In the first stage of ACCULTURATION, an immigrant, a long-term expatriate or a refugee experiences a period in which the customs, food, sights, and newness of the country is received with delight. Worries and fears are downplayed during this stage where everything else is interesting. The individual is so glad to be there.
One example is how Julia Roberts perceived nomadic life in her visit with the Mongolians in the documentary called Wild Horses of Mongolia with Julia Roberts. She said:
I feel so happy right now, and it’s so exciting. Yet my linear mind is completely baffled. I don’t know one word that is being said to me, but everybody is smiling and happy and beautiful and so beautiful…So it’s sort of bewitching to not know anything that’s being said and to be this happy. It is ignorant bliss. That’s what it is.
Another example of this stage is from my favorite book of cross-cultural living, Mrs. Mike which I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Here’s a sampling of Katherine Flannigan’s first days in the Canadian Wilderness.
At first I ran around and looked at everything…Everywhere, from all things, there fell a constant drip: from branches, from roots, from boulders, from eaves. I went to sleep my second night on the ranch to the uneven rhythm of that wet, pattering sound. In the morning the sun shone on the moisture soaked earth, and a rainbow was made. The sound of wet air shaking itself into the Red Deer torrent made a subtle kind of counterpoint. This magic land…this was the North.
You wonder if humans couldn’t withstand the next psychological stage of Culture Shock without the wonders and delights of this first stage –Euphoria.
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Module 2 Continues: social grammar
