Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:
> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
>
>
> > > There's something fishy going on here. The fact that the article Padraic
> > > gave said that most pica was found in non-Western cultures should have
> been
> > > a clue. It seems that pica means more exactly "the eating of substances
> we
> > > Westerners don't find acceptable" :))) .
> >
> >While that's an perfectly possible interpretation, I'd like to point out
> that
> >most cultures are "non-Western", and that something occurs primarily in
> non-
> >Western cultures really means little more than that is unusual in Western
> >cultures.
>
> That was basically the point of my post you know?
No I didn't - I interpreted it as saying that you thought "pica" was just a way
of denigrating non-Western habits. Sorry for misunderstanding.
> >Now, I'm not really suspecting Christophe of this, but the tendency to
> >think of
> >all non-Western cultures as essentially the same is not appreciably less
> >common
> >in the intercultural exchanage and understanding brigade than among Western
> >supremacists.
>
> Where in my post did you ever get the idea to mention that? My whole post
> was pointing out that opposing Western and non-Western was a stupid idea
> anyway. I just used the terms of the article we were discussing about,
> nothing else.
From my interpretation of what you said about "pica" it's not very long to the
wider question of the attitudes of westerner's to other cultures.
I don't necessarily agree that contrasting Western and non-Western is stupid;
it makes perfect sense when discussing areas where Western culture differs from
what is otherwise normal in human societies. (Would you assert that
contrasting, say, Javanese and non-Javanese is also necessarily stupid?)
Andreas