re: #234 Sergey Romanov

Multiculturalism is fine as long as cultures are compatible. Multiculturalism should not tolerate oppression of women and other groups merely because some culture has such a tradition. Not all cultures are equal.

On a basic level I agree, but I’m to put on my anthropologist hat and quibble. My counter proposed statement would be:

“Not all activites justified by culture are equal, and some should be opposed regardless of multiculturalism or cultural relativism.”

The danger of the basic proposition “not all cultures are equal (because of immoral/inappropriate practices)” is that culture at the best of times is a spongey overarching construct that belies the variablity and plasticity on the ground. The tricky part is determining at what fractionation the culture-as-population has responsibility for the actions of individuals.

How many people in a cultural complex have to participate in an unacceptable practice before collective responsibility kicks in? What if an unnacceptable practice is something cited in written tradition like scripture, but isn’t actually practiced uniformly by the adherents of said scripture? What about encoded traditions that are subject to debated meaning—like, say, Halakah or Shariah, where there is a formal discussion of meaning, and thus of culture—and thus there exist multiple practices all viewed as customarily proper? More complexly, there’s the issue of differentiation of banality versus enshrinement: lots of ugly stuff goes on in the world that is emically unacceptable, but no-one stops it because they don’t feel responsible or don’t feel they have legitimate agency.

Trickiest of all is willful appropriation of traditional/cultural memes as camoflauge or post-justification for individual actions. Is a man beating his wife because of his understanding of Leviticus, or is that what he tells other to justify himself? Was that honor killings really a matter of honor, or botched domestic violence?

[NB: A real life thing I’m familiar with through my family in PK: the concept of “honor killing” is often used post-event to justify a rape concealed by a murder. More horrifyingly, it’s also is used as a threat to stop reporting of sexual abuse inside the extended family unit. Hence my ambivalance about the surface-deep analysis of the phenomenon in American sources: honor-killing is a repulsive cultural practice that needs to be resisted, but part of its repugnance stems from the shade it provides for individual crimes.]

And finally—and I emphatically don’t mean this as an ad hominem or a condemnation of anyone specific in this discussion—I’ve always found the “cultures are not equal proposition” tends to be projective and externalizing, but inequally applied in introspection. For example, in deailng with Americans I find they are often fast to lump all Muslims into a single cultural mass and extrapolate “Muslim behavior” from the as-written decrees of the Sunnah and Shariah (and generally they’re operating from a very limited sampling thereof). If one playful counters by trying to encapsulate all Christian behavior according to the Old and New Testaments, though, the same people will suddenly take issue with the agglomeration.