The Stages of Culture Shock / Extended by Tiny Wanda

Kalervo Oberg / Canadian Anthropologist

Culture Shock

Extended Version by Tiny Wanda

Stage One / Honeymoon Phase / The Alien Culture is experience as enchantingly novel & endlessly fascinating.

 

Stage Two / Reaction / The Visitor Reacts Angrily against The cultures incomprehensible customs, uneatable foods, disagreeable fashion or grooming habits, thus intensely disliking it & romanticizing their home cultures superior & correct ways of doing things.

Stage Three / Resignation / The Visitor develops various coping strategies, such as drinking imported canned soft drinks, averting their eyes from revolting native conventions & shouting poorly pronounced foreign phrases.

Stage Four / Adjustment / Resigns themselves to accept The Foreign culture as merely different, inferior in many ways, but not as evil as they’d believed a few days or weeks before that.

Stage Five / Upon returning home; The Visitor experiences Reverse Culture Shock in which they see their own culture anew, become far more critical of Taboos & Customs which are meant to Constrain & Crush their Individuality.

Stage Six / The Citizen becomes compelled to actively resist The Oppression of their own Society & become Freedom Fighters.

Stage Seven / The Citizen is Killed in a Hail of Gunfire by Regional Police, ATF, FBI or Silent Assassins. Where upon The Citizen becomes a Martyr for a New Generation of Disenfranchised Teenagers which overthrow their Cultures previous Religious & Traditional Values with Ill Conceived self-destructive Fads & Fashions.

Stage Eight / These avant-garde Vogues then slowly evolve into a Multicultural Amalgamation of Milk-Toast Mores, Praxis & Folklore that are as shallow as spilled bourbon on a hot day.

Stage Nine / Suicide Rates explode & The Culture eventually collapses, forcing everyone to flee The Major Metropolitan Areas, forming up into small villages that evolve their own languages & entirely new Origin Myths, Fables, Children’s Parables & ‘Ancient’ Legends that form a rock solid moral & Ethical foundation for then next few hundred generations.