Hello and welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand, it’s a beautiful morning today. The sun is shining, and it’s beautiful orange and little red. And in a sailor’s world, we say that Nippin, a blue, red sky in the morning, navigation warning, red sky at night. Sailor’s delight. So this is supposedly a navigation warning coming ahead, probably, but at the moment, it just looks very beautiful as I look into the sky. Today, I want to share with you about just culture and why just culture is a flawed concept. In anthropology, we don’t start with definitions and academic arguments. Instead, we tell a story, because it is only through stories that we reach out to the hearts and minds of people. If I was to tell you date give you data or definitions that would be engaging with your rational mind, but I have no interest in that, because a rational discussion does not bring change. What brings change is when you touch people’s hearts. So this story is about a forklift driver who I interviewed in Dubai. His name is Khalid. He fell off from the forklift and fractured his leg. So and I remember vividly, Khalid lying in the bed when I was interviewing him, and he was more worried about the investigation than the pain that he was experiencing in his leg, and his immediate thoughts were, is it time for me to pack up and leave Dubai? Will I even receive my final salary for the month? So we chatted for a few minutes, and he told me everything that was good enough to write a report. And once we were done, I just asked him an open question. I said, Khaled, what have you learned from this accident? And his immediate response was, what is there to learn, sir, it’s God’s will. Wow. That response was a total shock for me. So I took Khalid’s root cause, as we call it, in risk and safety, and reported it back to the company. And I was told, this is that what you found, I tell you what we could have done much better with our just culture process. I didn’t raise the invoice. I didn’t even think the company understood the depth of the problem that they were facing. A few days later, I landed in Vancouver for an assignment as an anthropologist, you don’t just travel the world, you navigate between world views. So I was in a completely different world now, and I met with my good friend Rosa Carillo, and Rosa and I had some deep conversations about her forthcoming book, The Myth of individualism. And primed by our conversations, I started to become more aware of the symbols of individualism around me. On the breakfast table, I noticed a family of four, and each of them were eating. They had their own little packs of spreads, jams and butter. And so what that means is that individualism thrives on this kind of behaviors. It thrives on autonomy and the freedom to choose, even as a four years old child, you want to eat as you wish, not what you are told by your parents. So that’s quite powerful. And if you think about it, and you think it from my perspective, I come from a country where we share a bowl of freshly skimmed butter every morning for breakfast. We just leave it out there and we share between us. So the next morning in Vancouver, when I was doing a workshop, I shared this image of my own culture, of how we serve butter, and I put it against those tiny packs that I saw in the hotel room in the breakfast bar, and one of the participants said, Isn’t it more hygienic to serve butter in small packs? And then there was this awkward silence in the room, like I was wasting their time. This is so obvious. Why am I even sharing all these images with them? So notice how one myth, one belief, builds on another. Not only those small cubes of butter in Canada are about free choices, it is also good hygiene. So you can see how the same thing that is edible in one world becomes unhygienic in another world. And if you think about it, this notion is no different from what we consider pure and impure, right and wrong, sacred and profane and compliant and non compliant. It’s really fixed, because what is acceptable in one culture in one belief system is considered intolerant in another culture. So. And there are some really good books to read here. For example, risk and blame by Mary Douglas, or purity and danger is even better, by the same author, and they’re both free for download. I would recommend reading those books. But now think of Khalid. Let’s come back to Khalid. And the question is, how is it fair? And just to dismiss another person’s faith in Divinity when they say that it was God will and replace it with root cause. Here, I’d like to course, quote The famous cultural psychologist Richard who says that many of our constructs, such as justice, fairness and equity, come from laboratory research with Western educated population who do not travel very well to subject populations in other cultures. In that sense, I think just culture is a flawed concept because it automatically assumes that what is just, what is fair, what is pure, what is compliant, what is safe in one culture is universal to every culture. And I think that’s not just culture. That’s cultural imperialism, that’s arrogance, and we need to question these things, because this is a deep seated problem in the world of risk and safety, where we go and do audits on on a site, in a factory, on a ship, and we genuinely believe that our culture or our way of looking at the world is more superior to them, and we never actually take the time to engage with how they view safety, how they view the food that they eat, how they serve butter. We get so excited because it doesn’t fit with our world. And that’s not justice, that’s imperialism, that’s arrogance, that powers, that’s authority, and we need to question this. And I leave you with those thoughts. Thank you so much for listening, and I wish you a nice day.