I
t's a really important point that cultural morals are not untouchable. It's a little too easy to assume that, because a particular practice has been traditional in a culture for a long time, it must be "okay". There are many cases of "primitive" cultures who engage in "bad" practices abandoning them almost with relief when they find out there are alternatives. For every female circumcision approved by women in the culture, there are those from those same cultures who actively work to end the practice. How do we choose between these two forces? There's no escaping doing the work of moral thought.
Think about the taboos (kapu) of Hawaii, in which a complex code of behavioral prohibitions disappeared basically overnight once a new King did not deign to reinstate them after his coronation. Or consider the human sacrifice of the Aztecs, which was a sort of sudden orgy of violence instituted by a young empire, and which was not looked back on fondly once the Aztecs were felled.
Our cultural imaginations limit what we think of as possible. In cases where there's not a ton of exterior contact, it's easy to think that even traditions which one thinks of negatively as existing for a purpose, such as to keep the gods happy, or keep the society united, or what have you. But if it can be shown that the "world won't end" if those practices go away, people will shed them quickly.
I wonder, though, whether there is a danger here, similar to the short term thinking of vice. Once the authority of tradition is struck this blow, do the others in fact start to unravel?