In Haiti lies a thriving voodoo culture. The spirits of people and of the land live among them and possess them. They have even formulated what anthropologist Wade Davis calls a “zombie potion” (made from various botanicals, frog skins and human bones) for making a victim appear dead.

In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, Annette Weiner chronicles yam rituals. When two people wish to wed, they spend the night together and in the morning they feed each other a breakfast of yams prepared by one of their mothers. For the first year of their marriage, they feed each other these yams, but only then. For the rest of their lives, male and female eat separately.

Humans never cease to fascinate me. However, I feel our cultural diversity is slipping away. Western culture is pervasive; we spread our empire of things and ideas without remorse.

We expect the world to accept our science, our teleology and world-view as a given; we expect those silly, tribal people to be better off with tennis shoes and a Western education. We expect our lifestyle to be theirs.

This idea defeats the beauty of humanity. The point of living in a culturally diverse world and combating imperialism is to encourage creativity. The ways we adapt to our environments and relate to other people is a profound part of what makes us human.

Cultural preservation isn’t about keeping archaic ideas; after all, if cultures change, let them adapt. If the Inuit wants to start using snow mobiles for transportation rather than a team of sled dogs, we shouldn’t see that as cultural genocide but merely an adaptation to make life easier.

But we shouldn’t assume all humans should adapt to our lifestyle. It isn’t our job to impose our ideas. Unfortunately, this seems to be a component of capitalism: markets, and thus ideas, spread across the globe, dominating indigenous cultures. The Mediterranean was once lauded for its classic diet of fish, olives, bread and wine; it now grows obese on McDonald’s and is forgetting its heritage foods.

There is one hopeful example. When radios and televisions came to the Gebusi people of Papua New Guinea, as anthropologist Bruce Knauft reports, society changed: people who lived mainly in the forest moved to the village to attend school and access to things like Western food and radio. More thefts took place, mainly of electronic devices whose introduction had created somewhat of a system of inequality, of haves and have-nots. Young people were forgetting the rituals of their parents and grandparents.

The funny thing is, when Knauft returned, the imports had stopped coming in and the culture had, for the most part, reverted to the way it had been when he had first done his field work. There is resilience to it. It’s a spark that never died, one that humans could return to and use to reinvent.

I have faith in our own endless imaginations. Markets may eventually dominate us, but they will never entirely hegemonize us.  We must fight it by preserving our stories and customs. Always it seems, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “we will press on, boats against the current.”

Roberta Singer is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.