Arrives now from Ricardo: >Colin: You may have asked one central question, but alongside that >one came a whole series of more detailed ones. Moreover, I am sure >you know that behind your queries about what I meant by "cultural >practices" is the central issue of ethnocentrism. While I am unwilling >to get bogged down into definitions, I am willing to do so with >what is the real issue here. I also think it is clear from my >last comment what I meant by cultural practices. Sigh. Go back and read the original post, which was 3 different ways of posing one question, which you continue to evade. Here it is again. >>I think Maggie Coleman is quite right that one can offer a >>critique of non-Western cultural practices (i.e dowry, widow >>burning) without being a cultural chauvinist. > >May I ask what it means to call something a "cultural >practice"? > >In the media, and to undergrads I teach, it means that >the practice is widespread and of some antiquity, and >that it has a positive value in cultural terms, enjoys >social consensus, or is at least tolerated. > >Is it being argued that sati and dowry deaths meet those >criteria? Or is some other meaning implied? > >Is slavery a western cultural practice? Is lynching a >U.S. cultural practice? Are violent attacks on nonwhites >by citizens and police a U.S. cultural practice? > >Best, Colin Clearly you're committed to dodging this, especially with these weird repeated assertions that the "real" issue is something else, a prefabricated duality you have set up around "ethnocentrism." So I'll stop asking. What is at stake here, at least for me, is the notion of culture -- what it means as a category, how it works, how coherent or hegemonic a single "culture" is, and so on. You have an implicit theory of culture but I donbt we're going to find out what it is. I suspect that there is a rather short distance in your mind between the condemnation of miscellaneous barbarities you have discovered in the third world and a commitment to declaring western culture "superior." I also suspect that your knowledge of the actual practices in India you mentioned is rather limited. Let's hope my suspicions are unfounded. But we'll probably never know, since you won't be pinned down on the specific meaning of what you say. Best, Colin
