Educating Americans for “Overseasmanship”: The Peace Corps and the Invention of Culture Shock

Abstract

Since culture shock was first coined in the mid-1950s, the term has become a fixture of popular discourse and continues to organize general understandings of the way individuals experience cultural difference. This essay examines the emergence of culture shock in relation to the 1961 establishment of the US Peace Corps, an institution that contributed to both scholarly and popular understandings of the concept. Through an analysis of both the early scholarship on culture shock and the term’s appearance in volunteers’ accounts and Peace Corps histories, the essay identifies two complementary discourses at play in the culture shock story, which together supported the Peace Corps’ project of “educating Americans for overseasmanship”: the concept of culture shock harnessed the expert authority of an emerging American social science to a classically sentimental narrative of individual crisis, growth, and recovery. Ultimately, the essay argues, culture shock offered volunteers a framework through which to make sense of their unsettling encounters abroad, but one that individualized, psychologized, and depoliticized their confrontations not only with cultural difference but also with inequality, poverty, racism, and imperialism.