Quando dou comida aos pobres, me chamam de santo.
Quando pergunto porque eles são pobres, chamam-me de comunista.
(When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.)
Quando dou comida aos pobres, me chamam de santo.
Quando pergunto porque eles são pobres, chamam-me de comunista.
(When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.)
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
===============
What is a culture?
Many westerners mistake me for a Chinese or Japanese. It is understandable. With ‘slanted’ eyes, straight black hair and prominent cheekbones, East Asians all ‘look the same’ – at least to a westerner who does not understand all the subtle differences in facial features, mannerisms and dress sense among people from different East Asian countries. To westerners who apologise for mistaking me for a Chinese or Japanese, I tell them it’s OK, because most Koreans call all westerners ‘Americans’ – a notion that some Europeans might find disagreeable. To the uninitiated Korean, I tell them, all westerners look the same, with their big noses, round eyes and excessive facial hair.
This experience warns against excessively broad categorization of people. Of course, what is ‘excessively broad’ depends on the purpose of the categorisation. If we are comparing the human brain with that of, say, the dolphin, even the over-arching category of Homo sapiens may be good enough. But if we are studying how culture makes a difference to economic development, even the relatively narrow category ‘Korean’ may be problematic. Broader categories, like ‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’, obscure much more than they reveal.
In most culturalist arguments, however, cultures are defined very loosely. We are often offered incredibly coarse categories, such as East-West, which I am not even going to bother to criticize. Very often, we are offered broad ‘religious’ categories, like Christian (which from time to time is lumped together with Judaism into Judaeo-Christian, and which is regularly divided into Catholic and Protestant), Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian (this latter category is particularly controversial, because it is not a religion).
Yet think for a minute about these categories. Within the ostensibly homogeneous group ‘Catholic’, we have both the ultra-conservative Opus Dei movement, which has become well-known through Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, and left-wing liberation theology, epitomized in the famous saying by the Brazilian archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Helder Camara: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.‘ These two ‘Catholic’ sub-cultures produce people with very different attitudes towards wealth accumulation, income redistribution and social obligations.
Or, to take another example, there are ultra-conservative Muslim societies that seriously limit women’s public participation. Yet more than half the professional staff at the Malaysian central bank are women – a much higher proportion than at any central bank in the supposedly more ‘feminist’ Christian countries. And here is another example: some people believe that Japan succeeded economically because of its unique variety of Confucianism, which emphasizes loyalty rather than the personal edification stressed in the Chinese and Korean varieties. Whether or not one agrees with this particular generalization (more on this later), it shows that there isn’t just one kind of Confucianism.
If categories like Confucian or Muslim are too broad, how about taking countries as cultural units? Unfortunately, this does not solve the problem. As the culturalists themselves would be prepared to acknowledge, a country often contains different cultural groups, especially in large and culturally diverse ones, like India and China. But even in a country like Korea, one of the most culturally homogeneous societies in the world, there are significant cultural differences between regions. In particular, people from the south-east (Kyungsang) think of those from the south-west (Cholla) as clever but totally untrustworthy double-dealers. South-westerners return the compliment by regarding the south-easterners as a crude and aggressive, albeit determined and well-organized, bunch of people. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that the stereotypes of these two Korean regions are similar to the stereotypes the French and the Germans have of each other. The cultural animosity between the two regions of Korea is so intense that some families won’t even allow their children to marry into families from the other region. So is there a single ‘Korean’ culture or not? And, if things are as complicated as that for Korea, do we even need to talk about other countries?
I could go on, but I think I have made the point that broad categories, like ‘Catholic’ or ‘Chinese’, are simply too crude to be analytically meaningful, and that even a country is too big a cultural unit to generalize about. The culturalists may well retort that all we have to do is work with finer categories like Mormon or Japanese Confucian, rather than broader ones like Christian or Confucian. If only matters were that simple. There are more fundamental problems with culturalist theories, to which I turn now.
東京の文化と地方の文化とでは、なにもかもがまったくといっていいほど違う。
戦前と違い、「日本」とか「日本人」とか「日本文化」で括れなくなってきている。
文化とか伝統とかいっても、どれもみんなそんなに長い歴史は持っていない。
http://www.rulit.net/books/bad-samaritans-the-myth-of-free-trade-and-the-secret-history-of-capitalism-read-226653-53.html