ANALYZING CULTURAL SHOCKS

The concept or cultural shock is very often used to explain everything that all immigrants may suffer at a certain time of their lives. Therefore, if a student does not go to a specific class, if the son is having problems with reading and writing, if the daughter does not go to school, if any relative start crying without any visible explanation, if the son has a poor test performance at school, it is because of the cultural shock. Well, the cultural shock exists indeed but if it is used in everyday basis to explain some common facts of our lives we are contributing seriously for the danger of loosing its meaning or any other useful meaning for the educator.

In my understanding, when we diagnose someone as suffering from cultural shock and nothing else is explained, nothing really was diagnosed because we are not analyzing the situation as being a possible cause of cultural shock but we are finding an excuse to delay the solution of the problem. By saying this I do not deny the existence of cultural shock, I am saying that every problem should be analyzed until we come to the conclusion that it is caused by the so-called cultural shock.

If we want the term "cultural shock" to become useful again to the educator, we have to develop some tools that will help him to analyze its characteristics, to differentiate its various aspects, and to predict its effects.

Analyzing this concept from a socio-cultural point of view we realize that any possible cultural shock analysis will consist of a comparison between the culture of the original country against the culture of the United States of America. For instance, we should not forget that a Capeverdean family structure is very patriarchal and the American one very democratic; the Capeverdeans are very nostalgic and turned to the past and the Americans are always turned to the future; the slavery past of the Capeverdeans does not go very easy with the liberty and democracy of the Americans.

Naturally we could enumerate some more examples of this cultural discrepancy, but what really matters is ''what can we do with all this information".

What is necessary is a "system of reference" in which the deep culture that influences the perception and behavior of an individual in a certain country can be compared with the deep culture of another individual in this country.

Before we go on, let us try to define culture in this special context, which is known as a complex set of beliefs, values, attitudes, norms and customs organized by a community through the centuries in answer to the demands of a situation. And this situation is composed of all the circumstances involving climate, economic structure, technology, institutions such as language, political organization, religion, law, and social conditions that each community confronts as the environment in which it moves and by which it is limited.

In order to elaborate a "system of reference'' that will help the educator in predicting where and how a certain group of students will find cultural shock, and how severe that shock will be, and how to deal with this cultural shock, we propose the finding of powerful determinants of a situation that will tend to provoke similar reactions in men, as far as perception and behavior are concerned.

These determinants are, in most of the cases, subsistence economy, socio-economic situation, race, religion, climate, language and political organization.

A matrix of these circumstances can be easily assembled and it will help predict cultural shock whenever there is a distance between the two profiles. The greater the distance between profiles, the greater the cultural shock.

In this example I am presenting a matrix involving Capeverdeans and Americans in New England.

Needless to say that other special conditions must be taken in consideration, like when we talk about race we are referring to the majority of the people once in Cape Verde and in New England we will find diversities of races.