# Is there any necessary value in preserving a traditional cultural practice? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 8, 2014, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984 "2014-05-08T16:48:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2014, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/41 "2014-05-19T23:01:00Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > It’s a nice idea, but the devil is in the details as they say. You have to make the following decisions wisely without offending people: . . . I believe a commission (new bureaucracy!) can make the decisions relatively wisely. We already have things like the National Endowment for the Arts. Without offending people? Not possible! It is (mthematically!) possible to offend the fewest possible number of people, but, believe me, if you don’t include the Left-Handed Sewer Flute in the Civic Orchestra, someone is gonna get offended…and if you do include it, someone else is gonna be peeved. It’s a classic no-win situation. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2014, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/42 "2014-05-20T00:12:12Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > I believe a commission (new bureaucracy!) can make the decisions relatively wisely. We already have things like the National Endowment for the Arts. > > Without offending people? Not possible!.. That was more or less my point. Saying “we’ll fund traditional cultural practices” sounds nice, until you try to actually think about managing the funding on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis. Someone will claim that your Highland Games are not accurate because people are wearing kilts of the wrong pattern, gotta respect “traditional” cultural practices, none of this modern stuff plz kthx. Someone else will claim that it doesn’t matter because kilt patterns weren’t standardized until 1800, but that the real problem is that Scots-Irish people from Ulster are being marginalized by the Games’ brochure being written in a Glaswegian dialect rather than in Ulster Scots, and why aren’t there any Ulster Scots on the board? Discrimination! Then someone else says that there should be separate funding for Nova Scotians because MacAleister (1995) identified several cultural distinctives of Canadian Maritime Scottish heritage that had diverged from Scotland by the time of World War 1. Then someone else asks why you don’t have any West Virginia hillbillies of Scottish borders descent performing next month, my mom said they have preserved medieval fiddle tunes of the pre-Union Royal Court of the Kingdom of Scotland the best. You can’t win. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2014, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/43 "2014-05-20T01:20:43Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > That was more or less my point. Saying “we’ll fund traditional cultural practices” sounds nice, until you try to actually think about managing the funding on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis. Someone will claim that your Highland Games are not accurate because people are wearing kilts of the wrong pattern . . . You can’t win. Grin! The truth. It’s sort of like writing history. It’s incredibly messy, and difficult, and is an ongoing puzzle. So-and-so said xyz; it’s in his diary. But You-know-who, in his diary, claims that s-a-s only intended to give that speech, but was prevented by a fire… We just have to muddle through as best we can. I think the trick is not to cave in to despair. I have actually heard people insist that history can never be written accurately. This, I think, is hogwash. Even if some details are wrong, the overall scope can be comprehended. So with funding for arts and cultures: if we get it somewhere close to right, we’re doing posterity a favor. We can’t save living recreations of every obscure social or cultural tradition, ritual, or celebration. But we can save some, and we can use public funding to bail out a few of the more popular ones which, nevertheless, aren’t popular enough to be profitable on their own. Alas, the annual Groot Festival at Thalergrad is lost to us forever. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2014, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/44 "2014-05-20T02:34:12Z")
“Tradition” is fluid and has always changed. A lot of “traditional” African practices, for example, have their origins in the 1950s. Tradition is just a response to the environment, like anything else. That said, many traditions are adaptive, and that makes it important to distinguish between someone freely choosing to break from tradition, and someone being coerced in to it. To give an example, the Europeans set up European schools systems in Africa, complete with European schedules. Unfortuantely, this is not suited for many local crops, and in some places the school year starts exactly as the entire community is focused on the fall harvest. This is not people freely choosing to adopt a more European education schedule, this is something being imposed without much thought to the reality on the ground. And this isn’t always an overt imposition. In Africa, the Europeans are no longer running school systems. But the prestige associated with being more “European” lives on, to the detriment of everyone involved. I don’t think there is an easy answer, being that as long as there is power, there will be imbalances. But there are a lot of smart people thinking of creative ways to preserve their cultural legacy, and I’m pretty confident that the balance is shifting. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/45 "2014-05-21T01:41:58Z")
It is of trivial interest–one might say an academic hobby for dominant and educated cultures- to document dying cultures and languages. But there’s no moral imperative and minimal practical value. Cultures and languages are inventions and frequently are not only pointless but sort of lame. In a very general sense we can learn from the past but then again we don’t nor do we pay much attention to peripheral and irrelevant past practices. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/46 "2014-05-21T01:49:57Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > But the prestige associated with being more “European” lives on, to the detriment of everyone involved. > > I don’t think there is an easy answer, being that as long as there is power, there will be imbalances. But there are a lot of smart people thinking of creative ways to preserve their cultural legacy, and I’m pretty confident that the balance is shifting. I have to say that I find it hard to believe any culture is so stupid as to allow a European school start date from prior colonizers to influence farming negatively. Please tell me this is a just so story to help explain ongoing marginal crop results since independence. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/47 "2014-05-21T02:52:46Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > I have to say that I find it hard to believe any culture is so stupid as to allow a European school start date from prior colonizers to influence farming negatively. Please tell me this is a just so story to help explain ongoing marginal crop results since independence. When you have a bunch of subsistence farmers, it’s not the crops that suffer. Students typically miss the first few weeks of school, and trickle in as the harvest wraps up. Colonialism wasn’t that long ago- your mother would have grown up in it. And it was far from a clean break. It was only a few years ago that France finally announced they were stepping away from their hands-on management of post-colonial states. Furthermore, it’s not like African countries entered independence with a well-developed cadre of education experts ready to redesign and staff a completely new education paradigm from scratch. With sharply limited resources, countries chugged along with the marginal model that was already set up. Unfortunately, the idea that Africans are dumb and Europeans know how to do things right has been internalized, and at this point it is hard to change. That said, new models of schooling are being piloted, and they are doing great. “Under tree” schools serving nomadic pastoralists are producing great results. A set of private schools where teachers work off of a regimented standardized scripts is having surprisingly good results. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2014, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/48 "2014-05-21T23:35:37Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > I have to say that I find it hard to believe any culture is so stupid as to allow a European school start date from prior colonizers to influence farming negatively. Please tell me this is a just so story to help explain ongoing marginal crop results since independence. However, “tradition” does exert some inertia on the process of adapting practices. E.g. Summer Vacation in US schools was traditionally intended so that children could go home and work on the farm during the months that the most work had to be done. Nowadays, the percentage of kids who live on a farm _and_ need to work in the fields all day in the summer is much lower than it used to be, but the tradition has remained. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/49 "2014-05-22T00:04:25Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Why? I think a language disappearing from history is a bad thing only if it has not been recorded so that it can be studied. In my opinion more people speaking the same language is a good thing for ‘peace and understanding’. I think the existence of different languages is a protection against, um, what would you call it, linguistic essentialism. As it is, we have enough screwballs who think words are magic. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2014, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/50 "2014-05-22T01:44:29Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > I think the existence of different languages is a protection against, um, what would you call it, linguistic essentialism. As it is, we have enough screwballs who think words are magic. Also…different languages are differently pretty. Verdi’s operas, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, lose almost all of their beauty when translated. A Hopi ceremonial chant, in English, loses nearly all its grace. Some cultural practices should be preserved, as they are lovely and elegant. The annual [tomato-throwing festival](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Tomatina) in Buñol, in Spain, could vanish without any great loss to human civilization… ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2014, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/51 "2014-05-23T18:51:17Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > However, “tradition” does exert some inertia on the process of adapting practices. E.g. Summer Vacation in US schools was traditionally intended so that children could go home and work on the farm during the months that the most work had to be done. Nowadays, the percentage of kids who live on a farm _and_ need to work in the fields all day in the summer is much lower than it used to be, but the tradition has remained. Ya, but not at the cost of either education or farming. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2014, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984/52 "2014-05-23T19:15:13Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > Ya, but not at the cost of either education or farming. Are you kidding? Summer vacation has a very well known negative impact on education, especially for low income students. The average student loses about a months worth of learning over the break, with that loss concentrated on low income students who cannot afford expensive summer enrichment activities. It also has a negative impact on nutrition and health. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-necessary-value-in-preserving-a-traditional-cultural-practice/687984.md?page=2)