Can protecting culture play a role in advancing human rights, particularly for minorities and indigenous populations?
There is a long history of confrontation between cultures, and this confrontation continues in the present as well. In some cases, we see a lot of intolerance, where people look at other human beings and think, “Well, we don’t really understand their culture, we don’t believe in what they do and therefore they’re inferior.” But when anthropologists, historians and others look at the achievements of other cultures, they find not ignorance but often insight, understanding that brings benefit to their own culture as well. At one time, everybody’s culture was innovative. It’s hard to say where the next insight will come from, where we’ll solve the problem of cancer, for example. It may happen in the medical laboratories of the United States, it may happen in the laboratories of China or India, but it also may be in the folk knowledge, of a healer, a practitioner from the Amazon rain forest or central Africa. So I think we have a great deal to gain from each other’s cultures. I look at cult
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