To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
 
My Chinese housemate made a strange comment. At least it sounded pretty strange to my ears. She said something to the effect that I must be considered beautiful in my culture! (It's difficult for me to not sound vain in saying this!) I was quite taken aback by the "in my culture" bit because I usually see someone as beautiful or not. Obviously my perception of beauty would come from a cultural lens but that would be true of everything I say or see or do so I would never consciously ask myself if the person is beautiful "in my culture" or in general because what would general mean to me? I cannot take off a cultural lens and wear a general one. My cultural lens is also my general lens and if someone looks beautiful or handsome to me then they are that to me...I wouldn't be able to say that they are that "in their culture" or “my culture” or “in general”. Which is why I was quite surprised by her question because it almost sounded like a backhanded compliment though I don't think it was meant in that way at all.

I asked her what she meant and she was not really able to explain it except for pointing out that I had "big eyes" which in her view was a mark of beauty (which sounded like she was applying her own cultural standard). I started thinking more about this and it made sense to me that different cultures based on physical characteristics may have different standards of beauty. But I found it curious that they would think about their own standard of beauty as applied to people within the culture as "cultural" and not "general". I cannot say whether Indian women I think of as beautiful would be considered beautiful in a "general" sense or a cultural sense. But that begs the question, what is the "general" sense? Isn't every perception of beauty a cultural one?

I guess what we really mean when we say general is actually implicitly Western. And beauty by Western standards would obviously mean a Western ideal of it. This framing of the Western as the "general" or in other words "universal" makes the suggestion that Western constructs or aesthetics are somehow superior to local or cultural ones; this seems strange given the fact that Western nations are also specifically cultures with their own cultural standards which have no objective claim to be considered superior or universal. If there were such a claim, it would have to be evaluated on some standard too, and whose standard would that be?

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 11:32 pm 0 comments
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