The easiest answer is that honor killings and cannibalism in most countries are illegal, and if one's not going to follow customs (whatever that entails) they should know the law.
As with honor killings, culture is actually a common defense of the indefensible, because there isn't an easy answer against it. You have to say "Well your culture is wrong", which makes your voice irrelevant in their eyes. However, it's actually most frequently cited in cases where it wasn't part of one's culture, at least historically speaking. An excellent case of this is the application and use of fundamentalist Islam. The discourse around it in such countries is that they're going back to the way things were in the era of Caliphates, but its application and expectation that it actually becomes the primary focus of government has its roots at the end of the 19th century. Sharia law was something that could only be implemented if several prerequisites were met, which actually made the whole thing more tolerable than how it is implemented now. None of these are ever mentioned by people trying to implement it now, conveniently. They need you, and everyone else to believe it's part of their culture, but they didn't count on the definition of culture changing, and their arguments fall apart outside of an early-mid 20th century anthropological understanding of culture.
Then: Cultures begin and end at naturally discernable social and physical geographies. A person is born into a culture, which gives them their sense of identity, their norms, etc. Cultures only change from the outside, and such change can be devastating, erupting social ties and rendering the culture vulnerable to being subsumed by the invading culture. In a sense, cultures are whole entities, bounded to place and people. In this conception, cultural representatives have every right to tell you to shove off with your culturally embedded concept of morality.
Now: there isn't one definition that holds the most weight really, but it's generally agreed upon that whatever culture happens to be, one certainly doesn't begin and end in identifiable places and people. It adapts to and rejects others according to its own cultural logic. This logic isn't necessarily consistent across all members of any given society, big or small. This is why there will never be a cultural map that holds any weight. Under this conception, it's possible to say that those who are advocating honor killings are generally gaining in ways that the rest of society are not through the subjugation of various members (particularly women), which is a statement that is free of cultural judgement. Note that this conception is probably alien to just about everyone here, because it's the former one that gets bandied around - and that's about 100% the fault of my particular discipline. Kicked ourselves right in the butt
Human diversity as well as the deliberate construction of nation states themselves is why I say culture doesn't equal country. I agree with you in spirit TL - there are discernable, distict elements across American society (whether they're due to culture, similarities of law, shared media, and education, etc, is up for debate), but I'll assert my skepticism that we could come up with a widely agreed upon set of characteristics that make us American in a cultural sense. Even if we can, well and good, but my point is that it's a bad assumption to go in with. I see it employed most by people who benefit from painting America that way, such as evangelicals who confidently speak of the silent majority, politicians who win by statistically insignificant margins, or as a handy dandy reason to not let cultural outsiders in (which actually used to include communists and atheists in our own policy).
And for those shaking your heads, maybe the happy middle ground is to just be skeptical about a more blatant example. Is there one Russian culture? Start thinking of the Kremlin, big hats or whatever, but the sheer size and diversity should render one incredulous of the applicability of a common set of cultural norms and beliefs.
And perhaps theoretically speaking, if at any point culture is a unified ideology across a political landscape (a country) - the governing bodies were REALLY good at social engineering.
[ 05-25-2006, 12:16 PM: Message edited by: Lucern ]