Culture Exhaust

Travel tiredness? What to call the effect of being bombarded with sights, sounds and experiences. I've experienced it whenever I travel even in relatively benign places like England. The very different-ness of the experience overwhelms the senses. The body must process these new experiences in any way it can.

One of our students remarked that she felt she was not getting restful sleep but that she was having REM or dreaming sleep nearly all the time. She had heard that the reason babies sleep so much is that they use dreamtime to process all their very new and very inexplicable experiences. So perhaps it is with us as travelers. We feel the exhaustion as well as exhilaration of travel and must spend time processing our experience whether in waking reflection or in dreamland.

For myself, the sheer volume of difference in India puts my being on hyper-alert. The traffic one must negotiate while crossing the street; the volume of the horns, speech, animals; the speeding colors of vehicles and fashion combinations one does not ordinarily find in the drab NW. The concentration it takes to understand ordinary English spoken w/ an Indian accent. Each individual piece is absorbable in parts but taken together the effect overwhelms the synapsis.

I'm inclined to believe this is not so much culture "shock" as culture exhaustion. Certainly there are elements that are shocking to our sensibilities -- its difficult for me to make meaning of the pantheon of Indian gods, for instance. Even the basics of household life contain very dramatic differences. But what more strongly overwhelms us is the sheer "volume" of the processing of things that are not ordinary to our senses. They are not "shocking" in the traditional sense of the word but they do tire us as we attempt to incorporate ourselves in this new environment.