Custom-made confusion
IN TROUBLED times such as these, it feels more important than ever that we respect other cultures. All right, so they may do things differently, have different values, different beliefs, an altogether different way of life. But who are we to sneer, snipe or snigger? Live and let live, that’s what I say. You too? Super.
But then I see some of the stuff featured on new series EXTRAORDINARY RITUALS (BBC2, 9pm), showing us a selection of the world’s most unusual, outlandish customs, practised by other cultures for generations and I find myself thinking, ‘Oh, good grief, what in heaven’s name are these people playing at? That thing they’re doing there, for example. It really does look very, very wrong.’
Take the clip of some enormous Japanese sumo wrestlers clutching tiny, helpless babies, stomping around and yelling in their faces, deliberately making them cry their poor little hearts out.
“In Japan,” the programme explains, “they say a baby’s cry scares away demons. Parents hand over their babies in the popular belief that crying makes babies grow fast.”
See, this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. To me, this particular ritual, known as Naki Sumo, just looks horrendously cruel. And I suspect I’m not alone in reacting that way. In fact, I very much hope I’m not.
And yet I gather it is deeply rooted in Japanese culture. By all accounts, it dates back 400 years. And cruelty is clearly the last thing on these people’s minds. Quite the contrary.
So if respecting other cultures is the issue here, is my reaction wrong and these people’s behaviour right? Or is these people’s behaviour wrong and my reaction right?
Or neither, perhaps? Or maybe both? I’m so confused.
At least it makes it comparatively easy for me to form an acceptable opinion of some of the other rituals featured on this show. Rituals, that is, such as the one in Indonesia where the Torajan people, in an annual ceremony known as Ma’nene, remove their long-dead relatives from their tombs in order to change their wrappings (a gesture apparently intended to show their continued love) and, in the process, cheerfully pass around the dusty, rigid corpse, even taking selfies with it.
I’m happy to confess I find that weird. Weird but ultimately harmless, though, so I don’t have an issue with it. I feel much the same about synchronised swimming. That said, I’m more comfortable with the sort of traditions we have been seeing on BRITAIN BY BIKE WITH LARRY & GEORGE LAMB (Channel 5, 8pm). And I don’t just mean cycling. Tonight, in the Isles of Scilly (which are looking so thoroughly, eye-poppingly lovely, by the way, that I shall be selling up and moving there tomorrow), the chaps are getting understandably excited about the annual World Pilot Gig Rowing Championships, a rowing event which attracts huge crowds and hypercompetitive teams from all over. They also get to make fudge. Larry and George do, I mean.