The article tries to defend the culture shock concept against criticism which has mainly been uttered by contemporary migration sociology. However, in contrast to conservative US American research on migration at the beginning of our century which blamed culture shocks to be responsible for integration difficulties of newcomers, culture shock is considered by the author as a valuable instrument for ethnological research since it helps to eliminate or rather reduce the researcher’s ethnocentrism and/or Euro-centrism. In three episodes the author describes how culture shocks he had experienced in Sandinist Nicaragua’s everyday life made him aware of his own Euro-centrism, which he had before considered to play a minor role in his percepteive system. They served for him as an eye-opener and helped him to correct some of the prejudices he had unconsciously developed during his academic studies. Cultur shocks became tor him an important instrument to discover the neuralgic areas where value- and belief-systems of progressive academics with European background were bound to misinterpretted reality. The article does not deny that cultur shocks may be responsible for some of the difficulties migrant workers and refugees have when they try to integrate into local societies. But it maintains that the origin of these difficulties must first of all be seen in structural and individual racism and xenophoby.
