ABSTRACT
This chapter explores profoundly irritating experiences produced by unfamiliar cultural environments in which the usual individual or collective ways of thinking and routines of action no longer “work”. Such ruptures can occur either in a situation of encounter, such as an acute experience of alienation, or biographically in the course of life, for example in the form of a prolonged culture shock. The chapter provides an overview of findings on the emergence and dynamics of strangeness and alienation due to different collective habits and the resulting dynamics in dealing with foreign people or foreign cultural environments.
