|
Emic means seeing things from the viewpoint of the people in the target culture. Your aim is to see the world from their point of view. Expect to find strengths and weakness in both your own culture and in your new culture. Their way of life probably makes perfect sense to them, even if it seems illogical or frustrating to you. There are almost certainly very good reasons why they are like they are. Remember that they are people who are just as human as you are. Some people adjust well because they're used to seeing things from other people's viewpoints and don't mind others being different from them. Two Paths There are two ways to learn a culture. In the usual way, you enter a new culture and face different kinds of realities. You become frustrated, although this might not be particularly conscious. You might then realize the cultural issue and interpret it seeking new insights. However, not everybody realizes the cultural issue; some people become bitter or develop unhealthy survival responses. The other way is better. Before you go into a culture, you learn at least some of its major features. When you arrive, you have regular orientation and meet with a mentor or a group of friends. When you face new realities, you recognize and accept them, even though they are seldom exactly as you anticipated. You then interpret the cultural issue and seek new insights. Even so, it is normal to be very frustrated at times, but at least you have ways to minimise it and its effects, and to maximise your learning and adjustment. Stages Cultural adjustment takes several stages: The honeymoon phase. Everything is fun--you play the tourist, enjoy meeting people, and having lots of new experiences. At this stage, it's all adventure. The beginning of culture shock. It's been somewhere between three and six weeks since you arrived. You feel you've had a good visit but it's not fun any more and now you're ready to go home. The honeymoon is over. The only problem is that you now live here and this is home. It just doesn't feel like home. Expect to go through a period of culture shock; almost everybody does. The symptoms will only be obvious in hindsight, but proper mentoring can make a huge difference. Deep culture adjustment You are fitting in all right, but you occasionally need to work through small problems that have been caused by cultural misunderstanding. You have come to fit in, although the old country is still home. As you look back, you might your very earlier stages as having a tourist mentality, and see the extent of your culture shock. Third culture person. You've made the emotional move, and this is now home. Your worldview is changing and your emotional investment in making the necessary adjustments is starting to pay off. The way they do things here makes more and more sense, and it seems just as good (and better in these circumstances) than the way they did it back in that place you once called home. You might even start to forget many details of your home country. You might not even want to move back to your old country because you've put down so many roots here and given so much energy into building a career here. Your children might have been born here and don't have much tying them to the other place. You might have even married a local person, and all your most treasured possessions and memories are here. The maturation factor. Not all changes in outlook result from cultural adaptation. Whether or not you spend the next five or ten years in another culture, you are maturing and will change anyway. You cannot know exactly what you would have become if you'd stayed in your home culture. In educational research, the way to account for the maturation factor is to use statistical results to compare groups of people (e.g. one group who lived in another culture and one who didn't). It is uncommon to find a large enough number of third culture individuals that are similar enough to be compared. Most cultural information is notoriously difficult to quantify, and it is more productive to explore the experiences of a range of individuals. |