Assignment 2
While I was reading Writing Across Culture, Wagner and Magistrale talk about the need to develop a “new paradigm” (pp 13) and often our own paradigms will cause us to misinterpret or prematurely judge an entire culture based upon initial impressions. I found this particularly true and I thought back to my previous program The Ethical Entrepreneur in spring quarter. We had an anthropologist come to speak to us about her experiences in working with the Masaii people in Africa. She talked primarily about the gender differences and challenges that women face when trying to enact social change for their respective tribes. I brought up the issue of paradigms and questioned whether our own “feminist paradigm” actually prevents volunteers and international workers from enacting positive change within the society. To be clear, I feel that when Americans go to another country and automatically assume that women are mistreated and receive unequal treatment, whether or not the assessment is true, we are applying and often imposing our own value system upon the society.
This has become especially true in reading about Mongolian women. Although women are slowly gathering political strength and becoming active participants in their government and economy, they are still the home caretakers and often are expected to have large families. “How terrible!” might be our first response but upon speaking with these women, it quickly becomes clear that the women take very distinct pride in raising their families and working hard. Is that because they “just don’t know any better?” Are we in any position to make that assessment? Because a society chooses a different value system than our own, is it not ethnocentric to demand that entire social constructs be torn down because of America’s particular view of “human rights”? These are all difficult questions for me, especially when you consider certain extreme cultural practices such as genital mutilation and the like. But again, if we begin to pick and choose which cultural practices should be allowed we begin to change those societies to our liking. American’s love for the exotic is often the root for such outcries, though the sentiment is of course admirable. Of course we don’t want people to suffer needlessly throughout the world, when we obviously have the education and moral compass to tell us that those things are wrong! But again, we have to continue to question our own sources of ethnocentric judgments.
These were many of the thoughts that came up for me during the reading though it will be interesting to see how many of my assertions will be challenged and/or verified during my travels.