CUlture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

CUlture - Essay Example Having announced free primary education in 1998, the government allocated a quarter of its budget to financing this venture and yet this was not enough to see it into completion. A continually escalating national debt and structural reliance on its richer neighbors, specifically, South Africa, are factors that have seen Lesotho engulfed in the present quagmire. In the Brazilian case as expounded upon by Nancy Scheper Hughes in her revealing testimonial of the excesses of shanty life, mothers seem to embrace almost fatalistic attitudes based on retrogressive cultural practices (Hughes, p.364). People seem to believe that evil spirits cause diseases (Hughes, p.366). Mothers refer to these illnesses as though they are caused by factors beyond their capacity to control and expect to be at the mercy of curable diseases. This is an example of one of the common ways that culture can be harmful to those who practice it. She also documents how mothers and older women claim that there exist fourteen to twenty one various types of child and infant illnesses, with systems ranging from a ‘hanging head and sickly pallor to a reluctance to suckle (Hughes, p.368). These ill-informed people can actually affect psychological systems of precociousness in a young or prospective mother who is encumbered with the fear that her child will be a victim of at least one of these diseases. In the Brazilian case, the poverty of these wretched mothers obviously contributes to their fatalistic view of life as far as their children are concerned. Unable to provide not only for their needs but also for their young, they adopt an unusual resignation to the harsh realities of shanty life and search for ways within themselves to accept inevitable death as normality. The church and its teachings as concerns the next life fits snuggly into this confusion as mothers