Our Culture vs Their Culture

We humans have a weakness in that the familiar appears normal to us and the unfamiliar abnormal. As a young boy, looking through the National Geographic Magazine (as young boys do) I noticed how strange women in Africa wearing many neck rings to elongate their necks or Indian women wearing nose rings looked. As I became a young man I began to see similarities between these customs and ours in the West. How different is stretching ones neck with neckbands from enlarging the breasts with implants or puffing up lips with Botox. Though the methods differ, the aim is the same, to enhance beauty. Wearing rings in the nose, which we now do in the West, in my eyes is no different than wearing rings in the ears. Wearing hijabs is strange to us but yarmulkes normal, though are cultural/religious. Modesty is locally defined. A woman with her head uncovered will be persecuted in Iran and Saudi Arabia. We look at this as primitive. A woman on the beach topless in the US today will be persecuted because she is not adhering to local customs of modesty. In Europe topless bathing is a common practice and we are thought of by some as primitive. Many years ago, while visiting Morocco, a majority Muslim country, we stayed at a modern hotel for western tourists in Marrakech. European women routinely sunbathed at the pool topless. The hotel adhered to the European standard of modesty. I strongly suspect were they to remove their bottoms they would be asked to leave. Customs are not only differ geographically but also temporally. In the early nineteen hundreds women here went to the beech covered from neck to toe as do some Muslim women today. In the fifties they wore one piece bathing suits whereas today bikinis are the common beach ware. During the “Dark Ages” women in Europe covered themselves, including their heads, much as do women in some of the Muslim cultures today. Some time ago I was watching a program featuring a primitive tribe somewhere in the mountains of Southeast Asia. They were interviewing a young teenage girl who was dressed in a colorful skirt but breasts uncovered. She was sitting very modestly on a rock with her legs crossed; so elegant in her manners, speech and movement, she could have been the daughter of proud, cultured western parents. When we see customs from different cultures, we should think about our own and ask how different are they really from ours particularly at some point in time?