There’s a thin middle ground between imposing your values and meanings on another culture’s customs, and thinking a culture hold all the keys on interpreting their own customs (positively, of course). There is as much disregard for reality in both cases. For an obvious example of the latter in Semyonova’s report, the babies who were euthanised soon after birth failed to get any benefit from their culture. Where is their happiness?
I agree that we should start by acknoweledging the complexity of human cultures. But we shouldn’t stop there. We shouldn’t use “complexity” as a thought-terminating cliché. Not that I accuse you of doing so, but I wanted to make that point clear.
There’s a thin middle ground between imposing your values and meanings on another culture’s customs, and thinking a culture hold all the keys on interpreting their own customs (positively, of course). There is as much disregard for reality in both cases. For an obvious example of the latter in Semyonova’s report, the babies who were euthanised soon after birth failed to get any benefit from their culture. Where is their happiness?
I agree that we should start by acknoweledging the complexity of human cultures. But we shouldn’t stop there. We shouldn’t use “complexity” as a thought-terminating cliché. Not that I accuse you of doing so, but I wanted to make that point clear.