loading . . . In the Mother’s Eyes/ Reverie, Reflection, and the Cultural Mirror: Part II **Dr Wiola Rebecka:**
(Continued after Part I)
Years ago, someone shared a memory with me — quiet, almost incidental, but deeply revealing. She was eight at the time, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and it was one of the first moments she became aware that the world was shaped by invisible cultural boundaries.
“We were walking through New York City,” she recalled, “when we passed a group of tourists eating grilled squid — glistening, smoky, skewered on sticks. My grandmother wrinkled her nose and leaned down to whisper, ‘How can they eat that? Like rubber tires.’ She wasn’t angry — just bewildered. A wall went up in that instant. Not hostility, just a kind of discomfort, like stepping into unfamiliar weather.”
She paused before continuing. “Later that afternoon, we went to our Polish church. The scent of incense, the low murmurs of prayer — it all felt sacred, right, ours. My grandmother didn’t think she was judging anyone. She was just sure that her way was the normal way.”
That story stayed with me, not because it was cruel or shocking, but because of its ordinariness. A fleeting moment, easy to overlook — and yet it revealed so much. It was one of those quiet instants in which a child glimpses the silent architecture of belonging and exclusion.
Only much later, she told me, when studying cultural psychology, did she find the language for what she had witnessed that day. Ethnocentrism — not a loud or conscious bias, but a quiet reflex: the tendency to see one’s own cultural world as the default, the baseline, the correct frame. As Lisa Worthy and others have written, ethnocentrism isn’t simply an individual prejudice. It’s a cognitive rhythm shaped by education, family, ritual, and repetition — a rhythm we don’t notice until we’re suddenly out of step.
It shows up when we think our way of grieving is healthier. When we assume romantic love must be the foundation of marriage. When we see a veiled woman and presume oppression. Or when we try to help—without asking what help means in someone else’s world. Even our compassion can be shaped by ethnocentric logic.
But culture is not a hierarchy. It is not a ladder of progress with us at the top. It is a landscape of meaning, shaped by place, memory, and need.
I learned this not just from books, but from being humbled towards otherness towards a different cultures.
Once, in a remote village in northern Japan, someone was staying with a host family. After dinner, they tried to help clear the table, eager to express my gratitude. Their host mother gently placed her hand over theirs and said softly, “Please, sit. You are our guest.”
They sat down, but their body tightened with discomfort. At home, not helping would be rude. Here, helping was impolite. They realized, wasn’t a moral truth—it was a cultural expectation.
This is what **cultural relativism** asks of us: to pause, to shift our gaze, to understand practices not through our own standards, but through theirs. As Worthy puts it, it is “the principle of understanding and valuing practices within their own cultural context.” Not because we must agree, but because we cannot presume. Cultural relativism is not moral relativism. It is a discipline of listening before judging.
This becomes harder when we confront practices that deeply clash with our values—forced marriage, ritual scarification, child labor, or silence around violence. Here, **critical cultural relativism** becomes essential. It invites us to understand without excusing. To contextualize before we critique. And when we do challenge, to do so with humility—aware of our own blind spots and histories.
In a world marked by colonial legacies, war, displacement, and digital collapse of boundaries, ethnocentrism is no longer a private illusion. It becomes systemic. Dangerous. Justifying not only arrogance, but also domination, erasure, even violence.
But cultural relativism—when practiced critically—is an antidote. It doesn’t ask us to abandon our ethics. It asks us to recognize that every culture, including our own, is a structure of meaning. And meaning is always shaped by context, not by universal law.
Sometimes I think back to the girl who watched her grandmother grimace at squid on a stick. What would it have meant if, instead of saying “like rubber tires,” her grandmother had said, “That’s not for me, but I see they enjoy it”? What if she had asked what memories that food held, what rituals it belonged to? And maybe—just maybe—she would have tasted it.
I often ask students and therapists I train to imagine two children. One in Tokyo, one in Chicago. Both are asked to guess what their friend is feeling.
The Tokyo child listens to silences. She reads the tilt of the head, the hesitation in the breath. Raised in a world where emotions are understood through subtlety, she attunes without needing words.
The Chicago child waits for a spoken answer. Raised in a culture that values directness and internal self-expression, she expects clarity, not implication.
Neither child is wrong. But each sees through a different lens.
**Ethnocentrism** is that first lens—the one we inherit and wear without knowing.
**Cultural relativism** is the second—the one we learn to borrow, to try on, if only for a while.
And **critical cultural relativism** is the courage to hold both—your own ethical stance and the humility to understand others’ truths.
Worthy reminds us that culture is a silent teacher. It shapes how we eat, cry, celebrate, and care. The challenge is not to rid ourselves of our lens, but to know we wear it. To learn when to take it off. And to know when to say: _Your way is different. Let me understand why._
Because in this plural world, ethics begins not with answers, but with curiosity.
When we are born, we do not know that other people have minds.
We see faces, hear voices, feel warmth or hunger or fear — but we don’t yet understand that the people around us have **inner lives** as rich and mysterious as our own. At first, the world is just sensation. Cry, and someone comes. Smile, and someone smiles back. It is through these repetitions — through attunement, delay, rupture, and repair — that a baby begins to piece together the first fragile threads of connection.
But something remarkable happens around the age of four — something invisible yet fundamental to being human. The child discovers the **hidden room** behind the eyes of another person. The room where **beliefs** live. The place where someone might know something… or not. Might want something different. Might feel something we cannot see.
This is the beginning of **Theory of Mind** — the ability to attribute mental states to others and to recognize that those mental states may be different from our own.
It begins with small experiments. A child watches her father look inside a cupboard and find no cookies. The next day, the child sees the mother put cookies in that same cupboard. When the father returns, the child is asked: “Where will he look for the cookies?”
If she has developed Theory of Mind, she’ll say, “He’ll look in the cupboard,” even though she knows the cookies are no longer there. Because she understands that **he doesn’t know what she knows**.
It seems simple. But it’s not.
This insight — that other people have minds that are **separate** , **subjective** , and sometimes **wrong** — is the foundation of every meaningful relationship, every lie we tell, every apology we give, every empathy we extend.
Theory of Mind is not a single moment, but a **slow unfolding**. It begins with **joint attention** in infancy — the baby looking where the caregiver looks. Then comes **pretend play** , where children assign beliefs and desires to dolls, animals, and imaginary friends. Later, they grasp **false beliefs** , **sarcasm** , **irony** , and the art of knowing when to speak — or stay silent.
And just as it is learned, it can be shaped.
In cultures that prize **emotional attunement** , such as Japan or Korea, children are encouraged to notice how others feel without needing it to be said. They develop a **relational Theory of Mind** , attuned to mood, tone, silence. In cultures that emphasize **verbal expression** and individual rights, like the United States, children learn to **name their thoughts** , explain motives, justify behavior.
The brain follows the culture. Neural networks in the medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and posterior superior temporal sulcus all light up as we guess what others are thinking — but what we _look for_ , what we _expect_ , is shaped by our social world.
Trauma, too, leaves its mark. A child raised in fear may develop a **hypervigilant Theory of Mind** — always scanning for threat, misreading neutral expressions as dangerous. Or they may shut down the process altogether, assuming others are unknowable, untrustworthy, or irrelevant.
Yet the capacity remains. In healing spaces — therapy, ritual, story — we begin again to imagine that someone else might understand. That someone can carry our truth. That behind the eyes of the other, there is a mind capable of holding our own.
In adult life, Theory of Mind continues to evolve. It is what allows us to negotiate conflict, navigate relationships, interpret novels, weep at films, and forgive. It is what makes **empathy** possible. And also **manipulation**. For to understand another’s mind is to hold power: to comfort, to deceive, to influence, to love.
We live not just in bodies, but in **invisible architectures of mental life**. We are constantly building bridges from our minds to others — across words, gestures, silences. Sometimes the bridges hold. Sometimes they collapse. But always, we are reaching.
Because to be human is to wonder:
**What do you know?**
**What do you feel?**
**What do you believe?**
**Do you see me?**
**Can I see you?**
And in the answering — tentative, imperfect, but real — we find something like home.
**About the author:**
Dr Wiola Rebecka is a psychologist and researcher based in NYC. She is the author of the book “Rape :a history of shame diary of the survivors”. https://womenchapterenglish.com/in-the-mothers-eyes-reverie-reflection-and-the-cultural-mirror-part-ii/
