About the discovery of cultural diversity

To discover the cultural diversity of human society, to learn the languages and local customs of even one people or group different from our own is a difficult goal to achieve. A remarkable exception, as Kwame Anthony Appiah so writes in his book Cosmopolitanism, might be Sir Richard Burton, a victorian adventurer who not only succeeded to learn the languages and the customs of many people, from India to Africa, but also was known to melt and disappear into the local crowds.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, in Travels with Herodotus, describes how he tried to make his someone else's culture but realizes how difficult the task is. In his words:

"It was a kind of malady, a dangerous weakness, because I also realized that these civilizations are so enormous, so rich, complex, and varied, that getting to know even a fragment of one of them, a mere scrap, would require devoting one's whole life to the enterprise. Cultures are edifices with countless rooms, corridors, balconies, and attics, all arranged, furthermore, into such twisting, turning labyrinths, that if you enter one of them, there is no exit, no retreat, no turning back. To become a Hindu scholar, a Sinologist, an Arabist, or a Hebraist is a lofty, all-consuming pursuit, leaving no space and time for anything else."
(Travels with Herodotus, Chinese thought)

This geometric view of a culture reminds me of Samir, my arabic teacher, who, confronted to a horde of rationnally-minded students, eager to understand a culture along a single linear line, from A to Z, used to describe it instead as a sphere, where there is no beginning and no ending.