Cultural reductionism is defined as reducing a culture to a few simple concepts without considering their place in time and context. For example, “The Sami are reindeer herders in Northern Scandinavia” would be a reductionist statement if it were left at that. Although statements such as these can be easy to grasp for new learners, they also tend to mislead and obscure the complexity of the culture under discussion. For example, to say that “Americans are independent thinkers who fight for freedom” doesn’t tell us much about Americans, independent thought, or the fight for freedom. These concepts sometimes fall under dispute, they are certainly embedded in the time of the Revolutionary War (at which no living American was present), and the details of American life are left unclear.
Avoid Unilinear History
Unilinear history is the representation of time and events as if they followed a coherent, unidirectional line of progression. History is under constant reevaluation, renegotiation, and is presented differently depending on the perspective of the presenter. It is also rewritten to accommodate the perspective of the reader. Neat timelines and chronologies are the result of much lip biting and random fact sorting on the part of historians.
Avoid Univocal Perspective
No culture is made up of one person, or even one type of person. If you were asked to paint a complete picture of American or Norwegian life, could you? Life gets played out differently depending on a person’s gender, age, sexual orientation, relative status, ethnic affiliation, professional memberships, political orientations, kinship relations, etc. Cultures are inherently full of tensions and contradictions amongst their members. That’s what makes them interesting.
Be careful when drawing parallels
That’s not to say that parallels aren’t useful – they can be when trying to do a comparative evaluation or to draw upon emotionally evocative issues. While we might consider comparing the situation of the Sami with Native American cultures as indigenous people, it’s important that they are considered in their own right and that parallels aren’t falsely drawn because both groups happen to belong to a class of people that we’ve categorized as indigenous. Both groups have their own unique sets of cultures, neighbors, traditions, beliefs, languages, and historical circumstances.
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