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Afterword:
Some Things We've Learned
A few years ago a student came to Peter with a request to do a
course of independent study on the subject of female modesty
across cultures. They discussed the idea for a while, Peter
confessing that the cross-cultural study of female modesty wasn't a
subject about which he knew a great deal, but that without actually
investigating the literature he could predict with some confidence what it
would show:
• that every culture everywhere has some concept that corresponds to
our notion of 'modesty';
• that within a given culture it will be applied differently to men and
women and differently to the powerful and the less powerful;
• that a given culture will regard its standards of modesty as 'natural'
rather than culturally determined;
• that 'modesty' will have a moral value and a given culture will regard
others with stricter standards as prudes and those with looser
standards as immoral;
• and that its content will vary widely and arbitrarily across time and
space; indeed, that what will be regarded as thoroughly immodest
in one place will be regarded as quite proper elsewhere.

This tells us something about the way anthropologists have come to
understand the social world. Reduced to its simplest terms, what Peter

-140-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction. Contributors: John Monaghan - author, Peter Just - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 140.
    
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