rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Screw culture shock" (Reply)

Rex's blog posting at Savage Minds about culture shock speaks not only to the discipline of anthropology--my second undergraduate major, as it happens--but to everyone, really, who's encountering with and engaging another culture. Sitting and proclaiming that you're taken aback by these strange people with their strange ways isn't very productive.

The downsides of making anthropology necessarily a culture-crossing encounter are legion. It reifies the notion of cultural boundaries, for instance, driving us further away from the Boasian recognition of culture’s fluid nature. It makes people who study themselves a tremendous problem, rather than recognizing that such a thing is perfectly natural—whether it be ethnographies of white urban first worlders, or Native anthropologists who are Taking The Theory Back. In so narrowly imagining the field as rich whites visiting poor browns, it reduces an ethics of connectivity (thanks for this phrase James Faubion) to an impoverished series of debates about how best activist anthropologist can help those poor, poor people. And, of course, saying that it is the culture shock rather than fieldwork and participant-observation that gives anthropologist insights is, implicitly, a vote of no confidence in our methods. Our discipline is worse off, I believe, when we claim that our method amounts to ‘hanging out’ but that’s ok because we hang out in ‘really strange places’.

Other cultures can't be taken in passively as objects of oddness; other cultures have to be actively engaged with. Culture shock can't be a cul-de-sac, but one stage of several in ethnography or, well, life, really.

The discussion in the extensive comments is also worth reading.