Understanding Other Cultures

I have written a few times in recent months about Americans projecting their own values onto other cultures across both time and distance.  Unsurprisingly, a professional writer, Sarah Hoyt, has done it better.

We imagine how we might feel in the situation of Viking warriors or Indonesian teenagers or captured hunter-gatherer brides.  We haven't the faintest clue. I have taken to defending the Disney Princesses against their attackers, but this is indeed one of the great weaknesses of those movies. No, Pocahontas and Mulan would not act like American girls with interesting costumes. Not close. I will accuse that most Americans do not even understand the attitudes of their grandparents, or of citizens of the Anglosphere, nearly as well as we pretend to ourselves.

Anecdote: Sons #3 & 4 lived in Romania until they were teenagers.  They adapted and became spoiled Americans fairly quickly, though they retained some distinctives into adulthood. When they went back to Romania, and when they encounter Romanians in America or Norway now, they find they like less than half of them. They are very clear on how different Americans and Romanians are.