Culture shock

Someone recently mentioned that the thought I was experiencing culture shock.  It was an assumption on their part supposedly based on the fact that I had complained about the heat, and the traffic.  I dislike the way we humans always clutch at negatives, hopeful perhaps that someone else is as miserable as we are.  It’s macabre and apparently spliced into our DNA.  That aside, it led me to consider the term “culture shock”. 

Is it culture shock to complain about the heat?  Hmmm, to begin with, man’s involvement with climate change aside, the heat is presumably a natural phenomena and so separate from culture.  Sure weather can impact the habits and traditions people adopt and therefore influence their cultural pursuits but it isn’t a component of culture per se.

So what is culture?  It might seem a trite question, but when you analyse it, particularly in terms of a developing country you begin to realise that the ‘culture’ to which we might be referring  to in the expression “culture shock” has nothing to do with the locals and everything to do with what we left at home.  We are not shocked so much by local culture, we are horrified that there isn’t more of our own – or that the ‘culture’ which apparently ‘shocks’ us is a dysfunctional hybrid of local resources and western expectations.  Why can’t we have the comforts of home exactly as we like them? 

Sorry, I personally didn’t come here to experience home.  That would have been nuts – and quite expensive too.  Hell, I could have saved the airfares and the cost of vaccinations and just stayed in Melbourne.  To people that travel overseas expecting what they are used to and comfortable with, I have two words:  “Stay home!”

Besides, the true culture of Timor has nothing to do with Dili and the way it works – or doesn’t work.  Timor’s true culture lies in the districts where the emphasis is on relationships, on family, on everyone having enough to survive, but not striving to amass considerably more for no other reason than to have acquired more than someone else.  It isn’t Dili Beach Hotel or One More Bar, the distinctly Australian establishments that cater to Aussie sporting tastes.  I can’t imagine, either that phone cards or taxis feature greatly in Timorese folklore.  Not sure about the UN vehicles either.  Even the older buildings are more Portuguese than Timorese. 

So anyone coming to Dili might indeed experience a shock.  They might expect Timorese culture and instead be faced with a mishmash of imports from around the globe, brought here, not to truly enhance what already existed, but rather to impose outside standards, expectations and requirements with scant concern for the culture over which these are being superimposed.

And for that reason the person suggesting I am experiencing culture shock is spot on – but for the wrong reasons.  Culture shock for me isn’t about the weather or the traffic or bureaucratic red tape.  Geez, as if I haven’t complained about those ad nauseum in Australia. 

No, culture shock for me is the new Timor Plaza.  Yes.  Precisely what the locals need – a western style shopping centre apparently decked out with Australian stores selling furniture, homewares, sporting goods and groceries.  I am assured that the wealthy Timorese, if not the everyday mums and dads, will be able to shop there.  Perhaps it will employ some people – we can only hope this is on more than a subsistence wage. 

To me Timor Plaza is a monstrosity, a shocking example of how we ‘develop’ countries not by supporting what already existing, not by providing things everyone in the world has a right to – food, education, a roof over their head, the ability to support themselves and their families in their traditional ways.  No.  Clearly no country can consider itself ‘developed’ until it has a shopping centre.  And to add insult to injury it is, in classic western fashion, right next door to an existing retailer that sells food and homewares. 

That’s the shocking thing about Timorese culture – how much of it has already and will continue to disappear under the auspices of ‘development’ and ‘progress’.