Fish don’t have a word for water.
Cultures differ greatly in what members of the culture consider normal:
• The Dani people (Indonesia) will, as a sign of grief, cut off their own fingers after the death of a family member.
• The Malagasy (Madagascar), in a ceremony called “Famadihana”, disinter the corpses of their ancestors, rewrap them in cloth and dance while holding said corpses over their heads.
• The US has the highest estimated number of civilian gun owners in the world (120.5 firearms per 100 residents). Guns play a big part in the culture and political debate.
• A traditional dish called “casu martzu” in Italy (specifically on the island of Sardinia) is cheese (made from sheep’s milk) containing live maggots. The cheese and the maggots are consumed together.
• During Yom Kippur, Israelis (secular Israelis included) do not drive cars and mostly cycle. All shops are closed and there are no TV broadcasts.
• The OtjiHimba language, spoken by the Himba people (Namibia), groups and labels colors very differently compared to many other languages.
• In Germany, it was observed during a natural field experiment that native Germans were almost 2.4 times more likely to reprimand a stranger for a minor so-called “norm violation” (like littering) than non-natives (12.6% vs 5.3%). Also, a study comparing noise complaints made by German speakers from Germany with those made by German speakers from Belgium found that German participants were ≈3.3 times more likely than Belgian participants (24.0% vs 7.3%) to use the imperative and raise their voices (this is often, somewhat confusingly, called “direct” in the literature, but the example given is literally “Leute, bitte was leiser!”, which is more “commanding” than “direct” in everyday English).
with many other examples from all over the globe.
There are two things to note here:
1. These differences are objective, meaning they are not merely the perception of foreigners simply “misunderstanding”* what they are seeing. All those different customs and ways of life are either qualitatively different from how things are done outside the culture or are quantitatively/measurably different, regardless of one’s opinion on the matter. In my personal experience, many people (especially monolingual “westerners” who never traveled, never lived anywhere else and never actually tried to integrate into another culture) find this idea “controversial” and “pearl-clutching-worthy”, however, there is an entire scientific field, i.e. cross-cultural studies, dedicated to comparing, classifying and measuring said differences. The idea that everywhere, everyone is the same is not only self-evidently false, it is also unscientific. This obviously does not automatically mean that some places are inherently and immutably superior to other places, but a lack of obvious hierarchy ≠ a lack of measurable differences in ways of life.
2. Unique customs/ways of life are not entirely equivalent to their analogs in other cultures. Even if used to express similar emotions/intents, self-mutilation is, factually, not equivalent in every possible way to delivering a eulogy and eating together, politely trying to appeal to one’s shared humanity when a conflict arises is not functionally exactly the same as using the imperative, etc.
Even within the same culture, the way that individuals express themselves is not equivalent to one another (for example, crying to express grief vs “burying” oneself in work in order not to think about a recent loss), why would it be any different cross-culturally?
Also, many of those differences have tangible, unique consequences: consuming live maggots increases the risk of pseudomyiasis (though to be fair, no case was ever conclusively tied to “casu martzu” consumption), funerary cannibalism among the Fore people (Papua New Guinea) caused an almost 50-year-long epidemic of kuru (a rare prion disease), Germany is ranked, year after year (2023, 2024, 2025, 2026), very poorly by expats (from over 160 different nationalities) with one of the main named reasons being “perceived unfriendliness”, etc.
*- One could claim: “OK, but you might misunderstand the intent behind the actions”, which is a bit of a silly response because all that one could ever perceive from other people, be it interculturally or within one’s own culture, is their external behavior. From the inside, everyone has reasons (more on this later).
Human behavior, like that of all other animals, is the result of some internal information processing and environmental input.
One of the only things that makes humans unique is culture; the brain is often treated as the source of one’s choices (as opposed to simply being the place where choices happen), but the culture in which we were socialized plays an enormous role in how we parse reality.
Every sensory input is analyzed and compared with what we already know and what we expect to perceive next.
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Very few people would expect the incomplete sentence “Barbara opened the fridge and saw..” to continue with “..a sanguine giraffe from Jupiter who worked as a lawyer one one one”. This is no coincidence; we do not think in terms of the space of “all possible things that can be said”, instead, we use the much more constrained space of “things I personally find reasonable to come across”, which is shaped by, among other things, our socialization (which is directly downstream from one’s local culture). This is not unique to text and works the same for all other sensory modalities.
What one considers “normal” is a product of the culture and value system one grew up with.
People embody those values and, in a sense, “act them out”, even if they are not fully aware that this is what they are doing or actively try to express belief in those values.
If, where you live, it is customary to say “bless you” when someone sneezes, then most people just say it. If it is not, then most people do not.
This is also true for more complicated, more consequential behaviors: a population living under what someone might call a “dictatorship” is not necessarily aware that this label is appropriate in some contexts, individuals who grew up under a strict religious order might not think of themselves as living in a “theocracy”, etc.
For you, the way that you interact with other people is just the normality. Most people are not trying to be someone who is not themselves, but “themselves” is dictated, among other things, from the value system inculcated in them.
However, humans, regardless of culture, have a shared, near-universal biological template, which can be used as a fixed, canonical framework for examining consequences for one’s health and prosperity. This means that the consequences of adopting different value systems can be compared, analyzed, operationalized and measured. What we are left with is then not a case of purely “cultural (hyper-)relativism”, rather:
(★) From within a culture, different behaviors, regardless of how extreme their consequences might be with respect to our shared biological basis, are tolerated as “normal”.
It does not mean that members of the culture literally process physical pain differently, are unable to perceive certain colors, or cannot differentiate between aggression and friendliness. The difference is in how they conceptualize those things, in how appropriate a behavior feels to them and in what pops into their minds.
This also means that the idea of a “cultural misunderstanding” is somewhat of a misnomer; it is not necessarily the case that the intent of the behavior is misconstrued, rather, individuals from outside the culture are simply unable to relate to why members of the culture express their intents in the ways that they do.
I think the main takeaway is this:
People often do things “just because,” but just because people do things does not mean they would have chosen to be the way they are if they had tried another way of life.
If you only ever drank orange juice, water will taste weird.
