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PARTISAN REVLEW
bodies and of gifts. Surely everyone on earth could profit from adopting
the traditions of the Kung, who avoid war because it is dangerous and
depend instead on expert defusers of quarrels. But there are also African
practices everyone would be better off avoiding, such as the violent an–
tagonism between the sexes among the Kamba and Pokot of Kenya.
African religious beliefs, however differently expressed, can be just as
damaging to their adherents as those of any Western religion, as in the
case of the prophecy which led the Xhosa in the mid-nineteenth century
to kill all their cattle.
It is possible to respond to my objections to unicultur3lism by argu–
ing that European historians from Herodotus to the preseIlt have treated
their own civilizations as the norm, against which the civilizations of
foreigners may be compared, usually unfavorably.
In
a famous passage,
Herodotus writes that because the Egyptians have a sky and a river differ–
ent from those of other peoples, "they have established for themselves
customs and laws different from those of other human beings; for in–
stance, women buy and sell in the marketplace, and the men sit at home
and weave ."
In
The Disuniting oj Al/lerica
Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr.
argues
for the superiority of Western civilization by mentioning African customs
that would seem particularly obnoxious to his readers, like female cir–
cumcision. But how can the damage done by writing with a pro–
European bias be undone by African writers adopting the same tech–
niques against Europe? Certainly it makes better sense to follow Asante's
advice and try "not to cast aside" other peoples' ways of thinking, but
rather to understand and appreciate them in their full social context.
It is also possible to remark in these discussions a tendency to gen–
eralize about the whole on the basis of a selection of parts.
Understandable as this practice may be, when such wide-ranging topics
are under discussion, the result is rhetoric rather than history. Is it really
possible to deduce, on the basis of a few remarkable customs such as
those described by Herodotus, that the Egyptians are fundamentally dif–
ferent from other people in all respects? If in Egypt men carried burdens
on their heads, and women used their shoulders (in contrast to the stan–
dard practice in Greece), what can that observation tell us? It can be
used as evidence that Egyptian women had greater freedom to move
about than Greek women, and that they could own property. But such
a difference in custom cannot be used to argue that Egyptian minds
worked differently from those of Greeks. Certainly Herodotus did not
think so.
But arguments about differing "mentalities" are frequently produced
as an argument for unilateral multiculturalism. As we have seen, Asante
believes that as a result of their different customs, Africans think about
