Re: SIL (was: A project)

Marcus Smith wrote:
>But even apart from the Christianity issue, SIL workers bring their own
>cultures with them. Sometimes in an honest attempt to be friendly and
>helpful, they introduce things and ideas that are harmful to the local
>culture. A case in point (one I was told about, but have no confirmation
>of) is where SIL workers introduced soccer and the card game UNO to a
>culture that did not encourage competition. This, apparently, brought
>about hard feelings between natives of the town that drastically changed
>things. Whether or not this is true, it does illustrate the point that SIL
>workers can destroy a culture/community, even if Christianity itself is
>not the main problem.
On a tangential topic, ANY contact between different cultures carries a risk
that one or both of the cultures will be destroyed, destabilized etc. At the
very least, both will change. Many multiculturalists seems to try to both
eating the cake and have it - both perserving existing cultures and mixing
'em into some multy-culty, liberally-tolerant superculture. The underlying
assumption seems to be that culture is just some kind of mental clothes you
can change at will - Spanish today, European tomorrow and Javanese on
Wednesday.

Needless to say, I don't consider myself a multiculturalist.

                                                       Andreas

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