VietBlog

Traveling is probably the one way for us to expand our minds and truly become students of the world and its many cultures, especially our own in West Virginia.

Nick Blood has been thinking about it lately and writes for us some thoughts on the topic of culture:

As our last round of workshops draws to a close, some interesting questions have surfaced outside of class. This is such a unique situation, if you want to talk about cross-cultural interactions, where Western ideas about health and social work are being taught in an epicenter of ancient Eastern civilization, with traditions that are often strikingly different.

And in this situation, a natural question is the extent that Western ideas are culturally appropriate in Eastern civilizations. This debate has raged with particular fervor in our own society in the last century and a half.

Often it has taken form as a great Clash of Civilizations, East and West, as it was once put by an American political scientist. But there are many other manifestations of this debate.

In some disciplines it is called nature vs. nurture, and the argument centers on whether culture or biology plays a stronger role in our development as humans. In other fields, it is an argument between relativist (roughly nurture) and innatist (roughly nature) perspectives.

But in essence, the argument is about people, who they are, what they are. Are we nothing but the sum of our culture? Are we defined and contained within culture? Or are there human universals that reach beyond and across every culture?

For me, it is truism that we are all members of the genus Homo; we are all organisms who share the same human ancestry, and the same shared evolutionary history. And to me, this is such a wonderful thought. While I believe that the richness and diversity of human cultures is a truly magnificent thing, a testament to our impulses for creativity and adaptation, I am infinitely encouraged by the idea that there are many universals we share across the human species.

One of these universals, there is strong reason to believe, is an intuitive psychology, as well as a general developmental plan that spans across human populations. The more we learn in fields like neuroscience, cognitive psychology and the vast array of evolutionary disciplines, the more evidence there is to suggest this elegant truth: our bodies and minds share many fundamental, universal components across the species.

And all of this comes to bear on our situation in these workshops. There are those who argue it is folly to assume Western concepts of psychology and social work can be helpful to people in Asian cultures. Such people can be described as extreme cultural relativists.

They subscribe, consciously or not, to the belief that people are nothing but the sum of their cultures, that there are little or no human universals, like an intuitive psychology, and so ideas which work in the West should stay in the West.

Often they are concerned with cultural and intellectual imperialism, with the forcing of ideologies of the most powerful upon those less powerful. And here is where a crucial concept in reasoning about people and their cultures comes in. It can be summed up in one word: nuance.

We must be able to hold nuanced views on human nature and culture. Imperialism exists, today and in the past in many forms. Too often our ideas have been used in harmful ways against people in the developing world, to justify exploitation, to degrade and subjugate peoples with different ideas.

And indeed, the ideas of cultural relativism (the nurture side of nature vs. nurture) have done heroic work in the last century, combating the racist and ethnocentric thinking which has all too often characterized our ideas about other cultures. This work continues today, and there is still much to be done. We should recognize this truth, at the same time as we recognize the beauty of human commonality, of our tremendous amount of shared experience in body and in environment.

Though these concepts, nature and culture, are often presented in violent contrast, I see no contradiction. As long as there is a place for nuance in our ideas, and uncompromising commitment to self-determination for all peoples everywhere. I believe there must be.