{"id":129,"date":"2013-01-19T09:53:04","date_gmt":"2013-01-19T07:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/?p=129"},"modified":"2013-11-13T10:52:36","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T08:52:36","slug":"maiming-killing-and-dying-for-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/maiming-killing-and-dying-for-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Maiming, killing and dying for “culture”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Parts of a 17-year-old boy\u2019s feet from Bonita Park, in Hartswater had to be amputated, after he ran away from an initiation school in Pampierstad in search of food.<\/p>\n

After he was tracked down, he was thrashed with a sjambok, while his feet were burnt with fire. He was later abandoned along the side of the road, where he was left for dead, naked and bleeding, until a passing motorist noticed him and alerted the police.<\/p>\n

Due to extensive nerve and muscle damage, his toes had to be surgically removed<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This boy, and thousands like him, are sent (and often willingly go) to initiation schools to mark the transition between boyhood and manhood, “through ritual circumcision and cultural instruction<\/a> regarding their social responsibilities and their conduct”. Ever year, children die in the course of “becoming men” – and in South African society, being a man correlates quite positively with thinking you can dictate the course of the lives of women.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason for the continued survival of poorly regulated initiation schools, with poor hygiene and cultural instruction from previous centuries, is that they provide a narrative to life – a structure, and a community. If the average adolescent knew that they had a decent prospect of a good education, a good job and so forth, they’d probably be joining protests against such schools – opting for medical circumcision at the very least, if not entirely rejecting cultural indoctrination.<\/p>\n

But it’s been – and will continue to be – a long wait for more people to have a better shot at a good life through adequate healthcare, education, and those goods many of us take for granted. And what we put in place as substitutes to give meaning to life – namely cultural practices such as these – result in\u00a0initiation schools, genital mutilation, corrective rape, culturally embedded homophobia<\/a>, sexism and so forth.<\/p>\n

“Culture” is used as an excuse of all sorts of things (in South Africa, often as a simple vote-getter<\/a>). But it’s only when you get to choose what your “culture” is – and not have it forced upon you – that it becomes remotely respectable. And even then, it should never be an explanation or justification for doing or believing something. As I tell students, appeals to culture, tradition and the like get the causality entirely backwards: things could become cultural norms because they are good norms; but the fact that something is a cultural norm has no bearing on whether it’s a good or respectable one or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is only when you get to choose what your “culture” is – and not have it forced upon you – that it becomes remotely respectable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[255],"tags":[85,84,87,86],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-circumcision","tag-culture","tag-initiation","tag-zuma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}