The Repugnant Cultural Other. This was new to me a couple years back. I was reading this book called How to Think and the author of that book, Alan Jacobs, introduces us to a long time anthropology professor at UC Santa Cruz named Susan friend Harding and

this lady sounds like she's absolutely brilliant and very brave

academically one of the things that she decided she wanted to do all the way

back when she was a graduate student was an ethnography that is an ethnic

study a cultural study on a minority group that does life a little differently than most people, she wanted to do a study

like that on fundamentalist Christians.

What an interesting thing.

And even the premise of that is interesting because what she's saying is that this is a group worthy of being studied in this way because they really are very different even though they live right next door in the same community.

Now look, I know there's some of you were like, well, I'm kind of a fundamentalist Christian,

what the heck is going on here?

No judgment, I'm not making any statement one way or another about who does Christianity

right or wrong or how many rules there should be or how you should dress.

I don't know any of that.

I don't know.

Just do whatever you want.

Think whatever you want.

What I'm saying is that to most people in Western civilization, fundamentalist Christianity with tremendous conservatism and a little bit more

orientation toward particular social and behavioral norms within the community is different.

It is other to most of us. But Harding recounts

running into opposition from her advisors and her professors and everything, and she sensed

that they would be fine with her doing an ethnography on some barely

contacted tribe in the Amazon, Ecuador or something or some group in rural Africa

...