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Imagine if you will an anthropologist from Mars (to borrow someone else's
term for an alien observer who truly knows next to nothing about us),
commenting to citizens of the United States that he wants to look into how
we manage, since we use our resources so inefficiently. We would then
suppose that there must some means to use some resource more efficiently,
and in asking the question, would begin to look for an answer. Does
Heisenberg have a corollary in cultural anthropology? Can you even observe
someone, without those observations affecting them?

This is not idle speculation. While I was getting my B.A. in linguistics at
the University of Oklahoma, my alma mater ran off the Summer Institute of
Linguistics, for various reasons. For those who do not know, SIL is one of
the training arms of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. One of them was the
complaint of some professors was that merely allowing SIL to rent the
facilities, as would any other group that the university hosted during the
summer, was to violate the separation of church and state. But one of the
accusations that WBT faces (and there are many), is that they change
whatever culture they have contact with. Not only does their proselytizing
obviously have a cultural impact, but simply reducing a preliterate language
to a written system has the effect of slowing linguistic drift, of
preserving the forms of the language as it exists at the time of
translation, and so slowing the rate of cultural change. This effect is
exacerbated by producing literature in said language, and promoting literacy
among a people who had not written language to read (this is not to say that
some of these groups may be highly literate in some other language).

One of the criticisms that some parts of the Islamic world levels against
the U.S. is that we export our popular culture, and that this popular
culture is obscene. This is one of the few charges I take seriously.

That said, other parts of the world view our "cultural imperialism" with
about the same love that some feel for Microsoft. There will always be
critics, and there is probably no way to ultimately satisfy the complaints
of all of those critics. We have to be guided by those values we hold dear,
and the light of our conscience. We have to humbly listen to the complaints
of our various critics, because there is always the chance that they might
be right. But even if we merely found a way to feed the starving of
Afghanistan with minimal contact, and importing as little of our culture as
we could, or using entirely indirect means, someone would gripe about it. I
understand that U.S. funding and support has in fact been refused by those
we regarded as desperately needing it.

But I will never forget a comment by R. C. Sproule, that, at the end of
WWII, the U.S. had the means to lay down the law, to make any changes we saw
fit in the government of any country, and we held the ultimate trump card.
We could have been imperial in the extreme, and formed a United Nations of
an entirely different sort, a world government such as the world has not
seen in millennia. We could have enforced a Pax Americana on the entire
world. And we did not. That act is unique in human history.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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