Cross-Culture Understanding: Become Bi-cultural People

We are born as Cultural Human, we live and raise up in cultural family. We grow up as social people in cultural environment. From babyhood to adulthood, we learn about culture continuously. The existence of culture bring many benefits to us as human being. We know the right way of thinking, make a good social interaction in our society. Through culture, we learn to be civilized human.

And can we imagine? How was our life without culture? Okay, take a moment for thinking about it. Can you imagine it, can’t you? I confidently will say it doesn’t make sense. Because from the past, culture has given us a lot of knowledge and skills even we don’t realize it so that we still alive.

We are Narrative Human

We are narrative human, storyteller human. We communicate to our generation by telling stories. In modern era, we are homo sapien can tell stories to our generation by writing in blog or book, drop some pictures in social media with a long caption and message inside and wishing someday our grandchildren and great grandchildren will find it. But, our ancestors in the past, our ancestors told their stories and their messages to their generation; to us by writing on cave walls, carving in stone and through songs and dances that we call traditional culture.

After the time, in digital age when anything can be connected each others by internet. We can spreading our stories as fast as light speed. We are in hyper-connection era, that can make us be connected to new thing everyday, especially culture. We represent modern human who should be able to adapt better to our ancestors. Because we have modern tools for learning. Well, this is a modern tool that we can use to understand, motivate ourselves to adapt more to a new culture.

W-Phase: Tool for understanding cross-culture

We will understand how the normal phase most people experience when entering in new culture. What are the obstacles they face, what’s meant by culture shock and how to go through worst stage to reach a Bi-cultural Human Being. So, here’s 5 stages that we should know to understand new culture.

Honeymoon Stage

On this stage, we are happy and flowery at the first impression. Euphoric period. We fell everything are interesting, extra-ordinary and new. We will be so enthusiast. But, commonly this period isn’t long last.

Culture Shock Stage

On this stage, we start feel anxious and getting bored with your new environment. We feel everything are ordinary (Not extra-ordinary again like on Honeymoon Stage). We will compare our new culture and environment with our origin culture. So, here’s the shock culture.

Initial Adjustment Stage

Thankfully if we can reach this stage. This stage, we are used to the situation, habit and routine. We already understand local’s way of life. Then, we start to do adjustment to solve our problems such as boring and anxiety. We accordingly learn about dress, food and language.

Depression Stage

On this stage, we will crash to the bottom of the culture shock. Here we will be frustrated and depressed and this stage will be most difficult stage that we are going through. We feel homesick and we miss all the things on our origin culture. This is shortest period (commonly) but it hardest.

Bi-cultural Stage

Acceptance or independence stage. After the time, we have been through a weeks, months, years to struggle and to adapt with our new environment and culture. So, here we are. On this stage, it doesn’t mean we understood the culture completely but at least we can integrate with new culture and we don’t need more effort when there’s a little bit of change in the environment or the culture.

Conclusion

By understanding this phase, we can understand what we have to prepare and what we will be face it and   what we have to do especially for understanding new culture and I hope from this presentation you can understand what your problems is, you can define it and do initial adjustment to solve it.