Final Essay

Adapting to different living standards and basic ways of doing things

Contents

Overview Health matters Information resources to help you plan an international trip Safety Food Legal, crime, police issues Money matters Poverty and differences in living standards abroad Different sensory environments

Overview

Navigating other cultures often requires you to navigate differences in how you deal with basic “everyday” aspects of life, like eating and using the bathroom. These differences are most common when you are travelling. Although they may seem trivial, learning to recognize and adapting to these differences can be challenging because we have normalized our own behaviors as "universal" practices. Upon further investigation, our own practices have been constructed through a variety of factors that enable these practices to be "normalized" in our cultural settings. For example, most of us do not think about how we “go to the bathroom” for example, so it can be challenging to be in a setting where we have to deal with a different way of “going to the bathroom”. Part 1 of this module discusses some common “everyday living” adaptation issues that you may encounter when you enter a new cultural setting. This is an unusually long section but on the other hand, the content is very easy. Three key learning goals for Part 1 are:

• Familiarize with basic preparation guidelines for going to a social and cultural environment that is different than yours with a focus on practical logistical matters.
• To understand where and how to find information that will help you when you are abroad.
• General tips on taking care of yourself while abroad, including dealing with culture shock.

Anthropologists often conduct research in places where they encounter many such differences. The following audio clip is about one anthropologist’s experiences with such differences; it is an example of the types of adaptions we will be talking about in Part 1.

In the audio clip below, Dr. Larry Robbins describes his initial experiences entering the Lake Turkana region of Kenya as a graduate student in the 1960s. Dr. Larry Robbins is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. Dr. Robbins has worked in the field of African archaeology since 1965. (If you do not see the audio player window below, simply click here to open the audio file in a new browser window).