UNICEF recently estimated that 57 percent of Afghan marriages involve girls under 16. Girls as young as nine years old sometimes marry a man five, six, even nine times older than them. Women are legally obligated to have intercourse with their husbands, who may have multiple wives all with the complicity of local cultural and religious leaders. I'm not about to plug a campus-wide fundraiser or a panel discussion on women's rights; those would be great, but what I'd really like is just some passive outrage, which seems to be a difficult thing to find at Dartmouth these days.
Last term in my film class, I watched a movie produced in India in which a male suitor strikes his girlfriend as she begs for his forgiveness on her knees. When we analyzed the scene, a student suggested it was a melodramatic element that helped convey the characters' emotions. After we discussed this perspective, a student claimed it revealed the filmmakers' sexism because it portrayed a submissive woman passively accepting abuse. The professor cautioned the student not to bring a "liberal Western" bias to a foreign cultural context.
I agree with the professor in the sense that, as a film class, we lacked any substantial knowledge about Indian culture and their gender relations. We should hesitate when making claims about cultures that we know nothing of, but the limits of our neutrality have extended too far. Stoning homosexuals because of their sexuality, punishing a woman for refusing to fornicate with her husband, arranging marriages between pre-pubescent girls and grown men these practices are inherently and inexcusably immoral, no matter how long they've been practiced, which texts justify them or the demographic of those who commit them. As budding scholars we can work to better comprehend the historical context in which they originated, the sociological factors at work, and the religious or cultural motivations behind them. But, we shouldn't use this academic process to excuse these deeds. What happened in the film I watched might not be called domestic abuse in India at the time of its production, as it would be deemed here. Does my aversion to the movie, however, reflect a distinctly Western perspective or does it speak more to a broader concept of basic human rights? Moreover, cultures are neither uniform nor horizontal. Labeling a practice cultural' ignores the different intricacies and power dynamics that a culture encompasses.
It's understandable why professors refuse to use phrases such as, "I understand that this religious text justifies this practice, but I still believe it violates a person's fundamental human rights." For far too long, a feeling of religious and cultural superiority blinded Western scholars, and academia sometimes was overtly bigoted. Moreover, scholarship is a discipline best characterized by neutrality because academics should present the facts as they are without subjective judgments. But, most students plan to use their education to engage the world and its problems directly. If we continue to draw these conceptual boundaries and excuse our critical thinking, our liberal arts degree will be useless. Clearly, we want to avoid the arrogance that defined and continues to define some scholarship, but this new type of neutral discourse has hardly given us any additional cultural understanding.
Almost every term, Dartmouth ignites in controversy over a distastefully worded blitz. Students erupt with anger and disbelief over a student's failed attempt at humor. Yet, when it comes to an 11-year-old girl marrying a 52-year-old man, suddenly a classroom full of seemingly enlightened egalitarians advocate tolerance. And even more ironically, it seems that the more concerned people are with human rights and tolerance the more willing they are to make excuses for those who violate basic freedoms the most violently. I understand the reluctance to engage in different cultural situations with the purpose of comparing it to our own community. But, we should approach all cultures' conscious of how our own society influences us and then judge them according to what we consider universal human rights.
Just because a culture differs from ours does not make its practices moral, and at the very least, we should discuss what offends us and why. The vast majority of the time it will probably be from a lack of understanding. But, in the event that we object to forced marriages between pre-pubescent girls and men as old as their grandfathers, it's okay to make that known.
