In sum, our current efforts to work across cultures and better understand the relevance of culture for HIV prevention presents us with numerous challenges. In practice, our shorthand efforts to explain culture may be seriously misleading and many explanations of foreign culture may be simply wrong and reflective of investigators’ personal biases or wishful thoughts. We have an obligation to respect cultures different from our own. This requires attention to their complexity and impermanence and to the value of engaging members of the culture to become an integral part of our research and our practice of prevention.