Transcriber: Lucía Ramírez Reviewer: Yasmina Casado González
A few years ago,
I decided to take on a challenge
and join my sister on a trekking trip
in Northern India.
It was an exhilarating experience.
Exactly what nature would promise and deliver.
Yet, it was one learning experience.
For starters,
I ended up learning the hard way
that I'm not exactly a fit person to be trekking.
More importantly,
I got to learn a lot about Indian culture in those seven days
than I thought I would.
See, apart from me,
my sister and two of our friends,
everyone on this trek came from a different corner from India.
So over the course of a few days,
we became friends with a group of five cousins.
Or brothers, as they would refer to themselves.
They assumed themselves as a family.
And it was quite evident, by the way that they treated one another
and the way that they put respect forward to the elder brother and his wife.
The elder brother and the wife were a very lovely couple.
They were really happy, humble couple.
They had beautiful two kids,
they lived a very good lifestyle,
they had the house.
They were a happy marriage.
And they had been blissfully married for ten years.
Curious about this secret to the happy marriage,
I had to ask the question,
"What's the story? What's the love story?"
And there it came.
Arranged marriage.
It came to me with two surprises.
The first surprise because I was expecting a high school sweethearts type of story.
But the second surprise
was that I was not aware of my own perception
towards arranged marriage.
I was not aware that I had deemed arranged marriage
as backward thinking.
It was surprising to me because the concept is not new.
I've known about it.
But meeting someone who lived through it,
experienced it, and is proud to talk about it,
made it a lot more real.
It was surprising that I had registered in my mind
that it is an old practice, and only a few practice it still.
That in our era of independence,
we are all able to find somebody for ourselves to love and marry.
So what was I missing?
How could they had accepted it?
After a few nights of talking and conversing and chatting,
I got to learn a few more things.
For starters, I learned that they were not part of a forced marriage.
They did not meet for the first time on their wedding night
and they were not promised for one another at birth.
They were simply set up to meet by their parents.
You could say it's similar to a blind date.
A friend sets you up
with somebody they think you match with.
And similarly, it sometimes works.
And similarly sometimes it doesn't.
I also learned that, in collectivist culture,
that one's primary responsibility is towards the group,
the family, the ancestors, the siblings.
That values are about group harmony, cooperation
and trying to take care of each other.
So within this context, when it comes to the decision of marriage,
the wise and the elder are probably at a better position
to recommend a compatible spouse.
The pre-requirement of love,
that in individualistic culture is a base for marriage,
takes on a different format
and is considered rather a strong bond that results from a compatible marriage.
In this context, marriage takes a different form.
And love within marriage takes a different form.
What I was missing
was that I was trying to make sense of their decisions
from my own perspective.
Over the years,
I have picked up on a very nice habit.
I enjoy travelling
and I like to go to new places and experience new cultures.
And throughout I have come to realize that culture is not a constant.
But rather, culture is constantly evolving.
And that the values that underlie a culture
can actually sometimes be constant and very hard to change.
Understanding somebody's values
and the order in which they rank
makes a lot of great difference to the way that their behaviour comes out.
It lends and explanation to their behaviors.
And that held the answers to my white questions.
In anthropology, the concept of cultural relativism
is a concept that is aimed at understanding people's behavior
within the context of their own culture.
It is supposed to promote
tolerance within anthropologists groups
to the new habits and customs that they come across in new cultures.
For example,
in the Nepalese Himalayan villages,
the practice of fraternal polyandry,
the marriage of a woman to two or more brothers,
an odd practice you may say,
can be explained from their cultural perspective
as protecting the family's wealth, the land,
and not dividing it over newly formed families.
It stems from the value of protecting the family's prosperity.
This is yet not to be confused with moral relativism.
Moral relativism is the concept of having no moral absolutes.
Cultural relativism is not an attempt
to justify any wrong doing that's happening out there.
But rather, what cultural relativism has taught me are three things:
One. It has allowed the child in me,
the curious child, the inquisitive nature
to surface and be present when encountering difference.
To always look for the drivers of the difference.
Two. It has allowed me to be aware that we all have our cultural biases
that we are simply picking up by living and interacting
within our own cultures.
That we tend to receive the world
from the lens of our own cultures.
And third and most rewardingly,
it has given my own values a new meaning.
By being exposed to difference
and trying to understand the sources of the difference,
before accepting the difference,
brings a lot more tangible meaning to my intrinsic values.
And for that I'm quite grateful.
In today's world,
culture is no longer bound by country borders or geography.
We are exposed to different cultures
by simply scrolling down a facebook timeline.
We are at a point where we have more and more cosmopolitan cities,
more an more multinational companies,
and we are constantly interacting with different cultures.
Cultural cross pollination has become inevitable.
It may be the right time
that we borrow some tolerance from anthropology.
Be aware that we all have our biases
and be aware that we perceive the world in different lens than the others.
It may be the time
that we revert to the child in us,
to be curious.
And when faced with cultural differences, ask the question "why?"
Thank you.
(Applause)