Străini în lumi și mai străine

Ramificațiile adaptative și pedagogice ale șocului cultural

Abstract

Strangers in Yet Stranger Lands. The Adaptive and Pedagogical Ramifications of Culture Shock
Any conclusive analysis of the socio-cultural effects that emerge, organically, as a major consequence of contemporary migration processes will have to be based, apodictically, on the adjoining tenets of an anthropological concept that has become a recurring node in the afferent specialized literature hailing from the middle of the XXth Century. This concept, tentatively dubbed culture shock, materialized as a germinal theoretical rudiment in the writings of the Canadian anthropologist Kalervo Oberg. According to his doctoral research conducted in relation to the migratory dynamics to which members of the Tlingit tribal communities (endemic, approximately, to the topography that is circumscribed by the current borders of Alaska and British Columbia) were connected, the pernicious valences inherent to the phenomenon of accelerated acculturation would justify the application of the somewhat radical attribute of shock to all the complex processes by which external elements of language, religion and cultural habitus are adopted by a given community.
In the decades following its initial formulation, culture shock was removed from its original speculative pedestal, which would have bestowed upon it the applicative singularity characteristic of a concept, being instead recalibrated to conform to the looser parameters of a notional construct. Its operational relevance remains, however, indisputable, as it now finds itself placed under the epistemic jurisdiction of a panoply of heterogeneous scientific fields, such as linguistics, imagological studies, psychology and, last but not least, pedagogical theory. The latter will represent the central framework towards which the explorations of the present study will be directed: in turn, these investigations will focus on highlighting the epistemological dimensions, as well as the major pragmatic implications entailed by the incorporation of culture shock (as an empirically validated datum) into the proverbial toolbox of the multiculturally conscious iterations of didactic theory.