October 16 - 18, 2007 

Paris Syndrome: Reverse Homesickness?

Janima Nam

Academy of Fine Arts

Viena

A strange illness called "Paris Syndrome" was recently identified in which Japanese tourists/expatriates in Paris develop a kind of exaggerated form of culture shock, requiring medical/psychological assistance and sometimes winding up repatriated. Apparently, the disillusionment that Japanese tourists experience upon arriving in Paris, stemming from the disappointment of their somewhat romanticized expectations, is enough to require in some cases medical assistance. What reasons lie behind this strange condition? To what extent doe the Japanese temperament contribute to this inability to adjust? To what extent the Parisian urban climate? Is it due to a particular incompatibility between these two radically opposed cultures? Is it the eternal clash between east and west? Is there a basis in the histories of the two cultures that can help to explain their radical incongruity? Or is it simply representative of the universal modern experience of mis-/dis-placed individuals? Orientalism has theorized about the lasting effects of post-colonialism on the western perspective of the East. 

The reverse perspective, what might be called “Occidentalism” has yet to be fully investigated. Although migration and tourism allows individuals to freely move from place to place, the persistence of national and cultural identity formation still plays a powerful force on postmodern itinerant existence. To what extent can cultural background (national, ethnic, religious, etc.) be retained and transported, lost and found, redefined and reinterpreted in the pursuit of (or flight from) new selves? Is “history” transportable and what happens when it gets uprooted and transfused into diverse arrangements? Are certain combinations impossible to achieve or at least problematic? Do cultures inevitably clash and when does culture shock become symptomatic of the difficulties of shedding one’s cultural skin? Perhaps the emergence of Paris syndrome points to the limits of an imagined global community that promises new frontiers and transformations. 

A historical perspective would provide clues to the factors that lead up to such a condition. Voluntary expatriation is becoming more and more commonplace in an increasingly mobile and transient world. What is interesting about the Paris Syndrome is not necessarily the stereotypes it may confirm about said tourists and said natives. What is more notable is the insistence on the part of the hospitalized visitors on staying put where they are. Serial relocation as a necessity for modern identity formation seems to be shedding new light on the motivation for mobility, on the need to become "citizens of the globe". As the endless search for our identities and our increasingly rootless backgrounds overlap, we are still seeking to define ourselves somehow by "choosing" our "homes", "paths", and "destinations", or at least insisting on our choice to let such terms remain open and fluid. The Paris Syndrome gives new meaning to the old saying: "Wherever you go, there you are," especially when the "wherever" and the "you" are no longer on the map.

About Janima Nam

Janima Nam is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She holds a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Film and Television from New York University and a Masters of Research from the London Consortium programme (Birkbeck College/University of London), for which her dissertation was about national identity in Australian women's film. She is now pursuing research on the connection between tourism/migration and identity in the context of "east-meets-west"-type encounters.

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