Cultural Relativism Among Cultural Near-Relatives

When polygany had more to do with survival than religion, the wives had fewer children.

It seems this sect was more interested in having their virgins on earth than dying for them.

[I agree there actually credible models for, at least, local polygamy. Based on conversations I've had with people who've lived among and/or studied those people, and based on my own genuinely freaky experience staying in one of their big "enclave" towns in southeast Utah, the "having their virgins on earth" business is just gravy -- a way to mark their territory/property. The real purpose, gruesomely, is the effective slave labor they get out of it -- having mulitple adolescent girls, often (as I saw in that town in Utah) under the wicked-sharp eye of older supervisory women. In other words, sexual *and* labor trafficking under one roof! Charming. Thanks, Five. --fl]

Cries of "cultural imperialism" reduce human rights to nothing more than a cultural custom.

I've noticed that, often, when westerners argue that sort of relativism, they assume that the human-rights-violating customs are freely chosen by the members of the culture in question.

::headdesk::

Sunflower

[Yup, like right after China reopened to the West when Nixon went there the leaders kept claiming that "Asian" minds were different from westerners and therefore they didn't mind oppression if it was for the greater good. Not *that* much longer as a percentage of Chinese history we had Tiananmen Square because... those leaders were opportunistic, self-serving liars. -Thanks, Sunflower. --fl]

Hmm, well I read the article and the idea that multiculturalism and feminism may be mutually exclusive bothers me a lot and parts of the article don't sit well with me. I have a problem with assuming that people are oppressed because their practices are different from the dominant culture because there may be things that members of the dominant culture don't understand. I have a problem with looking at another culture and judging it without understanding it and saying to people, "Don't you see how oppressed you are?"

I would not assume that polygamy itself is bad for women. I have heard women who live that way say that they like living in a household with other women and the women get along and they share work and it's all good. Also, a funny anecdote, a friend of mine is a professor of library sciences and is working on a project with a library in Kenya and part of the deal is that she goes there and then someone from that library comes here. So anyway a woman who works for this library in Kenya was visiting our university's library and the two women were talking and (I wish I could remember the details better) but the gist of the conversation was my American friend saying, "How do you handle sharing your husband with other women?" and the African woman saying, "How do you take care of your husband's needs without other women to help you?" Of course, it wasn't just sex (although that is part of it) but all the other work of being a wife. The two women looked at each other and laughed and laughed.

I do agree with the conclusion of the article, which was:
"...policies aiming to respond to the needs and claims of cultural minority groups must take seriously the need for adequate representation of less powerful members of such groups. Since attention to the rights of minority cultural groups, if it is to be consistent with the fundamentals of liberalism, must be ultimately aimed at furthering the well-being of the members of these groups, there can be no justification for assuming that the groups' self-proclaimed leaders—invariably mainly composed of their older and their male members—represent the interests of all of the groups' members.

Unless women—and, more specifically, young women, since older women often become co-opted into reinforcing gender inequality—are fully represented in negotiations about group rights, their interests may be harmed rather than promoted by the granting of such rights." I think that's an important point and I think that we can be culturally sensitive and at the same time look out for those who may not be represented. I think it's important that when cultures do change that the change is from within rather than something that is imposed from the outside. Take for example female genital mutilation. You could look at FGM and say, "But female circumcision is their culture" and that would be true but women within that culture want to stop it from happening. Have you seen the movie Moolaadé? It's a wonderful movie about FGM and also about African village life, I highly recommend it.

That being said, I think the situation with the raid of the FLDS compound is different for lots of reasons. When the Mormon church started, polygamy was illegal and that's why Mormons went to Utah. Part of the deal when Utah became a state was that the Mormon church would give up polygamy and the fundamentalist church refused to do that and they have continued the practice in violation of the laws where they live. That is very different from immigrants bringing old traditions to a new place. Further, in this country we have laws that protect children from abuse, and if girls under 18 were forced into marriage, sex and babies, that is abuse and those children need to be protected. You can't just get a group of people together and start doing something that is abusive and against the law and then cry, "but it's our culture!" We also have laws that require that children have access to education and when teenage girls can't read or write, I would call that abuse. Also, I heard on NPR this morning that someone testified that if a man fell out of favor, his wives and children would be given to another man, so for many of these children, it is unclear who their parents are. What worries me the most is what will happen to those children. If they become wards of the state, how will they find enough foster homes for all of them? Will they be better off? Probably some of them will and some of them won't. I worry too about the women. Say a woman from the compound chose to leave and take her children with her. Where would she go and how could she support them? It's very sad.

[I agree that under less patriarchal circumstances polygamy might be loosely defined as a women's collective where the shared resources include a husband. Even that wouldn't, at all, be better for the majority of men and, especially, *boys* though. And except for the actual polygamy part Mormonism isn't *that* different from some of the other post-transcendentalist communitarian sects that sprang up in the American east in the 19th Century. (Mennonites, Shakers, Amish, and others arose from the same wave of religious experimentation.) That they're uniformly repudiated, even by their more modern brethren, doesn't alter their cultural identity or integrity, it just makes them a more model case for examining assumptions about multiculturalism. And finally, my actual beef with those guys has nothing to do with polygamy itself and *everything* to do with *imposing it onchildren!* If you're old enough to choose, and free enough to make the choice unforced then... I might grit my teeth when I say it but I'll say good luck with that. But to take it out on twelve, thirteen, even sixteen year old boys and girls? I'm never gonna tolerate that. In this or any other culture. Thanks, Sugarmag. --fl]

i'd be inclined to believe it as a religion if the people involved actually had a choice (i.e. were exposed to other life-styles and other religions).

considering that they don't, and considering that all the "church's" money is in the name of only one guy (warren jeffs in the utah compound; another guy whose name i forget for community in boutiful, british columbia), i am inclined to think that it's all a money & ego scheme, NOT an official religion.

i'm not saying that polygamy is bad and shouldn't be allowed because technically it's no different than an open marriage or cheating.

the point is that those people sound brainwashed and are forced into it. i see no other logical explanation for a "culture" that prevents people from educating themselves and whose answer to every problem is "it's god's will because our leader says so". if they're so sure that people would stay, then they'd allow people to associate freely and get an education if they wanted to, just like the amish do.

[Eh, that's sort of like objecting that everything in the Catholic Church technically belongs to the Pope. And goodness knows enough critics claim that's the real point of Catholicism. I'm not *excusing* it, just saying that it doesn't make it non-religious. (It's *also* not to say, of course, that it's a model of all religions either.) The point being that it really fits the criteria for being a distinct culture... just one that happens to be *incredibly* incompatible with feminism. And also incompatible decency, morality, ethics, the law, public opinion, democracy, fairness, human rights... Thanks, kermit. --fl]