But how can the development sector address the issue without undermining cultural traditions?
For example, in her paper "Why We Gather: Traditional Gathering in Native Northwest California and the Future of Bio-cultural Sovereignty," Risling Baldy describes how laws and policies of the dominant society can undermine the cultural environmental heritage of indigenous people.
Would it really undermine our cultural competitiveness?
My research in Botswana reveals a government fundamentally antagonistic to the human rights and welfare of the Bushmen minority, profoundly condescending and contemptuous of it, and acting with the intent to forcibly assimilate the Bushmen, undermine their cultural and social integrity, and render them dependent upon the government and its narrow economic and political interests.
Third, it is no coincidence that the current attacks on the welfare state and the public sector are accompanied by attempts to undermine core cultural and institutional freedoms – the jury system, the rights of trade unionists and minorities, and media freedom.
Much as it had been necessary for Machar to undermine the cultural institutions governing raiding among the Nuer, the SPLA had to disrupt such institutions in order to mobilize the Titweng.
Jaspers responded to this characterization of Germany by claiming that societies which undermine the cultural role of the bourgeois elite are inherently unstable, and that the educated bourgeoisie has a primary role to play in upholding the preconditions of democratic culture.
Historical relativism does undermine cross-cultural notions of beauty, but it reduces the record of any given period to data from which inferences can be systematically drawn.
Weber's problem with modernity originates from the fact that it required a historically unique constellation of cultural values and social institutions, and yet, modernization has effectively undermined the cultural basis for modern individualism and its germinating ground of disciplinary society, which together had given the original impetus to modernity.
They can also be undermined by cultural practices legitimised through parallel legal systems.
