I’m cheating here, because this doesn’t really have anything to do with language (except insofar as it emphasizes that the word sexism still has a referent). But Jeanne has such a great post at Body and Soul that I can’t resist pointing to it and saying “Go, read, and think about this stuff.” The story she tells, and the stories it sparks off in her commenters, build up a picture of how families are affected by war, sexism, and other disasters, and the amazing resilience some women have shown. As Jeanne says:
Somewhere in those bits of stories, there’s evidence of deep-rooted sexism in this society, and a moral about what constricted opportunity does to women and, indirectly, to men. But it’s far from a simple morality play of bad men and suffering women—although I could easily shape it into that if I wanted to. (My mother’s friend wanted to, and did.) It isn’t a story about the powerful and the powerless. Looking back on those people’s lives, I can’t see anyone really having any power.
And that’s the way sexism works as often as not. Lots of hurt people, and no one to blame.
Furthermore, she has followed up with an equally wonderful post about Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, the subject of a lawsuit and (consequently) a great deal of press, the latter by and large positioning the story as one of an intrepid Western reporter versus a medieval, repressive Afghan man (one of the subjects of her book, and her host while she was there) trying to stifle her free expression. Jeanne has a very different, and more interesting, take on it.
Thanks for this great link. The stories Jeanne tells, and the way she tells them, are reminders of the complexity of the issue of sexism. As you so astutely commented on my blog before, the liberation that the feminists of a bygone era wanted to see included men, too.
I’m going to run over to Jeanne’s, but I’ll just say that Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small Things” also led to a lawsuit, and I’m not sure but that the plaintiff is her uncle. (The pickle man? Can’t remember any more.) An amazing novel.
I want to comment but Then I have to start with stories of the Bible and all the history books that have been written about the struggle and fairness, The chemical unbalance vs wisdom.
Napolean suppose to have said when ask why he let a general off from the guillotine. After sleeping with Generals wife “My lower head was stronger than my upper head” C’est la vie.
Trully a brilliant post, showing once again that Jeanne is queen of the blogsphere!
For people interested in the plight of Afghan Women, I highly reccomend this collection of essays..
I’m glad the Random Link feature took me here and gave me a chance to reread Jeanne’s post and the many thoughtful comments (Mark Liberman has a good one at November 19, 2003 04:12 AM); I agree with clio so vigorously I’ll post a bit of their November 17, 2003 08:52 PM comment here:
That was when this was just a Language Beanie. I don’t think I was reading here regularly yet. Anyway, what a brilliant writer! Is she still writing or blogging anywhere?
The question of how to separate universal values from culture-specific ones, and how soft the boundaries are, is always tough and never trivial. I’d like to think that these days some professionals (anthropologists? social workers?) get rigorous training in learning to tease the two apart.
Dan Everett, a very thoughtful guy, gives some examples of non-interference in his book on linguistic fieldwork. I am not quoting this passage because I find it disturbing.
Anyway, what a brilliant writer! Is she still writing or blogging anywhere?
I agree, and I wondered that myself.
I am not quoting this passage because I find it disturbing.
I can only see the introductory material at that link, not any of the examples of non-interference. Disturbing how?
Hm. It’s at page 60.
Ah. I see what you mean. Disturbing indeed.
Everett seems to feel himself bound by Starfleet’s Prime Directive. This is not a point of view that bears a moment’s scrutiny. It’s just moral dilettantism. To argue from the perfectly true fact that the issues are complex and our own judgments are often wrong (and in any case not privileged by the mere fact that they’re our judgments) to a doctrine that absolute non-interference is the One True Path is a simple abrogation of responsibility. “It’s all so hard … so I won’t bother to think about it.”
He’s an odd case himself, having apparently lost his Christian faith on account of his experience with the Pirahã. Radical reappraisal of his faith I can understand (would that this were more common!) But loss makes me wonder just what he was putting his faith in before. Perhaps that was his own logic for abandoning Christianity, come to that: the realisation that he’d never really believed in it at all. I can see that …
Case in point: female genital mutilation.
I am frequently made extremely uneasy by seeing this discussed in Western media, and indeed by Western legislators, as a straightforwardly criminal practice. Even to point out that it is in, in point of fact, a time-hallowed rite of passage in many societies, accepted, carried out and encouraged by people who are in no way criminals within their own societies, is potentially hazardous. The “criminal” narrative happily taps into the feeling latent in Western liberals and conservatives alike that those Others are essentially barbarians, and their opinions (when not quaintly folkloric) are essentially the product of cultural immaturity. The Others are graciously permitted their funny costumes, but woe betide them if they disagree with us over anything that really matters! (We get to decide what really matters …)
So far, so Everett …
On the other hand (and decisively) the most vigorous opponents of the practice come from within those very same societies. I remember in particular a wholly admirable Togolese lady I used to know who, when asked out of the blue what she most wanted to achieve in her own society, immediately said that she wanted to see an end to FGM. She was in no way deracinated from her own culture or ashamed of it. She just saw how it could be improved. The idea that we outsiders have no role in supporting or helping people like her is (a) moral cowardice (b) Noble Savagism at its contemptible worst. What, you think local cultures are incapable of change? You think that it’s wrong if they look at some aspect of Western culture and say “Yes, that’s good: we should do that too”? Should they keep to their own lane as fascinating objects of ethnographic study, instead of being communities of thinking and feeling people trying to get it right?
Just because “dialogue” between our hegemonic culture and others has been so horrifically one-sided in the past, it doesn’t follow that dialogue is undesirable or unnecessary. Far from it. What’s needed is a rebalancing of power between the participants, not an end to communication.
But Everett did interfere in one case and his position is ambivalent, not categorical.
True; I was being unfair. He is raising questions rather than purporting to answer them. (Indeed, the logic of his doctrinaire anti-universalist intellectual position is probably that there are no answers; in one sense I agree with him.*)
But he does seem to imply that his interference was a failure to maintain proper standards.
* “No ideas but in things.”
David, I think about it this way: You do not rule Togo. If you look down upon someone, then being an arrogant moron is your problem. To an extent it is their problem as well: you are more technilogically advanced.
But still it is an issue of self-improvement first. And the most efficient way to do something about a mote in your brother’s (Western or Eastern) eye is to notice finally the log in yours.
—
On the other hand, when you are in Togo, I do not really udnerstand why you are a “Westerner”. Are not you are a human? Yes, if you intervene without loving and understanding what you intervene in, the results are going to be uncool.
In other words, I do laugh at Saudi Arabia (the actual country). But I assume that I live in a Saudi Arabia myself. If I do not understand that, I am a monkey.
Drasvi, i have no idea what point you’re trying to make in the last 2 posts. Do you live in Saudi Arabia or not?
But PETA has come out against specieism inherent in your statement about monkeys.
:p
Drasvi’s point is that we all live in Saudi Arabia, but we can’t see it because of the beam in our eye.
Edit: the beam in our eye is a distributive singular. I never learn when that works in English.
I think drasvi was agreeing with me …
It’s quite true that legitimacy for cultural change has to arise from within the culture itself; however, minority cultures are not static fossils (or else they die), and the exploitation and deliberate cultural destruction of colonial times does not mean that people from such cultures are precluded from learning from our culture’s positive aspects (of which there are many) if they choose to. The counter-argument, that they are not really “choosing”, but have been brainwashed into our own mindset, denies agency to such people and would be rightly taken as patronising. I myself think that Africans (for example) often could do with decolonising their minds, but what that means in practice is for them to say, not me. It certainly doesn’t entail fantasising about an imaginary perfect African past prior to the European invasions: that should be left to Americans looking for their “roots.”
It would be nice if the power dynamic had swung far enough for us to learn from smaller cultures. Really learn, I mean: not the sort of play-acting that mimics a few outward forms.
I think that at least one can learn perspective. I don’t believe in the Kusaasi concepts of how human bodies, minds and spiritual aspects relate to one another, but I don’t think that they are foolish or illogical: the fact that they differ so profoundly from Western notions can at least show that those Western concepts are themselves not “givens” or natural but deeply culture-bound. That’s worth learning.
Thanks David E for clarifying.
Trond E, is this what you’re referring to:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_and_the_Beam
One thing i want to add to this supposed hegemonistic culture. I come from Croatia. Croatia (and a lot of other European nations) didn’t go out and conquer land in Africa, Asia etc. In fact we suffered from Germanic/Hungarian/Turkish supremacist policies for much of our history pre ww1, just like some Africans and Asians did in the same period.
However i consider that Croatia is a part of Western cultural tradition.
I just don’t identify with the narrative that because i’m European i should have some sort of baggage visavis Africa & Asia. I find it curious that all Europeans can be tarred with the same brush as the colonial powers.
Tito even got the nonaligned thing going.
I think that at least one can learn perspective. I don’t believe in the Kusaasi concepts of how human bodies, minds and spiritual aspects relate to one another, but I don’t think that they are foolish or illogical: the fact that they differ so profoundly from Western notions can at least show that those Western concepts are themselves not “givens” or natural but deeply culture-bound. That’s worth learning.
Yes, that’s one of the great benefits of immersion in a foreign culture, and I got it for free by being born in postwar Japan and then growing up in various countries alien in various ways to Standard American Everything. I like hamburgers and baseball, but I don’t consider them God-given ideals, just random stuff Americans happen to like. And I don’t necessarily believe that what I believe is true; it’s just what I happen to think. Keeps me from frothing at the mouth.
I find it curious that all Europeans can be tarred with the same brush as the colonial powers.
Fair point.
However, as far as the Kusaasi are concerned, not only do we all look the same, but we all speak the same language (Nasaal.)
They have a point: European cultural diversity is pretty minor compared with even a single country like Ghana, let alone Nigeria. (They also tend to encounter a pretty unrepresentative self-selected sample of Europeans, who in some ways resemble each other more than they do fellow-countrymen back home.)
@David E
🙂 All those Europeans look the same eh?
Anyway, during the days of Tito, Yugoslavs were pretty engaged in the Non-Aligned world. It probably wasn’t as major as the propaganda back home would have it, but I’m curious. Have you come across any of that legacy in your travels?
Everett seems to have been taught the depressingly common notion that everybody who’s never heard of Jesus is therefore miserable, and all he had to do was show up and tell them the Good News and he’d make them all happy. At least he didn’t get killed like that fellow on Sentinel Island a while back. As for losing his faith as a result, there are “Evangelicals” whose whole faith really does seem to consist of that assumption.
Have you come across any of that legacy in your travels?
Not really, though in African political terms, Tito’s era is perhaps effectively even farther away than in European terms.
In Ghana, the still-extant relics of the old geopolitical order are not so much non-aligned as Russia-aligned, dating from the Nkrumah era. I had a Ghanaian medical colleague who, like not a few Ghanaian doctors, had done his medical degrees in Moscow; he brought his Russian doctor wife with him (she was looking for a better life abroad …)
Thinking about it a bit more, there is (or was, in the 1990’s) a huge contingent of Cuban doctors sent to Ghana by their government (I used sometimes to wonder just who they had got on the wrong side of back in Cuba.) I was mentally thinking of that as Moscow-bloc stuff, but on reflection Cuba was much into the Non-Aligned thing, at least sometimes.
A surprising (to me, at any rate) number of Ghanaians have studied in Germany, too. And America, of course, people have heard of a bit.
China, too, in more recent times, especially because of Chinese financing of infrastructure development. (Which reminds me of a Chinese restaurant I used to visit in Tamale, whose proprietor was married to a Chinese woman and whose suitably exotic-looking Chinese-Ghanaian daughters worked there as waitresses,)
On the other hand, I don’t think I ever met a Ghanaian who could speak French (though there must be plenty); of course once you cross the border into any of the neighbouring countries you are back in the land of Paris-is-the-centre-of-world-civilisation.
Things may very well be different in parts of Africa that I don’t know (i.e., almost all of it.)
@zyxt: I was refering to the parable as it was used by drasvi, but yes.
the depressingly common notion that everybody who’s never heard of Jesus is therefore miserable, and all he had to do was show up and tell them the Good News and he’d make them all happy
More specifically, there is a definite notion put about (largely, I think, by people who’ve never actually met an animist) that animists all live in a world where they are terrified of malevolent spiritual essences all around them and desperate for some kind soul to show up and introduce them to Christianity (or, of course, Islam, if we don’t all do our duty and get there first.)
I think there may actually be animisms where that is not such a caricature (some traditional Inuit societes sound a bit like that) but it certainly is a caricature of Kusaasi culture. Most Kusaasi (at least when I lived there) were perfectly happy as they were, and saw no reason at all to become Muslims or Christians. I’m sure it’s significant that by far the greatest numbers of the relatively small number of Kusaasi Christians are either Roman Catholic or Assemblies of God; in both cases the relevant missions were largely the work of single astonishingly dedicated missionaries. The Catholic Father, who was Dutch, had spent so long in Ghana that he could no longer speak Dutch; the Assemblies of God man had lived among the Kusaasi from the start, and he and his wife persevered despite the early deaths, in Ghana, of several of their children. Both men rightly commanded considerable personal respect and affection. I’ve no doubt this accounted for much more of their (relative) success than skill in “evangelism.”
Here Saudi Arabia is a popular example of a country that did not let women drive cars.
The idea is that there are many practices in other places and times that appear unquestionably idiotic or are simply bad. You can laugh at them. You can discuss them seriously. Or you can use them as a reminder that you too practice somethign idiotic or simply bad without noticing it (because it is “normal” in your society).
I think the third approach is more productive.
—
@Trond, I meant that we can not see the beam. I do not know what prevents us from seeing beams in our eyes:)
If you can see the beam, it’s too late. (As we say in the ophthalmic laser business.)
DE: If you have any hilarious retinal surgery blooper videos, please attach an appropriate soundtrack to them and post where such things are posted (next to embarrassing cat moments). Everyone needs some laffs now and then.
I’m not sure how relevant this is, but your example of the Togolese lady reminds me that even with cultures that seem on the face of it to be similar to one’s own there can be difficulties for understanding the points of view of people with different basic assumptions. The first time I went to Chile was in 1978. I had some misgivings about going then, as I thought it could be interpreted as support for Pinochet’s dictatorship. I mentioned this to someone who had told me within 30 minutes of meeting me that she had voted for Salvador Allende. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would think that: Chilean scientists were so isolated in the world, with no government support or appreciation, that for foreign scientists to come to Chile was the best thing they could do to support them.
@David Eddyshaw: Nkrumah was actually a major figure (along with Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and a few others) in the foundation on the official Non-Aligned Movement. A lot of nominally non-aligned states, especially the smaller ones, were really in the Soviet (or sometimes later Chinese) orbit; Cuba and Syria are glaring examples of Soviet client states that claimed non-aligned status. More powerful non-aligned states like Egypt and India were able to exploit their strategic values, inducing both the Americans and the Soviets to try to curry favor through economic assistance.
Cuba and Syria are glaring examples of Soviet client states that claimed non-aligned status. More powerful non-aligned states like Egypt and India were able to exploit their strategic values, inducing both the Americans and the Soviets to try to curry favor through economic assistance.
It is not that Cuba was given a choice.
From what I’ve read and watched (on YouTube) about Everett’s deconversion, I don’t know what exactly he believed, but his Pirahã-specific experiences must have played a role. One may be their disinterest in the distant past: if he hadn’t personally met Jesus and his father hadn’t either, they figured he couldn’t really know anything about Jesus, so they saw no point in talking about him. Maybe that got Everett thinking about epistemology. Even more striking is what happened when he wanted to know their creation myth so he could compare it to the Bible. He asked who made the river, the forest, whatever. They looked at him and said “these things were not made”, disproving the widespread idea that only Western philosophers (armchair or otherwise) grappling with theodicy or something like that can be atheists. On top of all that, they’re not even animists. They believe in ghosts, but only when everyone can see them – more like cryptozoology, from what little I’ve read, than like religion.
Here Bitchurin deconversed in China 200 years ago (and was then preaching Chinese ways here much like Everett). But it is slightly different situation: clergy was a hereditary caste here. Even when it was not (as in the case of my great-grandfather, also prepared to work in China, but sent to Tehran) it was still a way to get education and a career.
No reason to think that he was religious:)
About female circumsision: without other countries that believe that it is bad local people would be less likely to think that it is bad.
P.S. I do not meant that anything of what DE said about the Togolese lady is inaccurate:
But if there was not “International Day of Zero-Tolerance for FGM” by UN, etc. etc., her answer could be different. She would have mixed at least and possibly strongly negative feelings about it. But would she have the courage to decide for herself that she is “against” it if she’s alone in this?
In 2003 most of us who didn’t live in the USA had never heard of Donald J. Trump, and thought that George W. Bush had hit bottom in the search for the worst possible President that could be elected. Now we know better, and know that the former guy twice traded in his wife for a younger one.
Are Sakel and Everett kidding!?
Killing a child or causing some offence among some in some community? A dilemma?
I write “some” community, because I am not sure what community they mean: this one, or “civilized” Brazil.
A pro-baby version of the story. (I do not think it or any version is accurate).
I do not think it or any version is accurate
Good find. It seems admirably balanced to me, to the extent that it explains the circumstances (by no means as straightforward as Everett’s brief mention might lead one to think) and attempts to deal fairly with the arguments against banning indigenous groups from practicing infanticide.
The thing that occurs to me about this is that the practice is, as the article says, part of tribal survival in an extremely unforgiving environment. Merely banning it does not provide the resources to those groups to support severely handicapped children, and banning it without providing such resources is just a measure to make us feel good about ourselves and superior to the barbarians who do such things (like our own ancestors); superior to the extent that we can feel smugly justified in continuing to expropriate and exterminate them.
A further unfortunate complication is that improving the material circumstances of these peoples to the point where infanticide is clearly unnecessary as a survival strategy might actually not be possible without destroying their culture as a side-effect. But the people themselves might well consider that a deal worth making …
I suspect that the waters have been much muddied also by the well-documented hostility of FUNAI and Brazilian academia to all missionary activity in Amazonia (which has indeed involved crass cultural imperialism and insensitivity, but by no means necessarily does so, especially nowadays.) Everett’s throwaway characterisation of the couple in question as a “missionary” couple, though accurate enough, is probably a sign of his own pretty evident partisanship in this issue.
@David, yes, I disagree with the idea of a law against infanticide. If you want to improve their conditions (“their” includes babies), improve thier conditions.
I am angry specifically for these reasons:
1. if you are a professional (linguist) it does not give you an excuse to stop being a human. If you are white (not Suzuki), it does not mean you can afford not valuing Indian human life. Stuff your white linguist burden up your ass.
2. there is any number of situations when saving someone’s life can lead to a conflict. But not when a family asks you to take care about a baby.
3. there is also any number of cultures ruined by openly predatory activity of “more civilized’ people.
But societies ruined because a baby was saved? WTF?
4. I do not know why they always tear each other’s throats in Brazil when they discuss such things. Ignore problems that concern the enemy and accuse each other in weird things instead of working together. It is like war-time propaganda: either 2 – 2 = 0 (we) or 5 – 5 = 0 (them).
As I said, I disagree with the idea of a law against infanticide. But it has nothign to do with what Sakel and Everett spoke about.
I do not mean, of course, that the anthropologist who said that informing natives that lives can be saved is bad, because this way they may learn that lives can be saved (if he indeed said somethign to that effect) is not a human. He is. Why not listen to him. But if as a human you do value human life it is your duty to save it. You have no right to “oh, it is Anthropology, it is Science” or treat natievs as lab rats. And if you are writing a book, well, you can analyze that anthropologist arguments and cite them. But you should not write a short paragraph that tells that Indian lives don’t matter.
I am not angry at the authors – I understand that they did not want to write about this. As result they wrote a poor paragraph, as it happens when you write about something you do not want to write about.
But discussing with serious faces whether you should save a baby or not, as a “dilemma”?
P.S. no, no one was “discussing it with seirous faces” here.
I suppose this is muddying the waters,
but one reason infanticide in this society seems so horrible is that it’s up close and in person within a tiny face to face culture. Our society is infinitely more complex, and the babies we kill are killed far away and from a distance, and most of us have no awareness that it’s even happening. And there can be a problem when our society, which is also more powerful and highly aggressive, points the finger at some weak vulnerable society.
There are missionaries and missionaries. Some are humane and bring medicine and literacy to endangered peoples, and some may also bring those things but are representative of the worst strains of America, and end up encouraging massacre and witch burning. In Central America the evangelicals massacred the Catholics.8
I’m not sure what your point is. You’re surely not resurrecting the old “primitive cultures don’t value children’s lives the way we civilized folks do,” but what is it you’re trying to say?
And your point about missionaries hardly needs making; nobody is saying they’re uniformly wonderful people.
Powerful murderous peoples should probably look at themselves before prosecuting weak peoples for murder. American infanticide is mediated and indirect, so we can all claim plausible deniability. I suppose. Every once on awhile someone calculates the deaths, including infant deaths, from our bombings and embargo’s. But these are impersonal and distant, and it’s boring news.
As far as the Amazonian peoples generally, the way things are going (habitat destruction plus murder) I doubt that they’ll exist a century from now, so their infanticide is far back on my queue of things to fret about.
It is so easy to say what is wrong with other cultures (like Brazil or anthropology or Amazonians or US). I wish there was a discipline that cautions outsiders to be quick to judge in this situations.
It’s also easy to say “Whatever, man, just do your own thing.” The difficulty is avoiding simple-minded easy ways out of a necessary dilemma.
I wish there was a discipline that cautions outsiders [not] to be quick to judge in these situations.
In principle, that is at the core of the discipline of social anthropology. Just like linguists are trained to describe ways of speaking, not judge them.
“Whatever, man, just do your own thing.” is a perfectly good position. I do not presume to tell filmmakers how to make movies even when I don’t like the product. But if someone wants to opine on other cultures, it is reasonable to expect them to study the subject thoroughly with awareness that they own biases will take a long and hard work to overcome. OTOH, who am I to tell. In my own culture, people think of themselves as entitled to make judgement on any random topic that comes across their horizon. Some even insist that it is their inalienable right and civic virtue. I shrug my shoulders and say “whatever”.
So you think killing or mutilating children is at the same level of moral importance as movie-making? Whatever, dude.
In discussions like this I always agree and disagree with all views.
But one point: We shouldn’t assume that small and closed native communities are unable to change. They are often quite versatile, both culturally and economically. That is both their strength and their weakness. It’s why they have survived for so long, but it’s also why they can throw it all away on short notice and move to the mission. We should also not imagine that life and death decisions are easy or cherished just because they are deep-rooted in the culture as a fundamental part of life.
So I want the discussion to be about how modern life-saving or life-improving medicine might be made available non-intrusively, giving a community the time to work it into their world-view in a way that’s empowering and which allows people to take advantage of the new without giving up the old. And then I realize how naive that is and just shut up. But I guess the main point is that there are some big and a lot of smaller goods and evils, and they are intertwined in complex ways, and what is right at one time and place may not be at another, so the debate should be held in a sober tone and with deep respect for differing views. And then I realize how naive that is…
Sometimes Margaret Atwood missed the mark in her parodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, but not in this bit from the much later academic conference described in the appendix:
Another classic fictional treatment: Hard to Be a God (Трудно быть богом).
So you think killing or mutilating children is at the same level of moral importance as movie-making?
No, but I think my ability to figure out the appropriate response is comparable. And I am also OK with delegating. If nobody tried their best to resolve it, it would be more worrying, but as it is there are enough cooks working on the broth already. This is not to say that following the discussion is not fascinating and instructive, I just try not to take sides prematurely.
I hate to introduce a highly contentious topic here, but no one has yet mentioned the abortion of unborn embryos in our civilised society. Is this not akin to infanticide? And yet, in Western societies, giving women the right to control their own bodies by terminating unwanted pregnancies has become the “progressive” attitude.
To add a bit of cultural nuance to this, my understanding (which I can’t back up and could be wrong) is that in Aboriginal Australia a baby was not regarded as a human being until it was given a name. Until then, it was acceptable to get rid of it.
Yeah, that may be a little too contentious even for this civilized venue.
but no one has yet mentioned the abortion of unborn embryos in our civilised society
…except Everett, apparently.
I wonder how many of the women who aborted their pregnancies (for non-medical reasons) would have killed their babies instead if that was an allowed legal option and abortion wasn’t.
Very few. You might want to talk to some women who have had abortions.
But is anyone criticizing the people in question?
Everyone here is defending them, but is anyone at least tempted to attack them?
As I said, it’s a highly contentious issue and I’m not taking sides. My point was that criticising infanticide in another culture while condoning abortion in your own sounds rather culture-centric. Whatever line you draw is going to be arbitrary to some extent (which is why I cited the Aboriginal example).
Suzuki were not a part of the girl’s story until her brother brought her to them. But they say, the girl’s parents committed a suicide because others wanted them to kill the girl, then her brother buried her in the forest, than her grandfather saved her and then he tried to kill her (with an arrow), injuried and tried to commit a suicide too because he regretted that.
Then her brother (another?) cared about her for a few years and then he brought her to Suzuki. They realized that she is ill. They tried to obtain a permission to take her to the hospital, possibly failed, and took her to the hospital. She received treatment and since then was able to walk and talk (this was the reason why people wanted to kill her). They tried to return her to the tribe, but no one wanted her, so they adopted her.
Then:
The distance between “let us kill girls” and “let us introduce a law against infanticide” is astronomical.
Why naïve?
Abortion is something you deal with very personally. Irrespectively of who you are there are situations when you need to decide for yourself what to feel about this option.
When you see infanticide among some Amazonian tribe compared to it, do not you look from the personal perspective first? The important thing (for me) is how to make sense of abortion itself, not “laws”.
Also it is the only perspective that I ever heard it discussed in my presence and it leaves not place for conflicts:/
What comes next is common attitude to it in you culture. What others say about this?
And only then comes “should we introduce a law against it?” Here you have conflicts because it is violence. Not the sort of violence that you normally see when you do not let someone to kill someone. It is specifically forcing a woman who does not want to be pregnant to be so. Many of my freinds believe that an abortion is a very bad idea, but I do not think anyone would support a law against it. I am well aware that there are people who would support such a law though, just not my freinds in Russia (or other countries)
But what it has to do with people in the jungle?
And what does “criticism” mean?
“I think this element of Russian culture is not very good, it is a good idea to change it” is not a “criticism”:-/
I’m also thinking about abortion, and how laws and attituted towards it is changing constantly in Western cultures, and yet few people take it as a sign that the Western cultures are destroyed. In the past, Swedish abortion laws have become more allowing, while Polish abortion laws has become more strict. Does that mean that Swedish and Polish culture is disappearing? Often we hear about anthropologial descriptions of “exotic” cultures, where the unfamiliar jargon adds to the exotism. I guess our feelings would change if it were our own cultures (whatever those are) being described.
And yet, there is something familiar in those stories about despairing parents and poor children. There are such things happening in my country too, if you read the news.
I don’t think anybody will argue that the changes in Swedish attitudes to abortion were caused by an external agent supplying information they didn’t have themselves — you might be able to pay for inserts in the major papers or something, but the community as such has so many links to other countries that it will only change the timing by months at most. Whether the man on the Warsaw omnibus chooses to inform himself or just listens to agitators is another question.
Apart from that, I think that all human beings have the right to be informed of the possibilities they have for achieving happiness, and that has to be weighted higher than preservation of their culture. Of course they might decide they are better off as they are, but that does not give parents the right to keep their children out of school to keep them from being qualified for non-traditional jobs.
The tragedy is if misinformation causes abandonment of traditional knowledge, for instance because “it’s better if we only speak English to the kids” — when we know that the kids will learn English just fine no matter what they speak at home. (Or whatever the language of the local dominant culture is).
“Back at the beginning of the organization, in April 2007, on Indian Day, the Muwaji Law Project was proposed through the federal deputy Henrique Afonso, at that time part of the PT-AC (Brazilian labor party). According to the lawyer Maíra, the intention of the group was to start a discussion on the subject. “We wanted to make noise, because from the beginning the name “ATINI” meant voice. The subject was always silenced and it needed to be debated. Everyone denied that there was infanticide, even the government,” she said.”
This is what I thought. In 90s Suzuki lived with the Indians and published some papers on phonology. That after 2000 they suddently became activists is understandable. Their behave like people with a very personal motivation, not missionaries determined to make everyone wear pants.
What I could not understand is why the law: it is hardly the first idea of a missionary or linguist who spent most of the time in the field. Also a law can not be productive here:/
So I thought (especially given that the law project was followed by a film that caused a scandal too) they wanted to make noice and provoke a discussion and a law was the only way to achieve this.
Two other factors are
– if they tried to do anything on their own (rather than to oblige the state to intervene) FUNAI would have stopped them, and… this is what actually happened. FUNAI are their enemies and see them as enemies. In a country where no one gives a shit about a native tribe, they would be free to do whatever they want, constructive or destructive or some combination, their enemies would be poverty and corporations.
In Brazil they can do strictly nothing, so the law is the only possible way.
– another possible factor is institutialization. They founded ATINI, lawyers joined them.
Most abortions are irrelevant to the argument, I think, since they are performed at a very early stage of development while inside the mother’s body and non-viable outside it.
Late stage abortions are performed almost entirely to save the life of the mother. My MD dad, mostly anti abortion, worked in a Catholic hospital in the 1950s and said that their practice in such cases was to assume that the baby was already dead.
I have hereditary blood guilt on this question. I am descended from a man of the first American born Emersons whose sister Elizabeth was hanged by the neck until dead, after considerable counseling by Cotton Mather (who found her recalcitrant) for killing two newborns. The Emerson Scarlet Letter.
Most abortions are irrelevant to the argument, I think
I think they are highly relevant. Your view is culturally (not scientifically) based.
An embryo and a child are both human lives. Your criterion is that abortion doesn’t count because the embryo “can’t survive outside the mother’s body”.
A newborn child is also unable to survive without constant care from caregivers. You don’t need to kill it; just leave it in the forest where no one will find it. It will also quickly die. Does that make it ok?
You also failed to respond to the Aboriginal example, which is non-Western and pre-modern. But that is precisely the point. Not all cultures recognise your “scientific” criterion. In fact, even in modern societies a lot of people are opposed to the killing of unborn embryos on moral grounds.
As I said, I am not taking a side in this. But I do think that dismissing the parallel between abortion and infanticide on your stated grounds is pseudo-scientific and represents the imposition of modern Western thought.
Would it have been ok if (hypothetically speaking) missionaries went into these cultures and said “No, you can’t kill newborns! But it’s ok, we’ve got a way of getting rid of the child before it’s ever born! Problem solved”?
Sorry if I sounded confrontational. My question was, “Where do you draw the line?”
In your comment you basically said “The line is drawn HERE”. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.
Reading the (imperfect, natch) Wikipedia article on infanticide, it’s remarkable how commonplace it was until recently. The long history of legal sanctions against it shows that it was familiar but not acceptable. Of course the people who practiced it and the people who made the laws may have been looking at it from different perspectives.
I speculate (and no doubt this has been studied for real by someone somewhere) that where death by natural causes is frequent, killing (for example as infanticide or for punishment) does not appear as extreme as it does to us from our benign and enlightened perch, and so tends to be commoner.
Likewise, infanticide surely was commoner when no options were had for the poor, and when the alternative to it may have been starvation.
Bathrobe, but when someone is killing a child, I try to save the child because (1) I value her life (2) the child values her life.
If this all is because I am a Northerner, then let it be so. What I do not care the least at the moment is your culture, my culture and the childs culture. And the child at the moment does not give a shit about any of those either (seriously).
As for abortions: no one among people I know thinks that abortions is a good thing. The range is “the question of child’s life is confusing, but it is certainly not good for me” to “a pill taken next mornign is already a murder”. Now, not one among my friends – and especially the girl who said about the pill (in the context of herself) – would ever think about blaming the mother. It is just a mad idea. No one here is the God. We are just doing our best. Why blame?
It is seen as a rather sad event for everyone involved – and this way the sub-culture is anti-abortion compared to some other possible culture where abortions are encouraged or a pressure exists.
Like in the culture in question where, according to Suzuki, there is a pressure from others.
Northerner
Of course any of my decisions are affected by my background. If I have some moral and feelings, they are affected. No moral – nothign to discuss. Destroy cultures.
Y, this culture is a singularity.
(from the link above). You* can’t even claim that they don’t value human life when they do that.
—
* “one”
The Romans had an affecting custom whereby a newborn baby was left in the hearth for the father to pick up for the first time. The custom becomes less heartwarming when you find out that the origin of this custom was formal acknowledgement of paternity: and originally, if the father didn’t pick up the child … one less child.
In Ghana, I was once informed in all seriousness by a Swiss gynaecologist that the local people didn’t love their children (his “evidence” being that mothers didn’t burst into tears in front of him when a newborn died; he contrasted this with the typical distraught response of a woman on being informed that she was infertile.)
I was a guest in his house at the time, and in retrospect did not express myself as forcibly on the insensitive bastard’s views as I should have done. I often wondered why people like him were aid workers at all when they despised the people they were supposed to be helping and had zero interest in their culture.
I suspect that the taboo on early stage abortion was a recent development in the Western Christian world based on new, more detailed scientific information on the stages of pregnancy, and thus irrelevant to the argument on primitive (quote-unquote) infanticide. Are the instances of people’s who forbid third or fifth month abortion, or knew about it at all?
When infant and child mortality was already very high (often 50%), infanticide was a less dramatic event than here and now. Particularly in families near subsistence where the parents fear that they will be unable to support even their earlier-born children.
I just sort of repeated what Y said above, I now see.
r/K selection theory
I once read a quite chilling account of a practice in the Terra del Fuego where if the provider of a family died, all the children who had not come of age would be buried alive because nobody could afford to foster them. I hope it was an invention by explorers or missionaries or somebody else with ulterior motives.
The Wikipedia article was an eye-opener. Our species…. (shakes head). But views and practices don’t just vary across cultures, they vary across time and are probably as much a response to living conditions as to morality (echoing John Emerson).
Concepts like “honour” and “face” show similar variation. In some cultures actions that bring deep shame on a person could lead to seppuku; in others they can lead to brazenness and ultimately the presidency….
From the WP article:
Strabo considered it a peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child must be reared
Those wacky foreigners!
I am still reading about Zuruahá (the group where that baby was born).
Poor Everett.
In one Wikipedia aricle (language) he is credited with making the first contact:
Zuruahá (also called Suruaha, Suruwaha, Zuruaha, Índios do Coxodoá [2]) is an Arawan language spoken in Brazil by about 130 people. Zuruahá is mentioned in Kaufman (1994) from personal communication from Dan Everett. He made first contact with the community (a 3-day hike from Dení territory in Amazonas state) in 1980.
In the other (Zuruahã):
Daniel Everett reports that after first contact with the outside world, many Zuruahá, including eight in a day, have begun to commit suicide by drinking curare.
The WP Zuruahã language article presumably just means that this was Everett’s first personal contact. Everett can scarcely have contacted them first of all, as they are refugees from previous contact with the Brancos (which would unfortunately shed a lot of light on their despair at being rediscovered.)
The Sentinelese may have the right idea … get the buggers first, before they have a chance to get you. But they have the advantages of island location and being under Indian control rather than Brazilian.
Or rather, not being under control. India claims the territory so that nobody else where, but Indian law is de jure inoperative there.
Yandex translator (Yandex is the Russian competitor of Google) added Elvish (Sindarin) to its corpus. I am looking forvard to seeing Elvish (Avarin).
I think it is mythology being born out of subconscious beliefs of editors and many random edits:) “White people are bad”, “Everett is
Chomskythe main expert”.“After the first contact they have began” – sounds as if the mere sight of white people was traumatic.
Everett did say something emotional about the despair but he is inaccurate. The other link in the article, this one is a text by João Dal Poz. He published a study of suicides among Zuruahã (in Portuguese) and based this (English) description on it. He avoided (carefully) the question of how and when the practice developed:-(
But: No levantamento genealógico que remontou cinco ou seis gerações passadas, foram reportados 122 casos (75 homens e 47 mulheres) anteriores a 1980..
(38 casos for the period 1980-1995). 122 is a lot.
– the population is 108 in 1980 and growing since then. It could be both larger or smaller 5 generations ago.
– you are expected to be a grandparent in your 30s, several generations is not too long a period in time – but it is obviously not a comprehensive list. It is suicides that people still remember about, 6 generations is likely just maximal distance. You can’t reasonably expect them (unless they are known to know such things) to know who of their grandather’s great-grandafather’s brothers died how – especially if this brother died childless. Or if a whole family did. So 122 is a fraction of total number and we do not know what fraction. They were interested in composition of those 122 remembered suicides. Still 122 is really a lot, and clearly the practice predates the second contact.
It seems admirably balanced to me,
It has just succefully resisted (passed) one fact-checking attempt. It is enough to deserve a chocolate medal:-/
Almeida (“Relatório acerca das observações desenvolvidas junto ao grupo de trabalho da FUNAI na terra indígena Suruahá e demais povos Arawa“):