#not that you can't kill people in a very self controlled nonshouty way. would love to go that way myself

[etirabys]

that ‘Inuit parents never yell at their children and raise them to have remarkable self control’ article is making the rounds again, and reminds me that I never know how to read ‘pop anthropology reporting cultural practices very different from mine’ articles because

My suspicion is that the average anthropologist/journalist is prone to projecting or exaggerating or straight up lying for motivations like ‘getting clicks’ and ‘inventing a counternarrative about human nature in order to push their pet theory (in their home society where they’re publishing) about how societies work or should work’

But human cultures are genuinely very diverse and you should expect to be run into a ton of real stuff from other cultures that blow your mind / make you suspect it’s fake

And the only way to satisfactorily verify whether a pop anthro article has accurately represented some very different culture is to deep dive existing literature and cross-reference descriptions of that culture from multiple sources (if they exist), or go talk to the people the article is about yourself. 

So the net effect is that I read articles and think “that would be cool if true. no way to tell, though. I’m going to try to pretend I didn’t read that”. Given that I should probably just reading them altogether