What is Fijian culture like?

Are laws, policies or norms that exist to protect the purity of specific bloodlines (whether it's "you can only marry a person from our culture" or "anti-immigration for the purpose of retaining culture") racist/xenophobic? Justify your beliefs

• In other words, where do you stand on assimilation and preserving your culture and why? At what point does assimilation (melting pot, not salad bowl) become an attack against preserving your culture? Is preserving your culture ever a good thing? This is different from sharing your culture and sharing in other people's cultures. This is "I will do what my culture does, and you do what your culture tells you to and we won't interfere". For example, a parent may ask a child to marry someone from his or her own caste, country, bloodline (what have you), with the excuse that "it is better for you to be with someone more like you". Does this indicate that "people like you" can only be from a certain country, certain culture, and inevitably indicate a subtle level of superiority? Is wanting your children, family members, societies to encourage people to marry their own, procreate with their own, keep the culture preserved and not tainted by mixing another culture's values with it considered a xenophobic/racist attitude? In a macro setting, if everyone thought that they should keep to their own, it could result in immigration laws (like Italy's tough citizenship laws where you have to prove blood links to a person who was an Italian citizen in the past). And herein comes the political side to the question. Do any laws, social norms or policies that stem from preserving culture from being "polluted" by another culture have any justified presence in a world that is aiming to eradicate discrimination?

• Answer:

  I can't give a simple answer to such a broad question. In the end it'll depend on whether the insular practice is reifying a system of oppression. There are some cultures and ethnic groups that believe in self preservation. There's nothing wrong with self preservation; it's not inherently supremacist. However, ideas of self preservation are often tied in with racist and classist ideologies. Insularity is not a crime in itself, but sometimes a dominant culture values insularity more than civil rights. A culture of insularity that denies rights is immoral. The answer depends on who is being insular, the extent of their insularity, and whether the insular culture is suppressing anybody's rights. I can imagine situations that are non-oppressive (indigenous people preserving their culture and religion), and oppressive (denying a minority group civil rights due to racism).