Cultural relativism: Difference between revisions

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The epistemological claims that led to the development of cultural relativism have their origins in the German Enlightenment. The [[philosophy|philosopher]] [[Immanuel Kant]], argued that human beings are not capable of direct, unmediated knowledge of the world. All of our experiences of the world are mediated through the human mind, which universally structures perceptions according to sensibilities concerning time and space.

Although Kant considered these mediating structures universal, his student [[Johann Gottfried Herder]] argued that human creativity, evidenced by the great variety in national [[culture|cultures]]s, revealed that human experience was mediated not only by universal structures, but by particular cultural structures as well. The great explorer and naturalist, [[Wilhelm von Humboldt]], called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant and Herder's ideas.

Although Herder focused on the positive value of cultural variety, the [[sociologist|sociologist]] [[William Graham Sumner]] called attention to the fact that one's culture can limit one's perceptions. He called this principle [[ethnocentrism]], the viewpoint that "one’s own group is the center of everything," against which all other groups are judged.

==Cultural Relativism as a Methodological and Heuristic Device==

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===The Political Defense of Relativism===

On the other hand, the most common and popular criticisms of relativism come not from anthropologists like Stanley Diamond, but rather from political conservatives. By the 1980s many anthropologists had absorbed the Boasian critique of moral relativism, were ready to reevaluate the origins and uses of cultural relativism. In a distinguished lecture before the American Anthropological Association in 1984, [[Clifford Geertz]] pointed out that the conservative critics of cultural relativism did not really understand, and were not really responding to, the ideas of Benedict, Herskovits, Kroeber and Kluckhohn. Consequently, the various critics and proponents of cultural relativism were talking past one another. What these different positions have in common, Geertz argued, is that they are all responding to the same thing: knowledge about other ways of life.

:The supposed conflict between Benedict's and Herskovits's call for tolerance and the untolerant passion with which they called for it turns out not to be the simple contradiction so many amateur logicians have held it to be, but the expression of a perception, caused by thinking a lot about Zunis and Dahomys, that the world being so full of a number of things, rushing to judgement is more than a mistake, it is a crime. Similarly, Kroeber's and Kluckholn's verities -- Kroeber's were mostly about messy creatural matters like delerium and menstruation, Kluckholn's were mostly about messy social ones like lying and killing within the in-group, turn out not to be just the arbitrary personal obsessions they so much look like, but the expression of a much vaster concern, caused by thinking a lot about ''anthrōposanthrōpos'' in general, that if something isn't anchored everywhere nothing can be anchored anywhere. Theory here -- if that is what these earnest advices about how we must look at things if we are to be accounted as decent should be called -- is more an exchange of warnings than an analytical debate. We are being offered a choice of worries.

:What the relativists -- so-called -- want us to worry about is provincialism -- the danger that our perceptions will be dulled, our intellects constricted, and our sympathies narrowed by the overlearned and overvalued acceptances of our own society. What the anti-relativists -- self-declared -- want us to worry about, and worry about and worry about, as though our very souls depended on it, is a kind of spiritual entropy, a heat death of the mind, in which everything is as significant, and thus as insignificant, as everything else: anything goes, to each his own, you pays your money and you takes your choice, I know what I like, not in the couth, ''tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner''.

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* Boas, Franz 1911 ''The Mind of Primitive Man''

* Boas, Franz 1974 [1887] "The Principles of Ethnological Classification," in ''A Franz Boas reader'' ed. by George W. Stocking Jr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 02260624300-226-06243-0

* Cook, John 1978 "Cultural Relativism as an Ethnocentric Notion," in ''The Philosophy of Society''

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*Nissim-Sabat, Charles 1987 "On Clifford Geertz and His 'Anti Anti-Relativism'" in ''American Anthropologist'' 89(4): 935-939

*[[Roger Sandall | Sandall, Roger]] 2001 ''The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays'' ISBN 08133386380-8133-3863-8

[[Category:Cultural anthropology]]

[[da:Kulturrelativisme]]

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[[pt:Relativismo cultural]]

[[fi:Kulttuurinen relativismi]]

[[Category:Cultural_anthropology]]