people sometimes experience in another country.”
According to its definition, culture shock includes among other things, “the impacts of moving from a familiar culture to one that is unfamiliar. This impact includes the anxiety and feelings (such as surprise, disorientation uncertainty and confusion) felt when a person must adapt to a different and unknown cultural or social environment.” This process in turn entails, “getting used to a different language, a different climate, a different transport system, and different food customs.”
Examples or instances of culture shock are for instance when a man who spent much of his life in the rural areas moves to urban setting for the first time and feels the chock and anxiety of first time experience in a different social environment. Many works of arts in the 1960 and 1970s Ethiopia dealt with the culture shock people from the countryside experience as soon as they come to Addis Ababa and face a different world that was dubbed “modern” for urbanites but was shocking and confusing for the farmers newly introduced to urban life.
The plays and poems that were based on experiences of culture shock were inevitably funny although they could also have tragic manifestations, like someone from the far countryside coming to Addis and losing all concepts of place and time and are exposed to unpleasant experiences like being mugged or robbed by pickpockets. However most of the plays portrayed characters whose languages and manners are completely at odds with urban mannerisms that provoked laughter rather than pity in the audiences.
Culture shock is not only the outcome of the rural versus urban social cleavages but also something that challenged educated folks who travelled to Europe or America for one reason or another. The late Ethiopian poet and playwright Mengistu Lemma had a famous poem he penned when he travelled to the United States apparently on an educational scholarship and described his experiences in the form of a poetic dairy that was extremely funny and caught the imagination of the Ethiopian public here at home for long decades as a masterpiece of poetic observation, wit and sarcasm.
The poem is entitled “Basha Asheber b’America” and can also be taken as a critic of Western life that was somehow absurd and violent as compared to the peaceful and predictable life in Ethiopia at that time. The poem can also be taken as a psychological portrayal of people in the two deeply different cultures and social settings. The meeting of two cultures, Ethiopian and American, produced feelings of anxiety and confusion in the poet who was inspired to jot down the verses that became very popular because they also reflected the emotions felt by anyone who set foot in America, or in any country for that matter, for the first time. We can also call such an experience as a kind of “clash of cultures” although no violence is involved.
In the 1960s and 1970s when educated Ethiopians were barely introduced to the same phenomenon of culture shock, the concept was not only new but also hard to understand until people found themselves in culture shock situations in their daily lives. Most Ethiopian students on educational scholarships in Europe or America shared the feelings although few wrote about them. By the way, culture shock is not only a one way experience of people who travel from a relatively underdeveloped to a developed world. Even people from the developed world can experience culture shock when they travel to Africa or Asia and find themselves in alien social environment. The difference is that they often manage to disguise their surprises with prejudices or their assumed cultural superiority.
There can be a third instance of culture shock when people travel from a remote and backward socio-cultural and economic environment within a country, to a more developed and different environment. This is generally what happens when Ethiopians living in remote rural areas come to Addis Ababa or any other modern city for the first time in their life. Everything they see and experience is shocking for them because it is radically different from the culture they grew in back home. And that is why adjustment to the new urban culture takes some time depending on the capacity for the newcomers to understand and act accordingly within the new realities.
This process of adaptation and acculturation is sometimes wrongly understood as embracing modernity by the rural folks who come to the urban areas. This is however misleading because modernity or ‘civilization’ is often regarded as consisting of modern buildings, luxury cars and fancy restaurants as well as asphalted roads and boulevards. Modernity in Ethiopia is a very controversial concept in need of clear definition or consensus. What modernization means to the educated elites may be different to the ordinary folks. So, there can be no binding consensus around its manifestations. For the wealth and the so-called educated elites modernity may mean thinking and doing things or acting the way Europeans Americans and/or the Westerners in general are thinking and doing things in their daily lives.
The very notion of modernity was first introduced by the educated elites who spent time in the Western countries where they were introduced to modern or Western education and returned to their country with the passion to apply what they saw and experienced during the academic sojourns. However, the idea of making Ethiopia modern and putting her on a par with the civilized world, was first introduced by Emperor Haile Sellassie who is known in history as a ‘modernizing monarch’ although many people may not agree with this qualification.
The very inspiration to send young Ethiopian to the West for educational purposes emanated from the emperor’s eagerness to produce new and “modern” educated cadres for his administration who later proved no better than their fathers. Some critics even argue that by doing so, the emperor has undermined the chances for tradition-based modernity or doing things the Ethiopian way on the basis of the wisdom accumulated through the centuries.
By the way, most of poet and playwright Mengistu Lemma’s works deal with the “difficulties of reconciling Ethiopian traditional values and customs with modern Western ideas.” Other critics insist that the failure to reconcile the two has led to the myriad political and social problems the country is now dealing with. They insist that it may not be bad to borrow foreign ideas but it should not be done in a way that undermines traditional values that could be used to serve as the bases for modernity. Even in situations where the encounter between tradition and modernity had some tragic consequences, Mengistu Lemma had a knack for turning tragic situations into comic ones or present complex ideas into simple forms to the benefit of the largely uneducated audiences of his time.
However, modernizing a medieval country along Western lines was not an idea unique to the Ethiopian monarch. Many countries were introduced to modernization in various ways and at various times and in accordance with specific historical circumstances of the times. What made Ethiopia’s modernization attempts particular or unique was that the process did not take into consideration the objective political, economic and social realities of the country.
Modernization largely failed to take root in Ethiopia simply because it ignored its past achievements and tried to impose foreign ideas and practices from above. Even the legal system, the constitutions or other aspects of modernization were done by copy pasting French, British or other Western experiences by ignoring the country’s long-established traditional institutions and ideas. Many researchers and writers in Ethiopia’s modernizing efforts attribute the failure to apply foreign ideas in a creative way by taking into consideration traditional values and practices.
What is puzzling even now after the old modernizing efforts have largely failed, is the fact that tens of thousands of Africans or Ethiopians are still dreaming of the material manifestations of western civilization and doing everything to live the American dream which is not their dream. In its modern manifestation, culture shock is often experienced by people who move from one culture to another in search of opportunities. The integration of these immigrants from a traditional to a modern culture is often accompanied with tragic events and in the worst case with mental traumas of anxiety and depression. This is a typical example of Africans who migrate to Middle Eastern or other countries in search of job opportunities but often find these cultures extremely unwelcoming and soon fall prey to episodes of anxiety and depression.
One important factor that has made culture shock less choking these days may be the fact of what we may call “cultural globalization” that creates an awareness of what life in rich countries looks like and this is in turn encouraging Africans to migrate and masses to escape poverty and willing fall prey to the allures of modern life. From whatever perspective you look at this phenomenon, you simply turn in circles producing and reproducing the same old patterns of culture shocks, illusions, disappointments and a return to square one. This has unfortunately become not only an African but also a global dilemma.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SATURDAY 28 OCTOBER 2023
