I remember talking with Miguel de La Cuadra and other explorers about things like that. You know there were people that killed each other in Africa, and that was ok, because it was your enemy.

It was ok to fuck with whatever woman you wanted when you went back from hunting(you could fuck 16,17 years old girls before they marry and got “women”, if you fuck a not yours “women” you got killed or pay) Now the christian culture tells us that killing is bad, fucking is bad, and now they don’t kill. If you ask the elders(one on them had killed 45 men) those were the days.

Those days you could eat your enemies without other people telling you thats bad.Those days when shaman voice was heard, and feared, and not like today that he is only a tourist attraction.

In a lot places in Africa and America people were afraid(really really afraid) of devils, Voodoo an do, someone could kill you if for example urinated on a sacred tree or excavate a hole on sacred terrain without noticing(I know an european engineer that disappeared after doing that).

In America there was a time you could take your enemies-prisoners heart out of their chest in live. It must be an interesting spectacle. You could rape your enemies wifes(and men, it was high status to rape men, low to be raped) as well once you slaved them.

That someone decides that for example removing your clitoris or the tip of the pennis(there are cultures that remove the sensible tip, not just the foreskin) is stupid and cultural imperialism.

We should preserve cultures, we should not tell anybody that options exist. We are richer when people ignore those options and not change.

A pity the world is unifying. We should make walls and forbid communication between them.

I love that. All culture belongs to all people.

I agree that assimilation is inevitable. Homogenization, even, to a certain extent. Even movements to preserve cultural artifacts end up turning them into fetish versions, not the “real thing.” But that has to be okay, cause it’s not like we can stop it.

What I’m saying is that it’s a necessary fact of the way systems scale that details and nuance get lost. It’s abstraction.

In large part, I agree with you. As I said above, that paragraph on OLPC was hastily worded and overblown. What I can really say is that I am more interested in engaging with development or activism efforts that are initiated and driven by marginalized people themselves (and make no mistake, such efforts exist all around the globe, they just have a much harder time getting attention than something like OLPC). I am wary of a project like OLPC when I see so many American/British names on the lists even of local OLPC coordinators in various parts of the globe.

I’m reminded of the words of Australian Aboriginal leader Lilla Watson: “If you have come to help us, you are wasting your time. But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with our liberation, let us work together.”

> I think many critiques only advocate disengagement.

As far as I can see, this is only true if one postulates a single binary choice: “engagement” vs “disengagement”, rather than an array of possible modes of engagement, and then presumes that any critic of a particular mode of engagement must therefore be advocating disengagement if they don’t explicitly lay out an alternative. I haven’t seen anyone seriously advocate a Star Trek-like global “Prime Directive” of total disengagement with the rest of the world.

My point is that when you have the upper hand in a relationship in terms of resources available, your proposals carry undue weight. And if your interest is in developing a really mutual relationship, you will strive to develop awareness of that dynamic, and strive especially hard to listen carefully and extensively before proposing anything. The listening piece is of course complex because, as you point out, no group is monolithic, and the larger the scale you try to work on the more difficult it gets (which is why I tend to be more interested in the potential of small-scale grassroots efforts).

My initial criticism of OLPC was overblown. I really don’t know that much about OLPC. Specifically, I would want to know much more about how OLPC engages in specific countries and locations, and I’m sure that varies. All I can really say is that the language on the OLPC website is too missionary, and the model too one-size-fits-all, for me to have interest in contributing to the project. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if in some locations the XO laptop is welcome and needed.

The connection to culture here goes back to “modernist hubris” and the fact of thatched roofs vs your presumptions about them. Post-Enlightenment Western culture has a tendency to believe that there’s only one valid way to see the world, and essentially one valid set of values to apply to it; coincidentally, those happen to be our worldview and our values. We are very quick to presume, even when lacking evidence, that our way of life represents the pinnacle of human development thus far, and discard the notion (again, without evidence) that we may have lost some valuable, specific areas of knowledge relevant to long-term sustainable life on earth. I don’t advocate some romantic (and equally dehumanizing) idea of the “purity” of “unchanged” cultures; simply the idea that we could benefit from a large dose of humility and openness to learning in our interactions with other cultures.

In a side note:

> Because this isn’t a “North American” effort anyway, it’s far larger than that — the components that go into a computer, materials, manufacturing, software, content, are international.

That seems like an odd (and not very useful) criterion. By the same logic my locally-owned computer store is also an “international effort” because the computers it sells are assembled from internationally-manufactured parts. I’d consider it more revealing to evaluate whether something is (primarily) a “North American effort” based on where the majority of the funding support comes from, and where most of the leadership are located. In other words, what cultural worldview is essentially driving the project?

> Nice, right. I always wondered though, what is it about these people that makes us believe that they don’t want to have clean drinking water, air conditioning, and Harvard?

I’m not familiar with the Rainforest Foundation or their work, but nothing you describe here implies that the Rainforest Foundation does anything to prevent them from choosing those things.

What is it about you that makes you assume they would naturally prefer those things to living in the rainforest? (Which may have advantages you are unable to evaluate, having never experienced them.)

About the same proportion, along with a similar proportion of everyone else. The “other tribes” now tend to live further away and we now murder them in much more massive numbers. Cultural improvement at work?

> I think, under sufficient examination and with a couple exceptions, cultural norms tend to be horrifying to a degree roughly proportional to their age.

Horrifying to a degree roughly proportional to how different they are from your cultural norms.

> My working definition is roughly the set of social norms not directly decided by necessity.

Of course, since what is “necessary” is at least in part culturally determined, that’s a nonsensical definition. One unambiguous necessity for human survival is for humans to be able to coexist with some modicum of harmony. Culture is how we agree to do that.

Recently I tried to understand (by joining forums and talking to nationalists) why is so many people paranoid with the Nation and “Our culture” concepts, whatever those mean. I was talking about the pros/cons of nations, what does it really mean with the communications and transports keeping us tied anywhere in the world, to be Danish or American or Portuguese. The same way we don’t want to be judged by our fathers crimes, our culture should just be what we make of it and not “tagged”. In a question, What is so wrong with the “Citizen of the World” thing? I got a lot of “noise”, flaming and some few interesting points on the problems of the Globalization. Culture “destruction”, the way you talk about it, was one of them.

My conclusion is that there is no such thing as “our culture” independent from the time. Our cultures evolve, receives and shares influence with other cultures and tends to mix what people find good in one another. In the past, that process was slow. Today, with comms and transps. its fast. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to compare one century of history 1000 years ago side by side with present century.

Letting this process go in the wild is a good idea? probably not, but can we fully control it? Definitely not, there will be wars, we are very likely to die soon in a WW3,… so why do something about it if we know that it will bring problems? Because, that’s our nature. In the past we wrote it for the first time. Now with some knowledge we can predict but still we can’t fully control it.

Pretending that we can’t ear someone shouting into our ears will never make us ignore it and we will always be influenced by each other. It’s not an artificial concept like “country border” that can stop that, just delay it as much… History doesn’t repeat itself… It makes us think yes but every time we see something we think we have seen in the past there is always something a little different. For the good and for the bad, that’s called Evolution.

But the (wildly uncompetitive) US sugar growers captured the regulators in DC, and imposed tariffs, quotas, and price floors to protect their business from Caribbean competition. Once cane sugar was made about twice as expensive as it otherwise would be, substitutes arose: beet sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.

(For all the damage it’s done to American palates, the biggest harm is to Caribbean sugar producers; Haiti would be much better off if they could sell us their sugar.)

Most of what you put in your mouth in America is a product of distinctly non-free markets.

Another good example is hydrogenated fats, which tend to contain lots of trans fats: the companies that produce them leaned on the Federal government in the fifties and sixties to push them as a replacement for unhealthy saturated (cis) fats, while simultaneously convincing the government not to actually test the health effects of trans fats. Decades later, it turns out that, oops, trans fats are much worse for you than even saturated fats.

I know this is tangential to your main points, but it’s useful to get even tangential facts right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_position

A common myth states that the term “missionary position” arose in response to Christian missionaries, who taught that the position was the only proper way to engage in sexual intercourse. This explanation probably originated from Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male through a confluence of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of historical documents.

Though, come to think about it, none of this thread has anything to do with culture…