I’m pretty sure the value of bush meat is tied to the desirability of a particular species? Not all meat is equal.
The term “bush meat” appears to be linked in hunted wildlife in Central and West Africa. I don’t think the term is used anywhere where it would be considered a delicacy.
Wut? I love carpaccio and steak tartare. Cite for it being “exceptionally dangerous”?
I’ve gotten ill eating raw oysters, but never raw fish or beef.
Africa shouldn’t be any different in its annoying cultural practices. However, annoying cultural practices in Africa are more consequential to us than most. The difference between annoying African cultural practices and annoying South American ones is that we in the West have to pay the financial consequences for such practices. When we stop giving aid to Africa then we can place such cultural practices on a level playing field with those throughout the world.
While SDMB tends to be the blessed vale of the educated and wise, sadly members can also be sheltered and naive. I think most of you have never spent time in a third world country and mixed with the local people. They are incredibly innocent and live simple lives where tradition and superstition is paramount.
There is no education in the sense of “there are tiny things called microbes and you must burn bodies”. That’s witchcraft.
Have some compassion. African families are experiencing awful deaths of sons daughters mothers fathers friends and nobody knows why. The rich white foreigners are bringing a magic to kill us all…
Here in the West our own people are saying its a Red Cross conspiracy to wipe out the burgeoning millions in Africa so we can get Liberian and Nigerean oil. If you lived in those nations you’d believe that. Sad sad sad…
Ground beef can be prepared safely by proper trimming of raw beef to remove the exterior surfaces where nasty little things like E Coli can survive and grow. But usually the meat is ground without such precautions and is dangerous if undercooked.
As was I, to a degree, here in the US (Appalachian culture) as late as 1970. When I sold advertising in the mid-nineties, one of the new funeral homes that I called upon was just taking delivery for a sleeper sofa for folks with a remnent of this culture (sitting up with the dead). A number of family funerals and visitations that I’ve attended in recent years has had family members, young and old, touching / kissing the deceased. The culture still exists in first world countries, not just parts of Africa.
This betrays a seriously naive perception of how science education operates. It is not “trivially easy for education to cure ignorance” about complex concepts like germ theories of disease.
What is “trivially easy for education to cure” is ignorance about simple observable mechanical tasks with intuitive cause-and-effect relationships, such as operating a firearm. E.g., technologically ignorant peasant does not know how to load or shoot a gun, trained soldier shows him how to load and shoot a gun, formerly ignorant peasant now knows how to operate a gun. That sort of thing.
Abstract scientific theories like infection by microbial pathogens are a very different kettle of fish. You, as an educated Westerner with a lifetime’s experience of indoctrination about the validity and importance of such theories, may perceive statements like “This sick person has stuff in them that made them sick and will make you sick too” or “This thing will kill you if you touch it” as self-evidently true. But of course, that’s bullshit.
It is not self-evident to somebody unfamiliar with modern medicine that touching the bodily secretions of somebody who died of disease will result in the disease killing them too. In contrast to the intuitive simplicity of pulling a trigger and firing a bullet, there is no clear and immediate cause and effect going on here. Consequently, there is no obvious reason why such a person should believe what you tell them about the causes and prevention of the disease.
Anything that gets a chapter in the Old Testament cannot reasonably be called “modern medicine”.
There are many things without a clear and immediate cause and effect - farming and pregnancy come to mind. Are you saying that ignorant peasants can’t learn to plant food or where babies come from?
Silly “gotcha” attempt fail. For one thing, most peasants, however ignorant of modern scientific theories they may be, already have thousands of years’ worth of accumulated knowledge about agriculture and breeding ingrained into their culture.
More crucially, if you read my post more carefully you’ll notice that I was talking about what types of ignorance it’s TRIVIALLY EASY “for education to cure”. No, it would not be “trivially easy” to teach people about farming and breeding if they didn’t already know about them. Of course, even people totally ignorant about farming and breeding can acquire knowledge about them over time (and of course, that’s exactly what prehistoric humans eventually did).
But that’s not the sort of “trivially easy” education that Grumman was mistakenly asserting is all it takes to make people understand the fundamental concepts of modern medical theories of infection by microbial pathogens (unless they’re, you know, stupid or something).
When I was in elementary school, one of the other girls confided to me that the health lessons we were getting were wrong. Her father was a chiropractor, who knew that those germ things were irrelevant. I didn’t argue with her because if she wasn’t buying it from the school system, she obviously wouldn’t buy it from me.
She got her shots to make those poor, deluded people happy and defended her father’s beliefs because, hey, he was her father. She is not alone.
How to farm, where babies come from, and how people get sick are ideas that evolve in a society and that have stories and responsibilities attached to them. Following the stories attaches you to your family and your group. As Kimstu said, there’s a lot of gathered information there.
Your family is your safety and your support. There is no unemployment, no health insurance - there is your family and your village and the stories that tell how to act within the group and how to ensure your place in the afterlife. In times of crisis you circle the wagons and depend on each other.
If someone comes in with new explanations, they’re not giving them in a vacuum. The group already has explanations. That person is saying that your family, your village, everyone you know and love is wrong. And that person is not going to be there for you the way that your family will. So while it is possible to get new information to you, you’re going to be harder to convince during a crisis.
Perhaps, but if they want to remain Ebola-free, they’ll have to accept it.
People can respect “cultural differences.” Germs and viruses don’t.
Thanks Yllaria, you put it much better than I did.
And of course, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be working to educate people about modern germ theories of disease and techniques of disease prevention. I’m simply not falling for the thoughtless assertion that it would be “trivially easy” to educate them about it if only they weren’t so “stupid”.
Slightly tangentially…
I’ve spent a few years living in less economically developed countries. And, I confess, occasionally while viewing alien cultural values and practices through a western cultural lens, I too have caught myself staring disbelievingly while scratching my head and muttering something along the lines of ‘…is this entire fucking country stooopid?’ Not politically correct, I know, but it happens to a lot of us. Man, just ask any expat…
This ‘westerner-in-a-developing-country-who-thinks-that-everyone-is-dumber-than-him-syndrome’ can, I think, be chalked up to a few different things…
Vast numbers of people in very poor countries really are uneducated; not figuratively, they literally are. Someone who has never been formally educated can be tricky to speak to in any language, above and beyond basic transactions and greetings.
If you’re a foreigner abroad, and the locals are trying to speak to you in imperfect English, then they will normally sound dumb to you. When you don’t speak a language perfectly, you have to make compromises with nuance and style in order to get your message across. This might make you sound charming, but is more likely to make you come across as slightly idiotic caricature. Imagine living in a country full of idiotic caricatures…
Sometimes people do things for idiosyncratically cultural reasons - they make sense, but only to those who possess the cultural knowledge to understand why people do them. To those who don’t, it looks stupid-as-hell.
Still, none of the above really does much to address the OP.
Yeah, it’s stupid that people kiss the infected dead bodies of their relatives…
Thank you for clearing that up - I did indeed not call anyone an asshole, neither **orcenio **nor the OP.
Man, I don’t know why I even bother…
Yes, there are cultural practices in Africa which are dangerous and stupid (as there are everywhere) but there’s no reason to lump them all together as “African cultural practices” any more than there is to lump bathing in a river with rotting corpses floating in it and eating tiger bits for medicine as “Eurasian cultural practices”
And the only place I’ve ever been hit up for a bribe was Italy…
Other than these particular practices are being done in Africa and are the ones under discussion. When they happen in Eurasia and are the ones under discussion, then we’ll call them ‘Eurasian cultural practices’ to distinguish them from the ones in Africa. That the practices themselves are similar or identical isn’t particularly relevant. I doubt anyone here would have a problem of dissing their own stupid cultural practices as well, if that is your issue.
I guess we could say the “Liberian cultural practice at grid reference xyz, as done by Tribe X and implemented by Joe M’bok on Saturday the 15th of May (variant 2A of tribal practice Z)” if you really want to be pedantic.
Remember the last Ebola outbreak? No? The CDC received word of it and flew their team over to the Zaire as fast as they could. But the process took a couple of days due to irregular flights and poor roads. When they finally arrived in the village… well, the elders had it all under control. The victims were kept in a special hut and fed by food and water passed via trays. So the virus was kept contained, due to local vigilance and certain other African cultural practices.
But that tribe was a few hundred miles from the current outbreak. Which is a big part of the problem: in Liberia many people have no experience with Ebola, no familiarity with the germ theory of disease and too much exposure to corrupt and rapacious governments.
Except that you won’t, of course. You’ll talk about the separate cultural practices of Indians bathing in the Ganges and Chinese people consuming tiger organs as medicine. It won’t even occur to you to assume that just because these two customs happen to be found on the same geographical continent, it makes sense to talk about them as part of a continent-wide phenomenon. And you’ll be right, of course: it doesn’t make sense at all.
Any more than it would make sense to talk about, say, alcohol abuse among Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic and Vodou exorcisms among Haitian immigrants in Florida under the label of “North American cultural practices”.
But many people seem completely oblivious to the fact that it’s just as meaningless to talk about immensely diverse cultural practices in different parts of Africa as if they were part of some kind of common continental culture. It’s as though the fact that all Africans live in Africa makes other people somehow bizarrely incapable of distinguishing them as historically, linguistically and culturally separate groups of people.
Hmm, come to think of it, I seem to remember there’s some other characteristic almost all Africans share, but I can’t quite put my finger on it… Oh well, never mind, probably nothing to do with this odd phenomenon.
Hey, don’t put your prejudices on me. I know the difference between the words All and Some.
A question for anyone participating in this thread. Who thinks that the practices under discussion here apply to all Africans? Of a more general question: When any discussion of cultural practice take place, does that practice apply to everyone in that culture, or just the people who practice that particular aspect of the culture? I’m not asking what you think others might think, but what you think yourself. I doubt anyone here will say they don’t understand this, so I’m not sure who you think you’re being pedantic for?