backcover information:

Fifteen years ago Dr. L. Robert Kohls, sensing the need for a practical guide for Americans living overseas, wrote what has become one of the most popular books ever published on an intercultural subject. The first two editions sold over 140,000 copies. Now, with this third edition, Dr. Kohls has updated the text and brought to bear on the subject new ideas and perspectives, all designed to enhance the experience of the sojourner abroad.

The book is still fast paced and practical, offering penetrating insights into the process of cross-cultural adaptation combined with hands-on suggestions for coping with the overseas experience.

Here you will find out how to avoid stereotypes, how to explore the mysteries of culture, and how values and different ways of thinking influence behavior. You'll be provided with basic strategies for getting to know your hosts, managing culture shock, and developing intercultural communication skills. You'll examine, in a chapter new in this edition, the special challenges women, especially those with families, face in the overseas experience. In another new chapter---added at the request of previous readers---you'll find guidelines for the short-term visitor which demonstrate that even a brief sojourn abroad can be enriched by the application of Kohls's principles of cross-cultural adaptation.

L. Robert Kohls is Senior Associate at the San Francisco-based management consulting firm East-West Group. Retired in 1993 from the position of director of the Office of International Programs at San Francisco State University, he has thirty years' experience as an intercultural trainer and trainer of other trainers. Kohls has lived, worked, and traveled in more than eighty countries with extensive stays in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. A founding member of SIETAR International, he was, in 1986, the first recipient of the Society's most prestigious award, Primus inter pares. He is co-author, with John Knight, of Developing Intercultural Awareness.

 

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction 1. So You're Going Overseas 2. Others Have Gone Before 3. The Stereotyped American 4. The Ugly American 5. Primitivism Reconsidered 6. Culture Defined 7. Comparing and Contrasting Cultures 8. What Makes an American? 9. To See Ourselves 10. Traveling by Objectives 11. On Becoming a Foreigner 12. A Strategy for Strangers 13. Know Thy Host Country 14. Let's play Q and A 15. Speaking of Learning the Language 16. Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty 17. The Handyman's Guide to Intercultural Communication 18. Culture Shock: Occupational Hazard of Overseas Living 19. Responding to Culture Shock 20. Skills That Make a Difference 21. Husbands, Wives and Children 22. The Challenge Postscript 1: So You're Coming Back Home? Postscript 2: Jaunts and junkets Appendices A. The Kluckhohn Model B. Information-Gathering Checklist about Your Host Country C. A Human Profile D. Checklists of Logistics E. Resources for Further Information About the Author

 

Preface

I had not read Survival Kit for Overseas Living, originally published in 1979, since the last time I revised it (1984). To my surprise, I felt it had stood the test of time rather well and, in all humility, I felt that perhaps it might even stand up to the high praise which some in the intercultural field have given it by calling it a "classic." I have also been encouraged by the fact that, to my knowledge at least, none of my professional colleagues have criticized the fundamental premises on which the book is based. It is often easy to criticize when someone tries to simplify any body of professional knowledge so that the layperson can understand its basic concepts and apply them in practice, as in this case to living in another country.

These facts, plus the additional fact that Survival Kit remains the best-seller in the Intercultural Press's stable of publications, have encouraged me to bring the book up to date once again. I am most appreciative of the many people who have told me over the past decade and a half how useful this small book was in helping them personally make their adjustment to another country and its unfamiliar value system. That, after all, rather than the compliments of one's professional peers, is the real test of Survival Kit for Overseas Living.

Although the target readership of this book was and is the neophyte American about to experience a first extended period living abroad, it has also been a pleasant surprise to me to discover that Survival Kit has become one of the indispensable reference books of professional interculturalists and that it is even often adopted as a textbook in university courses in intercultural communication.

Since this is true, I would like to address a word or two in this preface to my professional colleagues.

Although as Buckminster Fuller pointed out, Spaceship Earth came without an Operator's Manual, the initial plan, when the world was sparsely populated, seems to have been that the various human groups still had enough room to allow each group to live in "its own" territory, securely separated from one another. They could live out their entire lives in comfortable isolation, relating only to members of their own family and their own clan. They had no need to communicate with neighboring strangers, much less with people from halfway around the globe.

Then the Ages of Exploration and of Colonization began to change all of that, as the Western nation-states set out to find resource-rich countries they could take and "own"---by right of their superior firepower.

Today, the impetus for contact is somewhat different, as are the means by which it occurs. We are able to travel rapidly to and communicate immediately with the far corners of the earth. The many advances in communications and transportation have meant that even the remotest parts of the world have been brought into instantaneous contact with one another. Jules Verne's 80 days have become 80 hours, 80 minutes, or even the 80 seconds or less that it takes for e-mail to span the continents.

We all tend to see these changes as advancements (if not as evolution), but at the same time, they have produced greater complexity in our lives, and they have shifted the world (while we haven't been watching) into a new paradigm. The changes they have brought about are at least as significant as those which moved human beings from the Old Stone Age into the New Stone Age, when previously nomadic bands of hunters stopped pursuing large game and began to settle down, plant and raise grains, domesticate animals, make pottery, weave cloth, and develop their settled communities.

The current shift is, if anything, even more dynamic, for it means that instead of each group living in safe and intentional isolation from each other (with their major contacts coming through trade for essential items or through warfare), suddenly, and without much preparation, the plan has changed. We are supposed to know how to live together in harmony and with respect for every other group everywhere in the world.

The old habits which were developed over centuries and which provided protection and security have suddenly become dysfunctional. Yet they are not easy to shake for, fundamentally, this paradigm shift means that while it was natural in the past to develop a preference for similarity as we related to people who were so like ourselves, it has now become more natural to experience variety and difference in our daily lives. And those who do have a preference for variety, difference, and a large range of choice in their lives seem to have a huge advantage in adapting to the constantly changing world. It is obvious that we need to develop new skills, different ones from those which our culture provided us while we were growing up. The skills that served our parents and our grandparents so well no longer serve us in the same way.

The world can no longer afford the luxury of a separate space for every distinct ethnic group to have its own turf. In the United States, just within our own lifetimes, we have witnessed a striking evolution toward a multiethnic or multicultural society. We have watched as the possibilities of contact and interaction with the great variety of peoples who inhabit the world have expanded in exciting ways. We have even come to realize that our homeland is an even more special place, because it provides the world with one of the largest experiments ever witnessed in bringing together in one place and on such a grand scale peoples from all over the world. It is an exciting, hopeful experiment, made all the more difficult because there are no models to emulate. We have had to write our own Operator's Manual.

It is not easy for people to make this kind of dramatic mind-change---especially as we become more and more aware that the groups inhabiting the earth are in increasingly fierce competition for the earth's limited resources.

As an interculturalist, it is my sincere hope that we will accept this latest challenge with a spirit of goodwill toward all peoples who inhabit this planet. We will need all the compassion we can muster and a large dose of humility to meet this, the most important challenge in our history. Those who have found effective ways to express concern for others and work across cultural barriers must lead others in this essential task. We have embarked on a revolution of sorts, where building community at every level of human existence must become our overriding goal. This will require new ways of perceiving the human condition and the development of institutions which will allow humanity to thrive.

Every book is written by many people, and this one is no exception. While they do not share the title page, their imprint appears stamped clearly everywhere in the book. Without them it would never have been produced.

Revisiting one's creation of a decade and a half earlier stirs up fond memories of human contacts that span three revisions of this book. It is obvious to me that the loving contributions from coworkers in the field have left their indelible mark on the work. David S. Hoopes's suggestions were responsible for the inclusion of whole chapters in the original version (9 through 12 and 15 through 17, for example, were his idea to include). When I decided, in the second edition, to add a chapter on returning home and encountering reverse culture shock (Postscript 1), I asked Fanchon Silberstein to draft that chapter for me, and she did such a fine job of imitating my "Time magazine style" that there was little rewriting left for me to do. Similarly, in this third edition I asked my colleague at Global Vision Group, Claude Schnier, to conceptualize the contents of "Jaunts and Junkets" (Postscript 2), so most of the ideas in that portion of the book are his rather than mine.

Conversations with Danielle Rome Walker in 1979 were responsible for inspiring me to sit down and write the book in the first place. Serge Ogranovitch, Thomas Walker, and Jack Cook supported those early efforts. David Hoopes, Peggy Pusch, George Renwick, and Alex Patico critiqued the first edition, and all of them made valuable suggestions which greatly affected the content of the book. David and Kay Hoopes, Peggy Pusch, and Toby Frank went over this third edition with a fine-tooth comb and were an inspiration through the laborious process of rewriting it. Most authors I know argue a great deal with their editors and often look upon them as enemies, but I have always been grateful to mine for making the behind-the-scene improvements for which I will ultimately receive all the credit. They are the true unsung heroes of any publication.

L. Robert Kohls
San Francisco, 1995

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