In another scene, the Japanese are very disturbed by the British navigator’s complete lack of personal hygiene, and it discussed that, at the time, westerners were convinced that having a bath will make you possessed by evil!

The point is, there are lots of differences between culture, some based on religion and some based on tradition, tolerating or not tolerating some of the practices of other cultures will completely depend on the people concerned and the situation itself. However, there are some traditions that and practices that can never be tolerated, like killing babies for example, or blinding little girls, or leaving homeless people to freeze to death when there’ shelter near by that is vacant.

@James Willcox, I’m a Muslim, and from my experience what you said is very true :)

Thanks Andy for the article.

There are no hard and fast rules on how far we would respect the local culture. It’s a personal call, as far as I’m concerned.

Thanks for another thought-provoking post Andy. :)

I would say that it is not only travellers who are moral revisionists. Many people in the developing world often allow for foreign guests to do things that are repugnant to them just because they are foreign and they don’t know any better.
They would put it down to our strange culture.

Very true about how we thought about the wolf but not the rabbit. It’s that attachment of human attractive qualities (or cuteness) that we apply to animals that allows us to eat a cow but not a horse, or a pig but not a dog. I’ve heard the same incredulity about the western treatment of our old people. People from other cultures are often appalled by how we treat our elderly: and that’s before they’ve actually seen the grim conditions that exist in some ‘care’ homes.

I think that infanticide and canabalism are fairly rare examples and are cultural oddities rather than the norm and you are not going to find anyone sane defending them. However, the treatment of animals and equality in society do vary across the world. Sometimes it is a matter of perspective, sometimes it is a matter of social development. The rights of women, homesexuals and people of different races was not so great in Europe and the West 50,70 or 100 years ago.

The wolf cubs received sympathy but the Rabbit killed previously did not. Wolf cubs are a lot cuter but does that make them more “special”? I would suggest that battery farmed chickens get a much worse standard of care than 2 wolf cubs in a rural pit. Sometimes it is the closeness to death in developing countries that shocks rather than the acts themselves.

One Western practice that i find always gets a shocked response in the rest of the world is the habit of putting elderly people in a home rather than looking after them in the family home. I have spoken to people who simply did not believe me when i menioned that many people do this in Europe and North America. The idea that a society contains people who cannot stand the sight of a horse being whipped but will happily pack off the people who fed, educated and nursed them to a sterile house where they know no-one is a concept that most of the world finds insane.

Sometimes it is perspective.

I also think it is pompous of us to think so highly of ourselves as westerners. We are humans just like everyone else, and why should we sit back and watch people living in decrepid conditions, mutilating each other, solely because we think their culture is cute. (Has the internet erased our culture? Isnt is possible to bring advances to people without it erasing their culture? I think so) It is important to invite them to explore our medical, transportation, ecological, and technological advances and see how they can adapt these things to their situations.

Relativist theories offer interesting frameworks, but to use them to deny universal human rights is appalling. They contain inherent flaws, as do all moral theories. I think theories like cultural relativism are helpful when trying to understand an issue FROM that culture’s viewpoint, but it does not always justify their actions.

I also find that there is a tendency to believe “culture” as being the same for everyone inside that culture. This is not always the case. Many individuals within a culture are not aware of their own culture. They may not realize that the questionable action is only justified by the dominant cultural group in POWER. This group may be inflicting severe human rights violations onto other subgroups in order to maintain their position of power. This is applicable in so many human rights violations, such as the female mutilation mentioned above.

Who are we to assume these actions do not upset locals within the culture as well? Cannibalism was discussed above. In the ethnographies I’ve read on cannibalism, those who practice this act hardly find it “tasteful” or “normal”. There is a cannibalistic group in the Amazon who believe burying or burning someone is of the utmost insult and therefore they eat tribal members so as to respect their honor. They do not enjoy this practice & it often makes them violently ill, but they do it out of compassion. This is a clear example that there can be positive aspects to acts we consider “wrong”.

Westerners can’t think we are “above” horrible acts of non-Western cultures. Children unnecessarily die and animals are abused in American (I’m using my own culture as reference) culture as well. Animal food processors who provide for places like McDonalds will not allow media reporting of their chickens, for example, because they are so mutilated and live in such horrid conditions. The US is not known for affordable healthcare and people, including children, die because of this. I have been questioned while traveling abroad how these things can be allowed to happen in the “developed” world. I think it’s important to take an analytical eye to our own culture as well.

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!).

Aaron

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 am amazed that you all consider this ok

Again, a remarkably thoughtful article – one of the best I’ve read this year.

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.

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.