“Because cultural difference has long been conceived as a redemptive solution to the ambivalence of a Western culture established in the destruction of its own traditions, the appropriation of other aesthetic and spiritual modes is ultimately self-referential. This means that any attempt to perceive another culture based on the commodification and consumption of difference will fail. Understanding never really was the point.”

“Unless the relationship of law to Christianity is re-established, there is no future except destruction for Western culture.”

“The incompatibility here [between some anthropologies] rests with basic attitudes toward cultural others, which in turn rests on fundamentally different understandings of history. The one sees the Other as different and *separate,* a product of its own history and carrying its own hitoricity...The second sees the Other as different but *connected,* a product of a particular history that is itself intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes to such an extent that analytical separation of "our" history and "their" history is impossible. In this view, there are no cultures-outside-of-history to be reconstructed, no culture without history, no culture or society "with its own structure and history" to which world-historical forces arrive.”

“There are cultures on Earth that are more alien than some of the aliens in SF.More extensive quote: "the theme of immersion into different cultures comes naturally to science fiction, since a major theme of the genre is how humans interact with 'alien' cultures. Yet many of the so-called alien cultures of science fiction, particularly in its younger days, felt myopic, more like Western cultures even than other cultures on our own planet.”

“And thus woman has been definitely established as the Other. Western mythology itself was a patriarchal construct; through its portrayal of woman as the ambivalent projection of man's fears and desires, not as her own independent self, mythology translates the message that woman must respect a 'natural order of things' or risk responsibility for human chaos and destruction.”

“There are many different ways of approaching parenting as there are cultures. However, in non-industrialized cultures, the similarities are also striking. Extended nursing, co-sleeping, carrying the baby in close physical contact, responding promptly to cries or distress, never leaving a baby alone, are all virtually universal in traditional societies that have not become overly "westernized".”