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I’m back with another blog of travel thoughts, and I’m here to share some more book excerpts from two books and how they relate to the concept of culture shock.
The first, is Full Tilt (1965), by Dervla Murphy (which I talk about in last week’s blog).
The second is The Art of Travel (2002) by Alain de Botton, which teaches several important lessons travel can teach us by documenting experiences from several famous people (such as Van Gogh!).
Today I am going to focus on how people experience culture shock, and other ideas about differences between cultures.
If you prefer to listen to me chat about these themes you can check out my Youtube channel.
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Diving in Nose First into Culture Shock
In Full Tilt, Murphy describes her cycle journey through the Middle East. Once she reaches the Afghan border she meets some foreigners who are having a hard time adapting to the smells, sights and life in Kabul. I suppose for some culture shock isn’t so fun.
I find the following excerpt entertaining and insightful.
This evening I also met a young Dutch couple who arrived in Kabul a fortnight ago, on their first assignment abroad, and who are still wondering what hit them. I must admit that I do see their point and am duly grateful that I approached Afghanistan gradually. Had I flown direct from Dublin and landed in Kabul as a wide-eyed, sensitive-nostrilled newcomer to the East, I too might well have been unable to appreciate the finer points of Afghan life and culture. As it is, during my two months’ travelling from Istanbul to Meshed, the roads became daily less road-like, the mountains higher, the atmosphere rarer, the sanitary arrangements more alarming, the weather hotter, the stenches stronger, and the food dirtier. By the time I arrived at the Afghan frontier it seemed quite natural, before a meal, to scrape the dried mud off the bread, pick the hairs out of the cheese and remove the bugs from the sugar. I had also stopped registering the presence of fleas, the absence of cutlery, and the fact I hadn’t taken off my clothes or slept in a bed for ten days.
(page 96, Full Tilt, 1965)
I’ve included this one to give people an idea of what culture shock can entail—to a very extreme degree. I don’t think the majority of us travellers are constantly plucking hairs out of our food, but it’s definitely not impossible.
Murphy has a great point in that after a while, we all become normalized to these kinds of things.
When I first arrived in Asia (in Sri Lanka), I found the way people transported live stock and goods quite alarming, but by the time I was in Vietnam I hardly batted an eyelash when I noticed a person on a scooter hauling a refrigerator along with their four children.
Once we move past feelings of discomfort or fear, I find that culture shock is an acquired taste. I quickly became addicted to these instances of culture shock, and now I often feel disappointed when I arrive somewhere foreign and notice things which remind me of ‘normal’ life back home.
Human Life is Chaotic
The next excerpt I’ll share is from The Art of Travel. In this part of the book, De Botton is sharing some thoughts of a traveller, Flaubert, who was very fond of Egypt compared to his home country, France.
Why did the chaos, the richness, so touch Flaubert? Because of his belief that life was fundamentally chaotic and that aside from art, all attempts to create order implied a censorious and prudish denial of our condition. He expressed his feelings to his mistress Louise Colet, in a letter written during a trip to London in September 1851, only a few months after his return from Egypt: ‘We’ve just come back from a walk in Highgate Cemetery. What a gross corruption of Egyptian and Etruscan architecture it all is! How neat and tidy it is! The people in there seem to have died wearing white gloves. I hate little gardens around graves, with well-raked flower beds and flowers in bloom. This antithesis has always seemed o me to have come out of a bad novel.
(On the Exotic)
To be honest I think the hatred of these ‘tidy’ things a little harsh, but there is some component of this I can relate to. I feel I too have developed some love for chaos, and the idea that human life itself is chaotic is something to consider.
As humans, we make mistakes, we can be vulgar, we can be outspoken, and messy. Though these characteristics are perceived as negative things, they are all part of what it means to be human. Flaubert argues that in trying to portray ourselves are perfect and tidy, we are hiding our true nature.
After being in Asia already a month, by the time I arrived in India, I developed a love for chaotic environments.
In fact, in instances where I found my surroundings lacking this chaos, I started to feel uncomfortable and strange. When I later returned to the Western world, it actually took me some time to get used to roads without cars honking, and sidewalks without livestock around.
The main question I want to think about here is this:
Are we being faithful to our human characteristics by constructing tidy and clean societies, or do we thrive in more chaotic environments?
I don’t know the answer to this yet, but I think it’s interesting to think about. Personally I find traveling to chaotic and experiencing culture shock exhilarating and exciting. I suppose this is my personal version of an adrenaline rush since I’m not into bungee jumping to sky diving.
A Haphazard Taxation System
We’re going back to Murphy now. As I mentioned, the majority of her journey takes us though Muslim countries, and in this particular section she encounters real poverty (not simplicity, which I talk about in my previous blog). Murphy discusses how these countries in the Middle East have their own way of tending to the poverty in their society.
On leaving Constantinople, where one spends a small fortune on beggars, I had resolved to give nothing to anyone during the rest of the journey lest I end up with a begging-bowl myself. But of course Persia has undermined that resolution: the pathetic wretches seen here simply can’t be ignored. (Many of them in the towns and villages are lepers diagnosed too late for treatment—even if treatment were available in their area, which it often isn’t—and left to die slowly at home.) So now I’ve got the problem worked out systematically. I reckon that by being a guest at my friend’s house I’m saving a pound a day, which I distribute as baksheesh. This obviously is an oblique form of selfishness; one couldn’t come home after a walk through Teheran and settle down to enjoy the luxuries of Capitalism if one hadn’t done something, however trivial, to alleviate the surrounding misery. Yet it’s well to remember that this misery is not as total or as neglected as it appears to be. One of the religious duties of Muslims—as of Christians—is to give alms to the needy and the vast majority of Muslims of every sect regularly fulfill this duty in proportion to their deprived brothers as generously as do the tax-paying citizens of a Welfare State and the disparity between the circumstances of the disabled of Persia and the disabled of Britain is no greater than that between the circumstances of the working men of the two countries: in fact it may well be less, though the distribution of the funds is more haphazard. Also the Muslim method of providing ‘Social Services’ has the important virtue of maintaining a natural and humane link between individuals. It is obviously more desirable to have citizens giving to beggars voluntarily, out of compassion, rather than to have them grumblingly paying taxes to an impersonal government which dispenses what is left, after its civil servants have been paid, to unknown sufferers who are mere names in a filing cabinet.
(page 22)
Murphy’s findings here are very interesting (at least to me!). Obviously places like Persia are far more ‘chaotic’ than her home land in Britain, and so the way problems like poverty are approached is quite different. We might find the Persian approach rather dysfunctional and perhaps unfair, but we can’t say that our tax systems are a perfect solution to the problem. Homelessness and poverty have not been annihilated completely due to our ‘tidy’ efforts (as Flaubert would put it). Our solution is not perfect either so we should think twice before judging harshly.
If Nationality Was a Choice...
Now this is perhaps the most interesting thing about culture which I want to discuss today—the idea of being able to choose what your nationality is.
Here we are going back to The Art of Travel, to some excerpts about Flaubert. Obviously we all understand that one’s nationality is determined by the country in which you were born and raised, however Flaubert argues something quite different.
Flaubert’s lifelong relationship with Egypt seems like an invitation to deepen and respect our own attraction to certain countries. From his adolescence onwards, Flaubert insisted that he was not French. His hatred of his nation and its people was so profound as to make a mockery of his civil status. Hence he proposed a new method for ascribing nationality: not according to the country of a person’s birth or ancestral origins, but instead according to the places to which he or she was attracted.
(page 96)
On his return from Egypt, Flaubert attempted to explain his theory of national identity to Louise Colet: ‘As to the idea of a native country, that is to say a certain bit of ground traced out on a map and separated from other bits by a red or blue line: no. For me, my native country is the country I love, meaning the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well. I am as much Chinese as I am French, and I cannot rejoice about our victories over the Arabs because I am saddened by their defeats.
(page 97)
Admittedly these views are a little stark, but I can’t deny how interesting this is.
Of course if we really wanted to change our nationality, I suppose it’s not impossible to immigrate somewhere and call a new country our home (should authorities allow it). Regardless, even if we attain citizenship on paper, likely we would have locals ask us “where are you originally from?” and would still be considered immigrants.
But what if nationality was something we could choose and change after exploration of new places?
I might be taking this a little too far here but, if we had this choice rather than a concrete assignment at birth, would that help diminish prejudice and stereotypes of different cultures and people?
Would a fluid nationality allow people to be more compassionate and understanding of each other’s differences?
This is a rhetorical question for all of you (I don’t have all the answers to life’s philosophical questions after all), I just wanted to throw this bit of thought out there for you for thinking’s sake.
Do You Have a Culture Shock Addiction?
That’s it for today’s blog on culture shock and cultural differences!
I hope you enjoyed the read, and perhaps it’s inspired you to check out those books (I would recommend them both!).
If you have any additional thoughts or comments on these themes leave me a comments—I’d love to chat with you. Stay tuned for next week where I’ll be diving into some more travel thoughts and ideas from The Art of Travel.
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Thanks for reading everyone! I wish you exciting, culture shocking adventures in the future.
Much love,
Danika
