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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (55032)	8/22/2002 11:42:49 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

Here's something else to get your motor running. A critique of cultural relativism. I'm betting you're on the author's side. Roger Sandall THE CULTURE CULT Designer tribalism and other essays 214pp. Westview, 12 Hid’s Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ. Paperback, £15.50. 0 8133 3863 8 In April last year, the Etireno , with a cargo of slave children en route from Benin to Gabon, briefly became the most infamous ship in the world. Rumour had it that approximately 250 children, found to be surplus to requirements, had been thrown overboard. When this could not be substantiated, the world’s press lost interest, thereby missing the bigger – and yet more terrible – picture: the orphans of the Etireno were only a small part of an estimated 200,000 children sold annually into Africa’s modern slave trade. The authorities in Benin tried to explain the episode away as a West African custom in which children are sent abroad to live as household servants with wealthy relatives. Benin’s Foreign Minister, Idji Kolawole, remarked, “In our culture, we think that it’s always good for a child to go from his parents’ house, to an uncle’s or to a friend abroad.” Another incident, a few months later, gave the lie to this relaxed attitude. The prolonged torture and death of Victoria Climbié, sent to London to improve her life chances – not to speak of widespread evidence of sexual, physical and emotional abuse of other children sent away to live as unprotected mendicants with wealthier families – leads one to question the use of “always” in the Foreign Minister’s statement. His other phrase, “in our culture”, was striking too. Here and elsewhere these seemingly unexceptionable words have a strong intent: they are intended to immunize the practice being discussed against criticism. Roger Sandall’s brilliant, impassioned and sardonic The Culture Cult explains among other things how the phrase “in our culture” has come to be used to defend behaviour that would otherwise be seen as quite abhorrent. Until recently Sandall was a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His career coincided with the high tide of an intellectual fashion which held three dogmas to be unquestionable. In his words: Read the whole review at: the-tls.co.uk