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What is Culture?

It is the coherent, learned, and shared view of a group of people, about life’s concerns that ranks what is important, furnishes attitudes, about what things are appropriate, and dictates behavior.

Since culture is learnable, People now study about culture. Why? People started to learn it because we are in the era of globalization. There are challenges of diversity. We are going to meet lots of different culture. The only way to deal with the challenges of diversity is by living your own culture and cooperates with the new culture. However, you cannot cooperate with the new culture if you don’t now those culture. And you might get the culture shock, once you are living in the new culture.

What is culture shock?

It is the four stages we are going to get through when we facing the new culture. It is:

1. Euphoria, the feeling of excitement. You probably would feel so excited meet something new than your own culture. They do looks more excited than yours at the first time.

2. Disillusionment and Frustration, This is the stage where people start to realize that the new culture needs adjustment, but they are not ready to do this adjustment. You would probably miss your culture’s food or people. What would people do? They would leave from the foreign culture and go back to their former culture or struggle to overcome the situation. Few people who choose to struggle would go to the next stage of culture shock.

3. Adjustment. You started to adapt the new culture by make yourself comfort with it.

4. Integration, the stage where you can fully understand the culture, and how to cooperate with it without loosing your identity.

If someone had live in other’s culture in quiet a long time, they would get a reverse culture shock. Reverse Culture Shock is a moment where the culture shock appears again when someone who had adjusted to others culture, return to his or her own culture.

That’s make another reason for us to learn more about culture, specially if we are going travel abroad to other’s foreign country with the foreign culture.