Quotes About Cultural norms

Taboo is not a word considered with any seriousness in the Old World.

Americans' reputation for friendliness is the absence of physicality. In the United States, no one ever touches anyone else and if they do so by accident, most apologize immediately. Physical contact is seen by many as analogous to trespassing on posted land,

South America is known as a "high contact" culture, meaning that residents stand closer to one another, touch one another more and are accustomed to more sensory stimulation than residents in, say, northern Europe, with Australians and North Americans believed to be more moderate in their cultural contact level.

In fact the taboo against killing and eating one's relatives is the most fundamental precondition if people are to live together and cooperate on a daily basis.

Los hombres nunca han tenido que poner en un plato de la balanza el placer sexual y en el otro la dolorosa prueba en que culmina el embarazo.

Los heterosexuales occidentales tienen tendencia a encasillar a los varones homosexuales en el estereotipo de lo afeminado. Sin embargo, desde los puntos de vista histórico y etnográfico, la forma más frecuente de relación homosexual institucionalizada se da entre hombres instruidos no para ser peluqueros o decoradores, sino guerreros.

One of the purposes of 'culture', after all, is to make seem 'natural' claims that are not naturally at all; the flimsier the argument, the more noisily it is supported.

The only place where housework comes before needlework is in the dictionary.

How do we define "normal?" Quite literally it comes from the Latin norma meaning "carpenter's square." Straight. And "abnormal?" That's from the Greek anomalos, and the Latin abnormis meaning "monstrosity.

All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say, "Yo Goober! Where's the meat?" I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad.

We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren't photoshopped and filtered.

social sanitation

This stage involves clear choices and sacrifices that to anyone with a patriarchal focus may look like dropping out.

For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves: I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.

Why are we so hard on ourselves?" Asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it's not that I'm so hard on myself exactly, it's that I've learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own.

I find it hard to believe that she was just seventeen, my age now, when she was married and taken halfway across the world. But then again, Mama was just seventeen when she gave birth to me, so it makes me realize how young we youth of today really are. Maybe we know more or think we know more, or do a lot more, but we haven't been through as much. We'd never be able to cope with the pressures our mothers and grandmothers went through.

But—what if other women decide they want to do what he did? Just stop being women and become men instead? There will be an epidemic. Everyone will want to be a man." I was very quiet. She had just revealed a lot about how she felt as a Mormon woman.

is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Human beings today thus enter into each and every social interaction with me-motives, sympathetic you-motives, egalitarian motives, group minded we-motives, and a tendency to follow whatever cultural norms are in effect.

Cultural norms do not create morality, only collectivize and objectify it, and institutions may go a step further and sacralize it.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice...for we have no other criterion of reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.

Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. It's not something that any culture, religion or tradition propagates.

Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.