A common response when confronted with an entirely unfamiliar culture is a kind of intellectual straw-clutching. All too often, I hear tourists expounding on a country's culture or politics on the basis of what their tour guide told them or the wit and wisdom of some bloke they met on a bus. I'm as guilty as anybody of drawing sweeping conclusions on the basis of one person's comments - I merely draw attention to it.

But cultures are not static. In a recent interview in Wanderlust magazine, Dervla Murphy, author of In Ethiopia with a Mule, said she would hate to return to Ethiopia and see the changes that have occurred in the last 30 years. I can empathise with her perhaps I'll feel the same about 'my' Ethiopia a couple of decades from now - but it is ultimately a selfish concern. I doubt that Ethiopian society has changed any more in the last 30 years than has English or American society. And if it has, so what? We accept the organic nature of our own culture. Why do we find it so difficult to accept the same thing in other societies?

Concerned Westerners shake their heads at the sad spectacle of Africans asking for payment to allow their photograph to be taken or performing traditional dances for cash. Tourism is corrupting them, they have become commercialised. Rubbish! The destruction of traditional African cultures started over a century ago and it is virtually complete; for many modern Africans tourism is a lifeline. What, apart from their relative income, is the difference between a semi-professional Maasai poser and Cindy Crawford walking the catwalk, or a bunch of Africans dancing for tourists and George Michael wriggling his bum in a pop video?

In a cash-based economy, we are all driven by commercial needs, we are all open to 'corruption'. Within the law, it is up to the individual to determine their own morality. To say that tourists are 'spoiling' a local culture is to say that local people are incapable of making moral decisions for themselves, and also to say that the preservation of a pristine culture is a greater issue than the individual welfare of the people concerned. We live in an increasingly homogenous world, very few corners of which have not been sucked into a cash economy, and just as we enjoy visiting different countries and trying different foods, so should we accept that people from other countries have the right to want to opt for aspects of Western culture.

For instance, most of us would be happy to see the abolition of the tradition of so-called female circumcision, a common practice in many parts of Africa. By the same token, I expect that most Westerners would have little problem with Ethiopian monasteries opening their doors to females, or the Afar people of the Danokil desert dropping their tradition of lopping off the testicles of any male intruder. It strikes me that, on the one hand, we want to liberalise and change those aspects of ethnic cultures which we find morally repugnant, but on the other hand we want to preserve the rest of the culture in a pristine form. This is simply silly. It is perhaps the danger of multi- culturalist societies that they treat cultures as commodities: keep the bits you like and chuck the rest.

To me, much of the fascination of modern Africa is the interaction between indigenous and exotic cultures, the emergence of a dynamic something that might be described as an Afro- Western society. It is right that we respect African traditions; far better that we romanticise them than do as previous generations did and ridicule them.

In my experience, an evening in a local bar will tell you infinitely more about the realities of modern Africa than any number of camera-based exchanges with 'ethnic' Africans.

My experience is that it is practically impossible to understand another culture. You can learn about Ethiopians, you can learn from Ethiopians, but this knowledge will all be assimilated within the framework of your own cultural background. In fact, what you really learn from immersing yourself in another culture is to place the parochial concerns of your own culture in perspective. It is for this reason that travel is so mentally liberating and refreshing. Cultural gaps are not an obstacle to individual communication or enjoyment, but they will taint your perceptions of a country like Ethiopia. It is our most deeply seated cultural assumptions that we are most blind to and least able to overcome; that is why we should always be wary of making unconsidered judgements about African situations.