A couple posts have got me thinking about cultural imperialism lately: a post by Guido van Rossum about "missionaries" and OLPC not about OLPC at all, a post by Chris Hardie and a speech by Wade Davis.
Some of the questions raised: are we destroying cultures? If so, what can we do about it? Must we be hands off? I will add these questions: is it patronizing to make these choices for other people, no matter how enlightened we try to be? How much change is inevitable? Can we help make the change positive instead of resisting change?
More specifically: what is the effect of OLPC on cultures where it is introduced? Especially small cultures, cultures that have been relatively isolated, cultures that are vulnerable. The internet Quechua community is pretty slim, for example. Introducing the internet into a community will lead the children to favor Spanish more strongly, and identify with that more dominant culture over their family and community culture.
Criticisms like Guido’s are common:
I’m not surprised that the pope is pleased by the OLPC program. The mentality from which it springs is the same mentality which in past centuries created the missionary programs. The idea is that we, the west, know what’s good for the rest of the world, and that we therefore must push our ideas onto the "third world" by means of the most advanced technology available. In past centuries, that was arguably the printing press, so we sent missionaries armed with stacks of bibles. These days, we have computers, so we send modern missionaries (of our western lifestyle, including consumerism, global warming, and credit default swaps) armed with computers.
This kind of criticism is easy, because it doesn’t have any counterproposal. It’s not saying much more than "you all suck" to the people involved.
Cultural imperialism is a genuine phenomena. In an attempt to subjugate or assimilate, the dominant culture may explicitly and cynically enforce its cultural norms, through its religion, requiring all schools to operate in the dominant language, even going as far as suggesting how we arrange ourselves during sex.
But it’s not clear to me that what’s happening now is cultural imperialism. It’s more market-oriented homogenization. Food manufacturers don’t use high-fructose corn syrup because they want to make us fat — they just give us what we want, and they are enabling our latent tendency to become obese. Similarly I think the way culture is spread currently encourages homogeneity, without explicit attempting to destroy culture.
This is where I think a protectionist stance — the idea we should just be hands-off — is patronizing. People aren’t abandoning their cultures because they are stupid and they are being manipulated. People make decisions, what they think is the best decision for themself and their families. These decisions lead them to leave rural areas, learn the dominant language, try to conform through education, and even just lead them to enjoy a dominant culture which is often far more entertaining than a smaller and more traditional culture.
The irony is that once they’ve done this they’ve traded their position for a place in the bottom rung of the dominant society. And it’s true that in many cases they’ve made these decisions because they’ve been forced out of their traditional life by political and legal systems they don’t understand. But to blame it all on oppression is to be blind to the many concrete benefits of our modern world. Corrugated metal roofs are simply superior to thatched roofs, and we can get all romantic about traditional building processes and material independence, but we do so from homes with roofs that don’t leak. Leaking roofs are just objectively unpleasant. And frankly people like TV, you don’t have to tell people to like TV, it just happens.
So I believe that assimilation pressure is natural and inevitable in our times.
What then of technology, of the internet and laptops?
I believe OLPC takes an important stance when it selects open source and open licensing for its content. It is valuing freedom, but more importantly encouraging self-determination, trying to build up a user base that can act as peers in this project, not as simply receivers of first-world largess. But it will be culturally disruptive. And I’m okay with that. In a patriarchal culture, giving girls access to this technology will be destructive to that power structure. Yay! I believe in the moral rightness of that one girl making her own choices, finding her own truths, more than I believe in the validity of the culture she was born into. If you believe people should be able to make their own choices (so long as they are aware of the real consequence of their choices), then you must allow for them to choose to abandon their own cultures for something they find more appealing. They might know better than you if that’s a good choice. I think we all hope that instead they transform their own cultures, but that’s not our choice to make.
What I find unpleasant is if they leave a true identity to find themselves in a place of cultural subservience. If they feel they can’t preserve the part of their culture they most value. Perhaps because of discrimination they feel they must hide their past, or they build up a sense of self-loathing. Perhaps they become isolated, unable to find peers that understand where they come from. And perhaps there is no higher culture at all that they can use to exalt their understanding of the world — do they have a literature? Do they have non-traditional music forms of their own? Do they have a forum where people who share their perspective can have serious discussions? Cultures aren’t destroyed so much as they are starved out of existence.
I think assimilation is inevitable, and can be positive. If we were all able to speak to each other, with some shared second or third language, I think the world would be a better place. I’m not a Christian, but I’m not afraid of anyone knowing The Bible. There’s no piece of culture that I would want to deny from anyone. Each new song, each new book, each new idea… I believe they will all make you a better person, if only in a small way.
And on the internet our culture is cumulative. There’s only so many hours of programming on TV or the radio, only so many pages in a newspaper. On the internet the presence of one kind of culture does not exclude any other. There’s room for a Quechua community as much of any other. But the online Quechua community won’t have exclusive rights to its members like a traditional culture claims — children will live between cultures.
Cumulative culture is not a promise that anyone will care. Languages can still die, cultures can still die, identities become forgotten. If these smaller cultures are going to be preserved, they must adapt to the partially-assimilated status of their members. There must be new art and new ideas and new identities. This is why I believe in the laptop project, because it can enable the creation and sharing of these new ideas. I think it will give smaller cultures a chance to survive — there’s no promises, literature doesn’t write itself, but maybe there is at least a chance.
This is also why I am more skeptical of mobile phones, audio devices, and any device that doesn’t actively enable content creation. Mobile phones are not how culture is made. It let’s people chat, consume information, communicate in a 12-key pidgin. But the mobile phone user is not a peer in a world wide web of information. The mobile phone user lives on a proprietary network, with a proprietary device, and while it perhaps it breaks down some hierarchies through disintermediation, it does so in a transient way. The uptake is certainly faster, but the potential seems so much lower.
I don’t know if OLPC will be successful. That’s as unclear now as ever. But it’s trying to do the right thing, and I think it’s a better chance than most for maintaining or improving the richness of the worlds’ culture.
No related posts.
I think it is too easy to take for granted the basic quality of life we have and the immense mental freedom of having most information at our finger tips and having the time to use it. However, this seems to bring with it the disgust at what our own culture, what we ourselves are doing with it.
I can see Guido point in this regard, but I think he confuses the “religion” of consumerism and void this brings with the basics of what can make an individuals life better. Very few are lucky enough to sit down and enjoy making a programming language.
Poor countries need very very boring things like infrastructure, auditing and a civil service so people can have these freedoms. These things normally require a “logical head” to do, which you can find people anywhere if given the opportunity. However these things are rarely encouraged. I believe these things go with any culture also. But having a “logical head” normally equates with money and money on to consumerism and consumerism to our homogeneous culture. However, these things do not equate in any way. They only equate because our culture seems to be failing, not necessarily others given the same opportunities.
We need them to be able to share theirs to make ours better.
A while ago (several years) I saw a show on TV where this guy (researcher or maybe a linguist?) was going around the UK and Ireland and making recordings of old myths and stories in the original languages, specifically Welsh and Gaelic. The reason was that even though the stories were “known”, the original oral traditions were dieing. I believe several native american tribes have been doing the same thing.
A good example of technology helping to preserve culture.
Note: I believe this was part of the “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” series with Joesph Campbell and Bill Moyers. Though it may have been in his earlier work “Mythos”, or it could have been someone completely different ;-)
Ian: “In a patriarchal culture, giving girls access to this technology will be destructive to that power structure. Yay! I believe in the moral rightness of that one girl making her own choices, finding her own truths, more than I believe in the validity of the culture she was born into.”
I believe that statement alone forms a succinct and sufficient reply to Guido. I’ll go further and say that “destruction of culture” is almost universally a positive thing. Look at the precious culture that’s been lost by the widespread removal of monarchies. Or the lost culture in northern India if dowry-related killings and burnings became a thing of the past. Or the culture America would lose if it stopped turning a blind eye to the (profitable) incarceration of millions of non-violent citizens, let alone their subsequent disenfranchising in some areas. What proportion of living native Americans think it’s okay to murder members of other tribes, compared to 300 years ago?
I think, under sufficient examination and with a couple exceptions, cultural norms tend to be horrifying to a degree roughly proportional to their age. The common theme here isn’t their “transformation”, it’s their gradual disappearance as humanity slowly figures out how not to be jerks to be each other.
I don’t know that I believe the culture deserves simply to die off. That culture is like parents, and even bad parents are better than no parents at all (except perhaps very very bad parents). To abandon culture is to abandon just one one upbringing, but to abandon upbringing itself; that is not a context in which a person can thrive.
Of course, each generation should aspire to be better than their parents, and people with bad parents most of all.
I disagree that culture and parents are comparable in this context. As far as I’m aware, it is nigh impossible for a human to mature into anything the slightest bit functional in the modern world without parents of some kind. I doubt the same can be said of culture without introducing a huge amount of additional subjectivity into the evaluation of “functional”.
Beyond that, I suspect we may have different notions of culture. My working definition is roughly the set of social norms not directly decided by necessity. I dislike unnecessary social norms. I think they restrict and bias personal and social growth, clutter and confuse nascent minds, discourage creativity, and occasionally contribute directly or indirectly to horrible ignorance and violence. Not to mention make the world a tad more boring. For what?
> What proportion of living native Americans think it’s okay to murder members of other tribes, compared to 300 years ago?
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.
In the “Ender” series from Orson Scott Card (yeah, I know, he flipped out about the gay marriage thing, so we don’t like him anymore, but…) they meet a new race of intelligent beings on a new planet.
These beings are “behind” technologically, but not in terms of potential, and the humans basically pull a prime-directive to try and “keep them pure”. There was another reason to start doing this, but the real reason became the same as this discussion’s:
You know, because they were just so darn cute in their rustic and backward and authentic ways.
Card eventually makes the point (through the characters) that if they are indeed equal, they damn-well should get to make that choice themselves. To “preserve” them automatically means that we think we are better than them, and that we are the scientist and they are the specimen.
Its a pretty fascinating bit of sociology, really. He goes on to categorize all life into categories:
that which is “less than us”: like rocks and plants and maybe chickens
that which is the same as us: we can communicate with them, so consensus COULD be reached, therefore we are morally obligated to try
that with is fundamentally other: we cannot communicate, so we are destined to go to war with them
I’m probably not doing justice with my summary.
Another anecdote: Years ago, I made a website for the Rainforest Foundation. Their guiding principle was to protect the people living in the forests of the world so that those people would protect the forests themselves.
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?
> Another anecdote: Years ago, I made a website for the Rainforest Foundation. Their guiding principle was to protect the people living in the forests of the world so that those people would protect the forests themselves.
> 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.)
Thank you Ian… this is insightful and well-explained. I agree with loqi: that one statement is a succinct but meaningful reply to the issue Guido raised.
This is a great example of uninformed modernist hubris. Have you ever actually lived under a thatched roof? Oddly enough, I have. For six years in a village in Lesotho (southern Africa) my family and I lived in two buildings, one with a thatched roof and one with a corrugated metal roof, and the thatched roof was far superior in pretty much every way. It never leaked once in six years, required only a single routine repair in that entire time, and provided far better insulation; it was the metal-roofed building that became uninhabitable on hot summer days. And that’s without even considering the additional cost of the corrugated metal, the problems with disposing of it after its useful lifetime, etc.
The point being that if you’ve only experienced one way of life (and you’re speaking to readers who are largely likely to share your biases and lack of experience), it’s pretty easy to glibly claim its obvious superiority. But that doesn’t make it true.
Much of this discussion just misses the point, in my opinion. Of course it’s patronizing to tell someone they shouldn’t want computers, or TV, or air-conditioning. Of course that should be their choice. Who’s saying they shouldn’t have that choice, except your straw man? But people should also have the choice to maintain valuable parts of their own way of life that are missing from modern homogenous Western culture, and in real history most have not (forcibly assimilated indigenous people all around the globe), and many still do not, due to powerful economic and political forces aimed at breaking down communal economies to make resources available for corporate use. Advocating against those forces is not patronizing. Glib assertions of the “obvious” superiority of modern amenities, such as this thread is full of, are patronizing.
The real point is, who is setting the agenda? When I look at OLPC, I see a bunch of North Americans running the show and setting the agenda, essentially saying “THIS is what all you poor people need.” That right there is a sufficient red flag in my mind. If privileged people really want to work with marginalized people in a way that isn’t patronizing, you start by listening to what THEY say they most need, and then you place your resources and skills at the disposal of THEIR agenda. Consider this a counterproposal; it’s markedly different from the missionary approach that Guido is criticizing.
I think many critiques only advocate disengagement. Or, at least, disengagement from certain aspects of modernity and technology. OLPC is trying to give a new set of people the genuine choice of “do you want a computer”. Sure, this choice is offered from an external source, but it is for me too — I’m no more capable of building a computer from raw materials than any of the people OLPC targets. This engages these people in an social, economic, and intellectual structure much larger than them, one that spans the world, but this is also what we North Americans have done to ourselves. 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.
Marginalized people are no more a monolith than privileged people are. There is no one thing that they want. And what anyone asks for concretely is based on the solutions they understand and are familiar with. What people ask for abstractly generally better represents their true desires. They might ask for books, but they really want education. I can’t speak to what the priorities are for various marginalized persons (though I’m sure I don’t agree with every individual, anymore than I do for every privileged person’s assessment of what they need). Ultimately OLPC seeks to create not an answer to any need, but a tool to answer needs. They may be successful, or they might not, but I don’t think the project is structured in a way that is more enabling than directive. And of course it’s also imaginative, which is to say: neither we nor they know what it will achieve. Also: there is no one thing that everyone will ask for, but there are tools that anyone can potentially benefit from. OLPC is working at a certain scale and generality that must assert a benefit rather than asking individually.
In the most general sense, I also think the people who critique OLPC for not giving people what they need don’t know any more about what people need than the OLPC group does. “Why give people computers when they need clean water?” Well, lots of people have clean water, what do they need next? We obsess over the most marginalized people, and are often blind to other tiers.
I’ll also add: people can contribute according to their ability and skills. If someone comes to me asking about software, I can help. If they ask for eyeglasses, I can’t help. There’s this idea that somehow there’s this free energy out there that can be directed to anything, and by directing it to OLPC that it detracts from the most ideal activity each person can think of. That’s not how it works. When people say “OLPC isn’t the right thing” they are basically saying “all the people working on OLPC should stop and not do anything for these people” because frankly I haven’t heard much in the way of related counterproposals.
Though, come to think about it, none of this thread has anything to do with culture…
Thanks Ian for the thoughtful reply.
> 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?
Well most laptops are sold to governments. If the governments want them then that IS their choice. You may argue that governments do not know whats best for their people. If this is your argument then giving government tools to help learning seems a good bet. It is much better then giving them money (or arms).
In giving aid, giving the people what they ask for is always the best. However, practically this is impossible. If the infrastructure in those countries was good enough to communicate a consensus of their own wishes then I doubt the countries (or regions) would be on the radar to receive them. There is nothing wrong with making and developing an offer of some new form of aid, based on your own best judgment. It is better then sitting by and not doing anything, and waiting for a mythical time when a solution arises. No proposal will fit all peoples needs, sometimes a proposal will be destructive. However in the case of a laptop I very much doubt it will be destructive (I cant see why it would be?). It may be that there will be no take up, which is fine, but at least they tried. The world in this regard is deeply lacking innovation. The other main solution is helping people to set up their own businesses (normally in western model) but doing that is more dangerous.
I don’t think OLPC proclaims to know what people actually want, but it is another option, and options are good. I am sure some (maybe not all) teachers in these places, if asked if they could have wikipedia, would opt to have it.
If one thinks idea of a laptop and the internet are bad. Then they should stop using them themselves. The only way you can truly teach is by exemplifying your ideas with your own action. What you do and are as an individual, you should be proud of showing to EVERY other person on the planet.
Hi David,
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.”
The above message was posted before I saw Ians response and was in response to Carl Meyer
Carl Meyer: “But people should also have the choice to maintain valuable parts of their own way of life that are missing from modern homogenous Western culture, and in real history most have not (forcibly assimilated indigenous people all around the globe), and many still do not, due to powerful economic and political forces aimed at breaking down communal economies to make resources available for corporate use. Advocating against those forces is not patronizing. Glib assertions of the “obvious” superiority of modern amenities, such as this thread is full of, are patronizing.”
On this I completely agree with you, except to nitpick that “Western culture” is actually anything but homogeneous, unless you restrict your definition to the portions of it given coverage by Hollywood and CNN. But I fail to see the connect between the above and your complaints against OLPC:
“When I look at OLPC, I see a bunch of North Americans running the show and setting the agenda, essentially saying “THIS is what all you poor people need.” That right there is a sufficient red flag in my mind.”
Perhaps you should look more closely. OLPC originated from “constructionist learning” theory. It’s an educational project, so a more accurate placement of words into their collective mouths might be “THIS is what all you children need.” Or maybe, “THIS is a faithful implementation of our findings.”
Yes, they’re a bunch of North Americans… because North Americans are doing advanced research into theories of learning. If their research leads them to the conclusion that something like OLPC can be hugely beneficial to children in developing (and developed!) nations, should they just sit on it and pretend they don’t know? Should they, before providing a remarkable opportunity to millions of children, backtrack all the way to “generic charity”, spend all the time and money needed to figure out what’s “purely best” for each and every culture they intend to contribute to with their work, lest they rock any boats?
I’ll just notice that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_position
We don’t want high-fructose corn syrup: we want sucrose — that’s why Jolt tastes better than Coke.
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.
You focus a very interesting point.
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.
“There’s no piece of culture that I would want to deny from anyone.”
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.
Yeah, it’s a pity cultures die:
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.