When is ‘local culture’ just wrong?
We were shocked to find two wolf cubs in this garden pit
In a recent 501 Places post about Travel Broadening the Mind, many people commented on the diverse benefits of travel. Some spoke of the valuable exposure to alien cultures, of the acceptance of others’ way of life and of learning that our way is not the only way.
How far should we stretch our tolerance and judgement however, when we are challenged with situations that are not only strange to us, but sometimes appear inherently wrong? Do we accept that we are witnesses to practices and behaviours that are derived from many generations, and that as witnesses we have no power other than that of observation? Does observation in itself make us complicit in the wrong that is done?
Two such situations stick in my mind. The first was when I was in Uganda 16 years ago, working as an optometrist conducting a series of eye camps. I remember seeing one young girl who was totally blind. Her corneas were totally opaque. At first she said didn’t know what had caused this, but on further examination and in conjunction with a local nurse, we found out that she had been to see a local shaman about a matter unrelated to her eyes, and he had given her a liquid to wash her face with, and specifically to put in her eyes. The main ingredient was horse urine, and this potion had proceeded to render this young girl blind. I was angry and upset at how this ‘doctor’ had damaged the life of this girl, yet as the nurse explained the process of educating people away from their faith in witch doctors is a slow, frustrating and often dangerous one.
Last year we stayed with an eagle hunter in Kyrgyzstan. We were prepared to see some blood and guts as the eagle showed off its natural killer instinct. Somehow its destruction of a wild rabbit that had just been caught for the eagle’s pleasure seemed ok. What disturbed us however was when we took a walk through his garden and found a pit in the ground with a net fastened over it. Inside the pit were two wolf cubs, pacing back and forth. The hunter explained to us how he had bought these recently and would be taking them to neighbouring Kazakhstan a week later for an eagle hunting contest. Our small group was quite shocked by this treatment of these beautiful cubs, yet we had to accept that this was the way of life and the cultural heritage of this generous man, and he had inherited his skills from his father and grandfather before him. We could only pity the poor cubs, who were unaware of the fate that lay before them.
On a different magnitude of horror, a good friend of ours travels regularly to the remote hill tribes of Indo-China and recently told us of a visit to a tribe where she witnessed at first hand many of the rituals of the animist beliefs that are held there. The most distressing story by far was of the twins that were born in the village. Believing that twins are a curse, the villagers carefully prepared the two babies for the sacrifical ritual and with great sadness suffocated them by pushing leaves into their mouths. This was necessary to appease the gods who had expressed their anger by sending these poor children. How does one challenge such deep-rooted beliefs and hope to create a change?
Yet before we get on our moral high horses, let us not forget the wickedness that is prevalent in our own societies. If those same tribal people came to the western world, there is little doubt that they would be greatly disturbed with some of the barbaric practices that we tolerate and encourage. How would they view the fact that we allow members of our society to sleep in the streets in the freezing cold of winter, while the buildings by which they shiver lie empty? Or the fact that so many of our old people are left neglected by their own children for who they sacrificed so much of their lives, and by the generation for whom they fought and struggled? Every society in the world, however supposedly developed, has its shameful sides, and while it’s much easier to see the wickedness in others’ belief systems our criticisms might start to appear more hollow when we take an objective look at our own way of life.
This is a very sensitive issue. I think what we need to do first is find out if that is really the general culture or an isolated or few cases (which will need to be erased, too, of course).
Also, if a cruel tradition belongs to the general culture, I think the best way to fight this is educating the locals, employing other locals, rather than imposing our own views.
In every society, heinous crimes are carried out day after day, if with this expression you mean also the crimes against animals (personally, I do). The meat we find in the supermarkets, for example, very rarely comes from ethically run farms: most of the times the animals we eat have lived all their lives in a tiny cubicle, have been forcedly fed to get fat enough quickly enough to be sold, and have never walked or run like would be their nature.
Most people would cringe when learning how the fois gras or the duck liver paté are made, but they still buy it, contributing to increase the market. We just don’t see these things, but they are horrendous, and they exist although they’re not part of our culture. Or maybe they are and I just don’t accept them, I’m not sure about this.
Thanks for this post, very thought-provoking and useful.
You must never judge a culture against your own social/cultural upbringing/morals, as they are by their very nature different to ours, however sometimes it is very hard to just accept the difference and a lot of travellers try to change peoples views (Both local and traveller alike), this is one of the reasons so many fantastic and amazing cultures are disappearing under a “blanket of western culture” because we cant just accept that other people are different and allow them to continue as such. How would you feel if a cannibal started trying to force his culture onto us?
There’s nothing wrong in questioning local practices that appear barbaric or cruel to our eyes – any more than there’s anything wrong with people questioning such practices in our own societies. I certainly wouldn’t be in favour of simply accepting the aforementioned cannibalism on the basis that it’s part of a fantastic and amazing culture!
Wow. I’ve been “distressed” when people do drugs in public and don’t bathe. These are a whole other level.
One of the gifts of long-haul traveling is coming home and experiencing the culture shock of returning. Our own culture is bizarre in so many ways, and it’s good to have a reminder.
Thanks for the fascinating comments.
Where do we draw the line between not judging, and coming down on the side of right and wrong? I like the example of cannibalism. It’s distasteful for us, but in some cultures it is normal. And there are many aspects of our own society that appear undoubtedly immoral for those who live by a different set of beliefs, rules and values. As tourists visiting another culture or community I think we can do little more than observe respectfully. Maybe that’s it: respecting while disagreeing.
I think the main issue with trying to change another cultures belief system is that we haven’t clean up our own backyard yet. Allowing homeless and Elder neglect are just the tip of the iceberg in western society. We can’t be the Moral compass for the rest of the world while our own is in such need of repair.
Thanks for this thoughtful and provocative post. While it’s certainly shameful that homelessness exists in the US, I wouldn’t call it “wickedness.” How much of today’s homelessness has been brought about by the deinstitutionalization of patients with severe mental illness? So many people on the street today are mentally ill, but courts are prevented from forcing them to get the help they need. The closing of most long-term mental institutions was considered a beneficial thing, it was done for reasons of compassion and justice, but had unintended consequences.
This is quite different from having a belief system that requires the suffocation of newborn twins due to superstition, or the genital mutilation of women in Africa, or ignorance and misogyny that approves of acid attacks on women for reasons of “honor” in Pakistan. Since 1994, a Pakistani activist who founded the Progressive Women’s Association (www.pwaisbd.org) to help such women “has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted.” http://blogs.tampabay.com/photo/2009/11/terrorism-thats-personal.html Must we say that such attacks on women are just examples of local culture that we should respect?
Interesting post. This is something of a moral quandary isn’t it! I personally believe, that as members of an affluent western society, we should be very reserved in passing moral judgments, particularly on the developing world. It is the curse of affluence. As we no longer struggle in any real sense for the things we need to survive, we find ourselves with too much time and energy. Morality, especially when it comes to animals, only seems to come into a situation where survival has long left, and education has long been.
Well, darn, I never imagined disagreeing with Angela, who wrote:
“This is a very sensitive issue. I think what we need to do first is find out if that is really the general culture or an isolated or few cases (which will need to be erased, too, of course).”
What I disagree with is the “erased” part. That’s the easy side, the negative side. “We” go in, like knights in white armor, and erase the cultural values that have been accumulated after a long an arduous cultural journey. Leaving, of course, a void.
What if we thought only of positive values? What if all of us believed in the value of rational argument, the value of teaching?
So what I’m getting at is this. What if we took it upon ourselves to provide an arguably more efficient treatment for blindness than a horse urine rinse? What if we took it upon ourselves to not only teach the techniques that produce better results in a majority of situations, but provided it free of cost, and free of moral obligation for reciprocity?
What then?
james
Mm do we have a right to judge local culture just because it is different than our own. It’s a tricky one. In the case of the child that is pretty horrific, but is it any different than someone having an operation on the NHS and it going wrong?
I think there is a danger here. Since many Westerners know that our colonialist and paternalistic attitudes to other cultures have done so much damage in the past, it is tempting to go too far the other way in an attempt to balance this out.
Moral relativists condone, or at least refuse to condemn (and thereby condone), any practice, no matter how barbaric, if it belongs to a culture other than ours. I think this is nothing more than a lazy cop-out.
Female genital mutilation is one example – I don’t care how entrenched in a local culture this practice is, I don’t believe that one human being has the right to do that to another. If a consenting adult did it to herself, free from any coercion and even free from prevailing social and cultural pressure, that might be another story But these girls generally don’t give, and are anyway not capable of, informed adult consent. Opposing female genital mutilation has nothing to do with curbing the freedom of another society, and everything to do with supporting the freedom of those girls. There are plenty of opponents to female genital mutilation within the societies that practise it, usually among the ranks of women who were mutilated when they were children. I think the right thing to do is to join with the efforts of those women, giving both moral and practical support and bearing witness to their struggle, but let them, as members of that society, take the lead.
We have no right to the moral high ground and we shouldn’t force our views on other people. However, that should not stop us from having an opinion and speaking out when we believe something is wrong, whether in our own society or another. As long as we are humble about our own imperfections and willing to accept criticism in return, I don’t see mere speech as an imposition on anyone else. Speech only stings if they feel that something is wrong, otherwise it can be shrugged off.
Human rights are universal – the UN Declaration of Human Rights was written and signed by many countries, not just Europe and North America. The concept of human rights spring not just out of our own Judaeo-Christian tradition but also exists in Islam, Buddhism and many other cultures. Indian philosophers wrote about human rights centuries before the Victorians came marauding in. People like Mahatma Gandhi in India and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma show that human rights are not just a Western-imperialist concern. Every culture might manifest its values in different ways but we should never feel that by standing on the side of human rights and freedom that we are enforcing Western values on a foreign culture. Believing we have a monopoly on either the universal principles of freedom and human dignity or the wicked supression of such rights is the worst sort of arrogance.
I don’t believe we should tell other countries how, precisely, to organise their government. But if we support the principle of self-determination of all peoples, then it is up to the individual people in a country how they wish to be governed. If they have to be kept in line by a repressive state and are denied freedom of speech or movement, then it is hard to see how that government represents the will of the people. Self-determination of people means precisely that, not self-determination of a ruling elite.
Telling other people exactly what to think and do and imposing our own beliefs and attitudes is out-dated and wrong. But moral relativism is equally bad and nothing more than a lazy cop-out. The right thing is a much more nuanced and difficult path of supporting people’s individual freedom (where it doesn’t impinge on another’s freedom). We should not be judgmental and we should accept difference when it is merely that. However, that doesn’t mean we should suspend judgment or our critical powers of reasoning.
Thanks to all for the varied and valuable comments. Do we accept that every society (including our own) has a right to determine its own moral standards and that we, as visitors, can do little more than observe? Or is there a line that we draw, as Caitlin argues, where causing suffering or mutilation to people in the name of culture or tradition is plain wrong, and our failure to act against these wrongs makes us complicit in their abuse.
We can all agree that such horrific practices (eg: infanticide, ‘honour’ killings, genital mutilation) are undeniably wrong. How do we, as individuals, best channel our convictions into useful action? Education is the obvious answer, but do we educate without appearing as imperial hyprocrites?
No easy answers, as many have said.
If we must wait until we are perfect ourselves before we are permitted to speak against wrongdoing, then injustice will always prevail.
The Saudi woman who is killed by her brother in a so-called honour killing is no less worthy of our respect, tolerance and support than her brother.
What an extraordinarily thoughtful piece and no easy answer is found. I do think we should oppose things that we find morally wrong (child slavery, female genital mutilation, animal cruelty and other examples above) and discuss our reasoning behind them. We can’t expect to boil the ocean and change things overnight but seeing things that we are totally opposed to by our personal value systems need to be spoken about to the perpetrators in a reasoned manner. I don’t think that this is necessarily a western high ground discussion or a simple cultural difference. Similarly we should be prepared to take criticism of our own practices and cultures some of which are seriously poor as well. To not speak out effectively condones a moraaly wrong practice. Education takes time but still is very worthwhile.
Again, a remarkably thoughtful article – one of the best I’ve read this year.
I’m sorry but I cannot and do not agree with any of you here. There is absolutely no way that killing children (or anyone) is OK in any situation. If I had of been witness to this I would have picked those babies up and run for the hills.
What happens in Western countries is no better but two wrongs don’t make a right.
Just because some cultures think that incest is Ok does NOT make it right. Same goes for honour killings, female circumsion etc etc
Part of evolution and cultures evolving is to learn and change behaviours that are not acceptable.
I am amazed that you all consider this ok
Moral relativism sucks.
And a lot of travellers, in a desperate bid to appear “hip” seem to engage in it.
It’s simple really.
Take something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most of the countries of the world are signed up to it and many countries had an input. So, it provides a simple, easy to understand concept of what right and wrong might actually be.
Also, what we imagine to be “local” is carefully constructed.
I recently met a Khmer woman and we got chatting about what she likes to eat.
“Burgers,” she replied.
Had she heard of McDonalds?
“No no, what is that?”
It’s a place that looks very clean and modern, has aircon and sells burgers very cheaply.
“Wow! That sounds amazing! I want to go!”
Of course that doesn’t fit our fantasy of what “local culture” should be.
We want our locals living in some suitably traditional shithole village, devoid of development, electricity/clean water/healthcare/education and judge anyone who disagrees.
Take the Khmers – they dont stay in hotels filled with Buddha busts and silks. They stay in gaudy, huge marble edifices that would send any “traveller” looking for “authenticity” running to the safety of the nearest LP approved backpacker place.
Thing is most travellers hate development because they no longer have an impoverished museum to travel in.
I guess its difficult to judge another country for what they believe is right. Just simply accepting that people have different cultures is the only way to live.
Aaron
Good read this article!
I am convinced that we don’t have to worry. With our technology nowadays, even the most remote places on the planet (read, the ones with ’strange’ or ‘disturbing’ cultures) are being exposed to our so called ‘civilized views’. Killing a child is regarded as evil everywhere, and the normal thinking individuals in those societies that think different, will in the end start to make a change.
Should you have said something about those wolves? NO! Imagine a Maasai warrior walking into Holland and say: ‘Release all those cows, they should be roaming free!”. We would tell the guy to f***-off.
Lets stay humble, respect other views and hope that cruelty will slowly disappear from every culture in the world (including our own!).
Thanks Johan. I agree with you. Every society has something to learn from each other, and we never influence others through hypocritical preaching.
As for cruelty slowly disappearing… well it will be slow, but if there is a gradual shift from the cruel and barbaric practices that involve violence and unnecessary suffering, it’s progress of sorts.