Bizarre practices and customs in Africa

[rousseau]

I came across this article a few weeks ago:

The Secret Killings of Twins in Nigeria

And after following Al Jazeera for a while this type of thing pops up now and then. Strange and sad, but also interesting.

What are some other strange customs on the continent? And why do they happen?

 

[Sarpedon]

They seem strange to you because you have a different cultural context.

While it is definitely bad these days to be killing people over these old fashioned superstitions, which tend to persist in areas of the world with lower standards of wealth and education, there's really nothing unusual about it. Every culture traditionally eliminates undesirables, and have various arbitrary means of deciding who those undesirables are.

 

[rousseau]

They seem strange to you because you have a different cultural context.

While it is definitely bad these days to be killing people over these old fashioned superstitions, which tend to persist in areas of the world with lower standards of wealth and education, there's really nothing unusual about it. Every culture traditionally eliminates undesirables, and have various arbitrary means of deciding who those undesirables are.

That's fair, but I would still go as far as calling such practices bizarre. I wasn't sure what to title the thread, but I suppose it could have been more culturally sensitive. At the same time I think it captures the type of thing I'm going for.

I think you could also call a lot of Westernized cultural customs bizarre, but what's interesting to me about stuff like twin killings is how extremely arbitrary it is.

 

[Sarpedon]

The theory is that having two babies at once imposes a burden on the mother that threatens her survival more than just one at a time. Thus they are considered unlucky.

However, the desire of people to find reasons for human behavior is one of our biggest biases. Perhaps there is no reason.

Black cats and white dogs being considered unlucky is arbitrary. Tuesday's child being full of woe is arbitrary. Lots of things are arbitrary.

 

[Politesse]

Bizarre is a purely relative term.

We kill all kinds of people in our culture. Often for monetary gain. Technically a crime, sure, but so are these twin killings (indeed, they not even really be happening, but that is another question).

You ever think how weird it is to kill someone for a little piece of cotton with another dead guys' face on it? The dollar itself is meaningless. Just an object. Costs very little to produce. But, in that it represents an idea that is real and meaningful, it is real and meaningful. Money becomes real when we make it real by treating it as real in our social interactions.

Other cultures have different symbols. Arbitrary, sure, but almost all symbols, unless they are purely onomatopoetic, are arbitrary in form. It is social consensus that turns paper into "money", the kicking of a rubber ball into a "celebrity", a disobedient daughter into "dishonor", or a cool glance into "sorcery". And everyone's customs seem bizarre and hardly worth killing over, to someone with a different background... and without the cultural context to explain them. With that context, symbols and symbolic associations become as real as anything else, because they can predict human behavior, and behavior is certainly real.

 

[skepticalbip]

I consider male circumcision to be a rather bizarre practice but it is common in several countries, including the US.

Also there is body modification like tattoos and body piercings.

China once did foot binding but I understand that has stopped.

"Honor killings" are a thing among some Muslim groups in the mid-east - sister or daughter "shames" the family, kill her.

Then there is neck stretching that is practiced in some areas of Asia and Africa.

 

[bilby]

Foreign countries are like the past - they do things differently there. (Apologies to L P Hartley).

 

[rousseau]

Humming and hawing about how to reply to the good posts above. For one thing, I should have worded the OP differently, but do grant myself that what I'm calling 'bizarre' practices exist everywhere. I mean, even standing for a national anthem, let alone singing the national anthem, before sports events, I find that entirely strange.

At the same time, on Africa:

The tribespeople believe, according to Margret Ekesua, a missionary with Nigerian Pentecostal church Assemblies of God, that twins are “demons who suck their blood at night” and “predestined to kill either parent or both”.

Or

Albinism

On a Thursday night in early March, a Malawian man named Gilbert Daire was woken by the sound of people trying to drill through his wall. He was convinced that hunters had come to kill him for his body parts.

I'll admit I didn't start the thread in a culturally sensitive way, but let's re-word it. What can we make of these extreme superstitions? What do they say about us? And if you don't want to pick on Africa, what does superstition across the world say about us?

 

[abaddon]

There are reasons but they disappear in time and then the behavior continues because of tradition.

Why kill twins? Because they suck the parent's blood and might eventually kill them, as stated in the quote. IOW, they're a drain on resources. Sarpedon already explained that.

Selling body parts of "special" people is probably explainable too in terms of "resources". Nature is exchanges of energy at different levels. If there aren't rare minerals in the ground, there might be trade-material, in plant or animal or human form, above ground.

Why are there sacred cows in India? The anthropologist Marvin Harris postulated it's because the dried droppings become easily available fuel for the fires, so the trees that support the life in the area don't get cut down. When that reason is gone and people cut the trees down, they still go on thinking the cow's sacred to the gods.

The interesting thing, to me, is there is thinking here but it's not individuals who deliberate on these behaviors. It seems more like "thinking" by a collective unconscious - environmental cues affecting human's instincts to manage their behaviors collectively.

 

[TSwizzle]

I'll admit I didn't start the thread in a culturally sensitive way, but let's re-word it.

I would reword it as a barbaric ritual carried out by ignorant, possibly superstitious, savages.

 

[skepticalbip]

... snip...

I'll admit I didn't start the thread in a culturally sensitive way, but let's re-word it. What can we make of these extreme superstitions? What do they say about us? And if you don't want to pick on Africa, what does superstition across the world say about us?

It says that humans are tribal and gullible and will accept, believe, and embrace almost anything they hear from their peer group.

 

[rousseau]

... snip...

I'll admit I didn't start the thread in a culturally sensitive way, but let's re-word it. What can we make of these extreme superstitions? What do they say about us? And if you don't want to pick on Africa, what does superstition across the world say about us?

It says that humans are tribal and gullible and will accept, believe, and embrace almost anything they hear from their peer group.

I was thinking something like:

It says that humans are tribal and gullible and will accept, believe, and embrace almost anything they hear from their peer group.. if the belief offers a material benefit.

I can envision a situation where a couple people conjure up a justification to kill their twins because they place an unnecessary burden. The wisdom is accepted because it offers material or psychological benefits.

My conclusion wouldn't be that this makes these people savages, though, but instead the very opposite that the image of our species as born good and righteous is basically an illusion. Morality is contingent on social customs, and economic hardship or lack thereof. Only when a person reaches true economic security and wisdom is something like real morality possible.

 

[abaddon]

Oh, the thread's about ideology and moralizing... I thought it was a science forum.

 

[rousseau]

Oh, the thread's about ideology and moralizing... I thought it was a science forum.

It would be nice to know which post you're referring to. I wouldn't describe much of the above as moralizing, except maybe this post:

I'll admit I didn't start the thread in a culturally sensitive way, but let's re-word it.

I would reword it as a barbaric ritual carried out by ignorant, possibly superstitious, savages.

What is partly what I was responding to.

 

[Politesse]

Oh, the thread's about ideology and moralizing... I thought it was a science forum.

Education in the social sciences is somewhat lacking these days.

 

[abaddon]

It would be nice to know which post you're referring to. I wouldn't describe much of the above as moralizing...

It was a reaction to the 3 posts before it. TSwizzle's "savages". Then skepticalbip's summation of "humans". Then you correctly responded with how "benefits" is more descriptive; but then speculated about what it takes to develop "real morality".

All irrelevant to the "why's" of social customs that seem strange to us.

I didn't want to get into it and derail the thread, but just followed an impulse to express "Oh, this isn't the convo I thought it was, so I'm outta", that's all. If social progress to "true wisdom" is the interest, that's fine, carry on. For my part, the only way I could stay interested is if there's description without the "We secular Euros are so enlightened it hurts" indignation stuff creeping in overmuch.

 

[rousseau]

It would be nice to know which post you're referring to. I wouldn't describe much of the above as moralizing...

It was a reaction to the 3 posts before it. TSwizzle's "savages". Then skepticalbip's summation of "humans". Then you correctly responded with how "benefits" is more descriptive; but then speculated about what it takes to develop "real morality".

All irrelevant to the "why's" of social customs that seem strange to us.

I didn't want to get into it and derail the thread, but just followed an impulse to express "Oh, this isn't the convo I thought it was, so I'm outta", that's all. If social progress to "true wisdom" is the interest, that's fine, carry on. For my part, the only way I could stay interested is if there's description without the "We secular Euros are so enlightened it hurts" indignation stuff creeping in overmuch.

That's fair. Na, your post above interests me more, I've just just not generated a reply to it yet. I thought I'd take a short detour to bring post-conventional thinking into play, which I think is fair game, but yea I'd probably avoid making the thread about morality. Because I know what you mean, and this forum can be bad for it.

ETA: I would say I'm interested in conclusions about our nature, but yea not in reference to the secular.

 

[rousseau]

Oh, the thread's about ideology and moralizing... I thought it was a science forum.

Education in the social sciences is somewhat lacking these days.

This is true too. Mine's pretty much limited to a bit of Peter Berger and what I've gleaned from a lot of study of science, history, and religion. I've read a little on Native customs, but not much.

Guess you can forgive me, I'm only 32 with a science and comp sci degree .

 

[rousseau]

There are reasons but they disappear in time and then the behavior continues because of tradition.

I've heard this a couple times. Berger's 'Social Construction of Reality' went into depth about this kind of process when I read it. People are born into a culture and accept that culture as ipso facto reality, as they have no outside frame of reference.

Fairly prevalent. Even in the Western world things like school and education systems. We take that as a normal thing that's done, but don't ask 'why', 'where did this originate', and the answers to those questions are really interesting (but probably unknowable for most).

 

[Jobar]

“Twin babies, according to our belief, are not humans. They are seen as danger to the existence of the entire community because our ancestors told us that they have strange powers. We see them as gods among men. So at birth, the entire village is alerted that a threat and perhaps an evil has been born into the community.”

As Sam Harris put it-

In many ancient cultures whenever a nobleman died, other men and women allowed themselves to be buried alive so as to serve as his retainers in the next world. In ancient Rome, children were sometimes slaughtered so that the future could be read in their entrails. The Dyak women of Borneo would not even look at a suitor unless he came bearing a net full of human heads as a love offering. Some Fijian prodigy devised a powerful sacrament called “Vakatoga” which required that a victim’s limbs be cut off and eaten while he watched. Among the Iroquois, captives from other tribes were often permitted to live for many years, and even to marry, all the while being doomed to be flayed alive as an oblation to the God of War; whatever children they produced while in captivity were disposed of in the same ritual. African tribes too numerous to name have a long history of murdering people to send as couriers in a one-way dialogue with their ancestors or to convert their body parts into magical charms. Ritual murders of this sort continue in many African societies to this day.

It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious. They are the product of what certain human beings think they know about invisible gods and goddesses, and of what they manifestly do not know about biology, meteorology, medicine, physics, and a dozen other specific sciences that have more than a little to say about the events in the world that concern them.

Which is not to say that mostly non-religious and scientifically savvy societies do not exhibit practices that appear strange and bizarre to other societies. But I would say that the more skeptical the society, the fewer practices truly harmful to the society as a whole, and individuals within them, exist. And we're still learning; if our species survives, we can hope that over time harmful, meaningless or counter-productive rituals will grow fewer and rarer.