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unsupp0rted 1y ago
That's not a good measure. You have to live in a place for a while as a normal person (not a touring musician, even if a hippie) and be forced to do mundane things there before you can really gauge what you're up against. Get a bank account, get yelled at by the garbage man, walk through the same park every Tuesday, etc Usually it takes a minimum of 3 months or so. Sometimes 5 minutes is enough, sometimes it takes a couple years.
- fuzzfactor 1y ago
  >do mundane things there before you can really gauge what you're up against. I do agree completely but all it takes is one good person who is capable of making even a passing stranger feel welcome and you've got the example for cross-cultural co-operation. Even within an overall society dominated by cultural antagonism. >You have to live in a place for a while as a normal person This would be semantic to the extreme, but what if the only place you could live as a normal person is the place you are indigenous from? Like it was nobody's fault but it had always been that way and there was not very much you could do about it [0]. Of course everybody is indigenous to somewhere, but what if that very culture was lost or very nearly completely lost during your own lifetime? And you could see it coming from a young age because when it happens that fast it's obvious in ways that very few would be able to perceive otherwise. [0] Your only choices would narrow down to; not doing very much about it vs not doing anything about it :\
  - unsupp0rted 1y ago
    > all it takes is one good person who is capable of making even a passing stranger feel welcome No, that's not all it takes. After a bit of time in a place your brain can tell that's an outlier, and while it's a nice moment, it doesn't warrant updating your priors. For a tourist though, that's all it takes. The local people are "so kind" and "so welcoming" after that one outlier. Most people with an open mind can tell that very good cultures are very good, even if their own native culture is vastly different. You can tell when you're in Singapore, for example, that everything is unusually good (or put another way: that everything is way better than it is in the general region). And you can tell when you're in... um, I won't say... that everything is unusually bad. And it doesn't matter if you're a Mongolian nomad or a SF Bay technocrat or from a former soviet country that no longer exists, you can still tell which places are objectively very good or very bad. But not as a tourist.
    - fuzzfactor 1y ago
      I still think we're on the same page for the most part, I've long agreed with every word of your first comment. Now there can also be a very big difference between living in a place versus being born & raised in that kind of place. The latter being far more depth of immersion than a tourist or long-term visitor, and is actually the kind of detail that makes the difference between whether one is indigenous to that environment or not. Being born & raised in a "tourist town" surrounded by nothing but tourist towns is not all that common but may be extreme enough to give the kind of awareness that some indigenous "cultures" can present themselves to visitors in an almost completely imaginary way compared to "normal", and over the much longer term than others. That's the same kind of feeling that I get in a place that's unusually good or unusually bad, but where they have lots more going on than tourism the dose is minuscule by comparison. Well I do recognize that a minor facade can be completely unintentional but just as difficult to see beyond. Some people travel more than others too, or venture further from their origin, sometimes you need to play the role of a tourist, sometimes act the host. As well as you know how to do, in either case. What about when other cultures come to visit you more than you visit them? A lot of the same familiarity can be built anyway. When every visitor is from someplace different, they're not bringing much of their "culture" with them, rather they are relatively isolated and completely surrounded by whatever indigenous culture exists, for the better or worse, some things are just more inclusive or co-existable than others. OTOH when there's a crowd from one single culture passing into a foreign area, an almost infinitely larger amount of culture comes along for the ride. If they stop to stay for very long this might be the first time when the indigenous host has to "contend" with a foreign culture beyond trivial accommodation. This may be too challenging for some cultures to handle when you've got some lands where assimilation has been so successful that there's not a close second, and others not like that at all. And everything in between. The concept of better or worse can take on infinitely greater scale, maybe even reverse unexpectedly. Then there's the part when you return to your origin, and your particular indigenous culture has been almost completely lost, all that remains are the scarce dwindling "outliers" but you yourself are not any more indigenous to any other place. You could end up being an "ex-patriate in your own hometown". From your further comments I think you might agree what it feels like, when the same place migrates from "unusually one way" to become "unusually the other", left to themselves the entropy is strongly from bad to worse rather than vice versa.