Culture shock is a term that is used by sociologists to describe the personal disorientation that an individual feels when he/she is introduced to an unfamiliar way of life. It may be as a result of visiting a foreign country, immigration, or relocation to a varying social environment. Typically, individuals possess a shared perception of what is real and natural in terms of what they are used to. As such, it is always a disorienting experience, when a person is confronted with a radically different and socially constructed reality. The reality can have significant mental and physical impact on them.
Chagnon experienced cultural shift in his 3 day trip up the Orinoco River in Venezuela. The anthropologist was in the midst of individuals from the Yanomamo tribe. The people of the Yanomamo tribe were distributed in villages that were along the border between Venezuela and Brazil. Chagnon arrived at this location at around 2pm on a hot and humid afternoon. His hands were swollen from numerous insect bites he had suffered along the way. His first culture shock came when he had exited his boat and was finding his way through the thick under bush. He gasped at the sight of about a dozen burly, sweaty, naked, hideous men that stared at him and his comrades (Zulke & Kirley 64). Additionally, the natives had plenty wads of green tobacco in their lower teeth and lips, and this made them appear to be outraged. The armed men had very long strands of dark slime that either hung or dripped from their nostrils and drizzled down their chins or clung to their chests. This experience, as well as several others that Chagnon and his men went through, left him amazed at what he perceived as an overly primitive culture.
I experienced my first personal culture shock during a visit to one of the famous gay nightclub in Paris. Being a strong Christian background, the heterosexual environment, was quite perplexing to me. It was shocking to see the sort of attire and makeup that the male clientele and lesbian women wore. Normally, I thought that heterosexual individuals would be cladding in normal jeans, dress slacks and shirts, and sneakers. In that club, men wore leather pants, black boots, chains, and leather collars that had spikes protruding from them. Most men were also overly tattooed and pierced. For the rest of my stay at the gay nightclub, I felt being out of the place. In fact, the partying itself was not like anything I had been used to.
Residential Segregation is a form of segregation where residents are sorted into a variety of neighborhood contexts. As such, the living environment is shaped in a manner that uniquely identifies a neighborhood. Residential segregation is based on such factors as race, ethnicity, as well as the level of income. Presently, there is a convergence between the members of the Black and Hispanic communities in the United States in terms of residential segregation. This is evident in several metropolitan areas including my place in Alaska (Zulke & Kirley 78). On the other hand, a 2000 census indicated that there has been a decline in the segregation of Black and African American members between 1980 and 2000. There has also been a remarkable decline in the segregation of the Blacks and African Americans from 2008 to date. Much of this decline is attributable to the election of Barrack Obama as the first African American President of the United States.
Residential segregation has been declining especially in terms of dissimilarity, delta indexes, and isolation. Aspects pertaining to absolute centralization and spatial proximity have been remarkably uniform. From the 2000 census, it has been observed that residential segregation was on the decline as a result of a number of factors (Diesing 66). Firstly, the Blacks had initially not been evenly spread across Metropolitan areas like Alaska (dissimilarity index). Further, the Blacks were less likely to live in common neighborhoods (isolation index) and were also less concentrated in the dense areas that consisted of Hispanics as the majority (delta index). Similarly, the Blacks have been perceived to be less likely to be centralized. They have the tendency to live in addresses that are near to those of their fellow Blacks. The increasing residential segregation for Hispanics has been attributed to their rapid and very substantial growth in population. It has also been observed that metropolitan areas with considerable increase in Hispanic populations are the home to relatively few Blacks (Diesing 23).