April 21st, 2011

when a gang-rape is ordered by local government to punish the brother of the victim for something he didn’t do and that wasn’t criminal or even wrong and that gets whitewashed by the highest national court (with the local council apparently not even indicted),  it’s important to say “Everyone’s culture is just as good as everyone else’s culture, in every way” over and over again, until you see the contextual advanced morality of the story and the men in it.  Get a sandwich and clear your schedule; it may take a while.

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12 Responses to “At a time like this,”

  1. calling all toasters says:

    My take-away is that Pakistan’s Supreme Court is no different from ours.

  2. Barry says:

    Michael, do you have something to say worth hearing?
    Did you get a ‘delinquency of hippie-bashing’ notice?

  3. NCG says:

    toasters: ditto. Our Supreme Court just said it was okay for prosecutors to withhold evidence. You can dress it up and say it was about administrative liability, or what-all, but that’s what they did. They appear to have no shame.

  4. npm says:

    Horrific story, but I think you’re holding up a straw-man. Who’s saying that all cultures are equal?

  5. Dylan says:

    npm, I think it’s more complicated than that. I can imagine someone saying that no culture is objectively superior to any other, but also saying that this case is terrible. I’m not sure what the argument would be.

  6. J. Michael Neal says:

    Barry, I think you misunderstood the target. He was adopting the tone that a conservative critic expects to hear, in order to make fun of them. I’m unsold on the attempt, but I don’t think this was hippie punching.

  7. Eli says:

    Yes, a straw man. Appealing to those who don’t find anything wrong with the “their culture” framing. Interestingly, this cognitive bias is largely what the “relativist” critique attacks. See: boob jobs.

  8. Barry says:

    J. Michael Neal says:

    “Barry, I think you misunderstood the target. He was adopting the tone that a conservative critic expects to hear, in order to make fun of them. I’m unsold on the attempt, but I don’t think this was hippie punching.”

    If so, that song was sung pretty badly.

  9. James Wimberley says:

    The famous anthropologist and explorer Wifred Thesiger spent time on the Upper Nile with pretty unreconstructed Dinka and Nuer tribesmen. A the time, a favoured male ornament was a belt with pendant dried penises. It’s aid that somebody asked Thesiger whether he had remonstrated. He replied that it was none of his business how his friends treated their enemies.

    Thesiger approached the anthropologist’s weird ideal of ethical detachment. The attitude is so rare in the wild that I must agree with npm and Eli that Michael’s target is a straw man. The bigger one is hypocrisy: “they may be bastards, but they’re our bastards.”

    “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. Discuss. Can the fear of being hypocritical cripple righteous anger? I actually like it when the Chinese government say criticises the US human rights record; it’s setting up a good dynamic.

  10. politicalfootball says:

    The important thing to remember here is that whatever appalling thing the U.S. government does, there are people somewhere who do worse things.

  11. NYShooter says:

    I have a problem with people and judgmental attitudes when time and circumstance make it impossible to experience the reality at the time.

    Example: Battle flag of the confederacy
    Example: Japanese internment, WW 2
    Example: Nagasaki & Hiroshima

    Most of the time there really are two sides to a story, such as the three examples above illustrate, but I don’t see any equivalency between them and the irrefutable evil of the Pakistan case. Crimes against humanity have no mitigating arguments, in my opinion.

  12. antropovni says:

    If you’re using stereotypical anthropologists as a foil, let me offer you Sally Engel Merry’s “Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture” as a more accurate example of how anthropologists grapple with their relativist methods when confronted with behavior or ideas that they neither endorse nor condone. A longish version is here: http://www.uchastings.edu/faculty-administration/faculty/bisharat/class-website/docs/Merry-Sunder.pdf