One of the comments that I often hear when my friends travel around the world is that they weren\u2019t able to find decent Italian food outside of Italy. They complain about ketchup on pizza or carbonara pasta full of mushrooms. Although I know they are sincerely distressed by what they find, I also try to remind them that assuming they can eat good Italian food outside of Italy is rather presumptuous. Perhaps they should have tried to eat local in order to really appreciate great cuisine. This is just an example of how often we neglect to understand other cultures because we focus on finding distinctive traits from our own culture within another tradition. More often than not, people are quick to judge a country negatively because of its different culture, and one of the issues that surrounds many discussions (besides bad Italian food!) is the role of women in society. There are many articles that denounce the mistreatment and inequality that women experience or label traditions as bad and unhealthy. I rarely find articles that portray a beautiful interpretation of the female role. For example, it would be nice to understand where the Quincea\u00f1era celebration for Latin American girls originated, or why Koreans don\u2019t often call their wives by their first name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have always viewed this as a consequence of people interpreting things through the lens of their own cultural perspective rather than from a culturally objective one. I do not intend to argue over whether or not this view is correct; for now, I want to focus on the idea that there are different cultures in the world and that each is the result of hundreds of years of life, food, and language evolution. Each followed a certain path over time, and what we see now\u2014good or bad, understandable or not\u2014is the culmination of all that history. Women and how they are understood is one of the aspects that changes from one country to another. If you think about it, even within different western cultures, women are interpreted differently\u2014we can\u2019t pretend to have the same perception of gender globally, just like we can\u2019t assume that we can eat amazing Italian food during a visit to Thailand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let\u2019s switch sides. Today, while celebrating women internationally, we will remember that cultures are different and that putting yourself in someone else\u2019s shoes to understand their perspective is invaluable. For once, let\u2019s rejoice in the fact that the world looks like patchwork art\u2014let\u2019s discover its beauty. Neglecting a culture just because we think it\u2019s wrong\u2026well, that<\/em> is what\u2019s wrong. First, we need to look at what we don\u2019t understand with a different pair of eyes. Only then can we give an informed opinion. So today, choose any country or culture that you are not too familiar with and learn something new about it (whether related to women or not). After you do that, share your new discovery with us on our Facebook page so that more people can learn new things!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Written by Noemi Clark, CEO at Athena Parthenos<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the comments that I often hear when my friends travel around the world is that they weren\u2019t able to find decent Italian food outside of Italy. They complain about ketchup on pizza or carbonara pasta full of mushrooms. Although I know they are sincerely distressed by what they find, I also try to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":185,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tipstricks"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2194"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2706,"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions\/2706"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.athena-parthenos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}