Transcript Cultural relativism

Cultural relativism is the anthropological principle
stating that a person’s beliefs and activities must be
understood in the local context of that person’s own
culture. In 1887, Franz Boas first articulated this
principle as: “. . . civilization is not something absolute,
but . . . is relative, and . . . our ideas and conceptions
are true only so far as our civilization goes”, whereby,
he established an axiom of anthropological research.
Philospohically, cultural relativism
originated in the German Enlightenment,
when Immanuel Kant postulated that
human beings are incapable of direct,
unmediated knowledge of the world — that
all experience of it is mediated by the mind,
which universally structures experience
according to the person’s perception of time
and space.
As a methodological and heuristic method
 Cultural relativism was partly a response to Western ethnocentrism, i.e.
the conscious belief that Western arts are the most beautiful, its values
the most virtuous, and its beliefs the most truthful. Originally trained
as a physicist and as a geographer, and intellectually much influenced
by Kant, Herder, and von Humboldt, Franz Boas argued that one’s
culture might mediate — and thus limit — objective perception of
other cultures. His understanding of “culture” as comprehending given
tastes in food, art, music, and religious belief, presumed a wider
definition of culture as:
the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities
that characterize the behavior of the individuals composing a
social group collectively and individually in relation to their
natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group
itself, and of each individual to himself.
As methodological analysis
 Between the First and Second world wars, cultural relativism was
the principal analytic method for U.S. anthropologists confronting
the refusal of non-Western peoples to accept the West’s claim for
the universality of its culture, and in salvaging non-Western
cultures. That refusal transformed Boas’s epistemology into
methodological lessons.
 Language is the most obvious case; although commonly perceived
as a means of communication, Boas understood language as also a
means of categorizing experience of the world, therefore, the
existence of different languages indicates that people categorize and
experience language differently, (a perspective that the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis develops more fully). Although people perceive light as
the visible spectrum (color continuum), their different languages
name its colors with different words. To wit, some languages have
no native word corresponding to the English word “green”, hence,
when non-English speakers see a green-color chip, they might
identify it with their word for “blue”, and others with their word for
“yellow”.
As methodological analysis
 Melville Herskovits, a Boas alumnus, summarised cultural
relativism thus: “Judgements are based on experience, and
experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his
own enculturation.”
 To objectively study and understand other cultures, Boas
and alumnæ understood they would need to employ
research methods allowing their escape from ethnocentric
limitation. One such method is ethnography: living with
the people of the culture being studied for an extended
period, and learning their language to become partly
enculturated. In that context, cultural relativism is an
intellectual attitude of fundamental methodologic
importance, because it underscores the importance of local
context to comprehending the meaning of particular
cultural beliefs and activities.
As a heuristic method
 Another method is ethnology: the systematic, even-handed comparison
and contrasting of as wide as possible a range of cultures. In the late
nineteenth century, such study was primarily effected via cultural artefact
diplays. Typically, museum curators assumed that like causes produce like
effects; therefore, to understand the causes of human activities, they
grouped like artefacts together — regardless of provenance — into
families, genera, and species, as in biology; thus organized, museums
displayed the forms of civilisational evolution from the crude to the
refined.
It is only since the development of the evolutional theory that it became
clear that the object of study is the individual, not abstractions from the
individual under observation. We have to study each ethnological
specimen individually in its history and in its medium. . . . By regarding a
single implement outside of its surroundings, outside of other inventions
of the people to whom it belongs, and outside of other phenomena
affecting that people and its productions, we cannot understand its
meanings. . . . Our objection . . . is, that classification is not explanation.
As a critical method
 Marcus and Fischer’s underscoring anthropology’s denying the claim to
universality of Western culture implies that cultural relativism is an
analytical method useful for cultural understanding and for cultural
critique. It indicates anthropology’s second aspect of enlightenment:
The other promise of anthropology, one less fully distinguished and
attended to than the first, has been to serve as a form of cultural
critique for ourselves. In using portraits of other cultural patterns to
reflect self-critically on our own ways, anthropology disrupts common
sense and makes us reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions. [9]
About the critical function of cultural relativism, the philosopher John
Cook said, “It is aimed at getting people to admit that although it may
seem to them that their moral principles are self-evidently true, and
hence seem to be grounds for passing judgement on other peoples, in
fact, the self-evidence of these principles is a kind of illusion”. [10]
Despite misconstruing cultural relativism as identical to moral
relativism, Cook’s observation applies to the broader definition of the
term — meaning not that one’s cultural principles are false, but that
claiming them as “self-evident” is false.

The Statement on Human Rights
In 1947, cultural relativism metamorphosed into moral relativism during the composition of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rightsby the U.N.’sCommission of Human Rightsrelativism
 The problem is thus to formulate a statement of human rights that will do more than phrase respect
for the individual as individual. It must also take into full account the individual as a member of a
social group of which he is part, whose sanctioned modes of life shape his behavior, and with whose
fate his own is thus inextricably bound. The gist is that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
was primarily prepared by Western societies, and expresses Western values that are not universal:
Today the problem is complicated by the fact that the Declaration must be of world-wide
applicability. It must embrace and recognize the validity of many different ways of life. It will not be
convincing to the Indonesian, the African, the Chinese, if it lies on the same plane as like documents
of an earlier period. The rights of Man in the Twentieth Century cannot be circumscribed by the
standards of any single culture, or be dictated by the aspirations of any single people. Such a
document will lead to frustration, not realization of the personalities of vast numbers of human
beings. Despite possible interpretation as making a mere procedural point — that the Commission of
Human Rights must include non-Western peoples — especially from the cultures that had been or
that remained imperially subjugated by Europe, the Statement on Human Rights concludes with two,
substantive claims:
Even where political systems exist that deny citizens the right of participation in their government, or
seek to conquer weaker peoples, underlying cultural values may be called on to bring the peoples of
such states to a realization of the consequences of the acts of their governments, and thus enforce a
brake upon discrimination and conquest.
World-wide standards of freedom and justice, based on the principle that man is free only when he
lives as his society defines freedom, that his rights are those he recognizes as a member of his society,
must be basic.