The Cold Water Plunge of Repatriation
Returning home is the ultimate challenge
I did not fight in the Trojan War before my return to America in 1999; that’s true.
I did not return from abroad to reclaim my beautiful wife, Penelope, constantly besieged by aggressive suitors after my twenty-year absence.
I also did not return in disguise to establish the loyalty of my wife and son. What?!
Odysseus was from an honor-based warrior society. I am not. Au contraire, I hail from shameless, individualistic America.
Like most modern graduate students in anthropology in the 1990s, I returned from the field alone to a society designed to promote personal autonomy in historically unprecedented ways that I’m sure Odysseus would find bewildering to navigate.
These people have no honor. No shame. They chase money like baby sea turtles trying to find the ocean.
And, even though I’d been gone barely three years, like Odysseus, I had to rebuild my life after living abroad. I returned to an urban campus in Madison, WI, where almost all of my friends and acquaintances before fieldwork had moved on, headed to the field, taken jobs, or simply vanished. I could not even track down 2 to 3 colleagues to whom I had spoken a lot. I still have no idea what happened to them. Social networks change fast in urban America, unlike in Odysseus’s era. We seldom acknowledge this weirdness and how it dislocates us emotionally.
I discovered that repatriation either happens to you, for good or ill, or you can take charge of it. My experience fell somewhere in the middle of this duality. I came home determined NOT to descend again into an alienated, friendless state of being that preceded my fieldwork.
India had massively boosted my social confidence, healing me in ways it took years to realize.
I recently talked about all this and more with Doreen Cumberford, host of the podcast Nomadic Diaries. Doreen spent decades living in the Middle East, an achievement I can not top.
Some of my favorite quotes from our discussion:
Leaving the U.S. and experiencing India helped me recognize I demanded too much from American society and encouraged me to actively work on building friendships.
As other students of modern friendship are making clear in their work, friendships require active maintenance in modern life because you don’t just repeatedly bump into people inside tiny social bubbles. There is little formal structure at all supporting friendships or relationships. This is partly because we do not NEED friends to do basic things for our survival or advancement. Everything is incredibly voluntary, if not non-committal.
The price of high autonomy is that we must be highly intentional about every relationship, or it will wither away. This includes our parents and siblings, too. After all, everyone else is also experiencing similar autonomous desires.
After I returned to campus in early 2000, I used the Milwaukee swing dancing scene as a proxy for a small village to force friendships into being through repetition. It worked much better than doing nothing, which had been my unhelpful approach in 1994-1996.
Despite committing social faux pas, I felt more at ease due to the culturally ingrained support system.
I’m used to offending people here, so why not in India, too? Why not export the awkwardness for all to enjoy? I discovered that mere interactional weirdness or faux pas did NOT cause people to stop interacting with me. The level of tolerance for weird folks was much higher than I ever perceived in America. Only if I violated local rules of reciprocity and respect did anyone shun me. And, yes, that did happen due to my youthful and American miscalculations.
If I was an awkward foreigner, most embraced me regardless. This was partly due to my relentless obsession with speaking “pure Tamil” without sprinkling in any English words, which is “right kind of weird” in Tamil Nadu (unless you’re trying to impress a potential bride/groom). That behavior alone charmed nearly everyone I met.
I almost burst out laughing once when visiting one family for an interview. Their teenage daughter muttered derisively to her mother right before me: “He’s weird. ”
It's good to know I’m also NOT cool in Tamil Nadu, India. Boom!
America's autonomy-focused and consumer-driven society quickly dissolves relationships.
Like some small towns in America still, my entire experience of southern India, urban and rural, was of dense social networks where individuals spend their whole lives in the same village, village nexus, or city/town. When people introduced their friends, most had been friends for decades or since early childhood. Wow. This included highly educated people, who, no matter how far they traveled for a degree (including abroad), returned to their natal social networks because this provides enormous mental well-being, even if the same ‘village idiots’ are at the coffee stall every afternoon. That, too, provides comfort.
We often forget how incredibly transient many Americans have become in the States. Americans move roughly every five years, an average driven by singles and extreme movers (military families).1 This episodic moving easily disrupts participation in social networks in ways that social media does not lessen.
The most important thing I realized about repatriation is that those who have not lived extensively abroad can NOT understand, so don’t ask them to.
It's unreasonable to expect family and friends will fully understand one’s experiences abroad, as it’s unreasonable to expect them to without having shared those experiences.
This is one of the more lonely aspects of coming home, as it was for Odysseus, with his many experiences of war, deception, and seduction by dark and sinister forces, all of which his natal family had never experienced.
This is why it is essential to find other repatriated souls who can be your emotional allies. During the same period, my ally was an American history student in South India. Burdening your parents or siblings accomplishes little and will only frustrate you. It’s no different for those like Odysseus, who return from war.
The repatriated adult feels very alone in their memories and confusion. It takes them time to re-center and move on.
Please listen to the episode on your favorite platform for the full conversation.
https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/how-often-americans-move/
I've thought about this a lot. After living in Korea from '09 to '12 I found the reverse cultural integration difficult. I was in my twenties then, so that factored in as well. I wonder if we ever return. I think part of us cannot, and this as you say is an American alienation problem.
Very interesting, James. It made me think about American individualism as much as an illusion as a practice. We are socially detached, yet economically dependent in a distant sort of way. Hence, the alienation (detached from other humans but dependent on the larger distant system).