Cultural relativism

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Compare moral relativism, aesthetic relativism, social constructionism, and cognitive 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, Frank 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.” ^[1] With that, he established an axiom of anthropological research in the early twentieth century.

The “Father of American Anthropology”, Frank Boas did not coin the term cultural relativism, which entered the lexicon of the science after his death in 1942. Its first, formal usage by anthropologists — expressing their syntheses of ideas he developed — occurs in the journal American Anthropologist, in 1948. As such, “cultural relativism” makes specific epistemological and methodological claims; if they require a specific ethical stance remains debated. Moreover, it is important that cultural relativism not be confused with moral relativism.

Contents 1 Epistemological origins 2 As a methodological and heuristic device 2.1 As methodological analysis 2.2 As a heuristic method 3 As a critical method 4 Comparison to moral relativism 4.1 The Statement on Human Rights 5 Contemporary debates 5.1 Post-colonial politics 5.2 Political critique 5.3 Political defence 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading

[edit] Epistemological origins

Philospohically, cultural relativism originated in the German Enlightenment, where Immanuel Kant postulated that humans are incapable of direct, unmediated knowledge of the world — that all experience of it is mediated by the mind, which universally structures perception according to the person’s sensibilities of time and space.

Kant considered mediating structures as universal, yet, his student, Johann Gottfried Herder argued that human creativity, as evidenced in the variety in national cultures, shows that human perception of the world is mediated by particular cultural structures and by Kant’s universal mediating structures. Moreover, the philosopher-linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology synthesizing their ideas.

Although Herder concentrated upon the positive value of cultural variety, the sociologist William Graham Sumner called attention to the fact that one’s culture can limit one’s perceptions of other cultures, this limitation he denominated “ethnocentrism” — the belief that “one’s own group is the center of everything”, against which all other peoples are judged.

[edit] As a methodological and heuristic device

According to George Marcus and Michael Fischer:

20th century social and cultural anthropology has promised its still largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts. The one has been the salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global Westernization. With both its romantic appeal and its scientific intentions, anthropology has stood for the refusal to accept this conventional perception of homogenization toward a dominant Western model. ^[2]

Cultural relativism was partly a response to Western ethnocentrism, e.g. the conscious belief that Western arts are the most beautiful, that its values are the most virtuous, and that its beliefs the most truthful. Originally trained as a physicist and as a geographer, and much influenced by Kant, Herder, and von Humboldt, Frank Boas argued that one’s culture might mediate — and thus limit — one’s objective perception of other cultures. He understood “culture” as comprehending given tastes in food, art, music, and religious belief, thus, presuming a broader 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. ^[3]

Per this definition, anthropologists confront two problems: first, how to escape the unconscious bonds of one’s culture and its inevitable bias in perceiving and reacting to the world’s other cultures; and second, how to make sense of an unfamiliar culture. Cultural relativism thus forced anthropological progress in developing innovative methods and heuristic strategies.

[edit] 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 people 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 a 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 all people perceive light alike, as the visible spectrum (color continuum), different languages categorize the spectrum’s discrete colors in different ways. To wit, some languages have no native word corresponding to the English word “green”, hence, when people who do not speak English see a green-color chip, they might identify it with their word for “blue”, and others with their word for “yellow”, in identifying the color that an English-speaker calls “green”.

Melville Herskovits, a student of Boas’s, summed the cultural relativism principle thus: “Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation.”

Boas noted that scientists grow up and work in a particular culture, hence, are necessarily ethnocentric; his example is in the article, “On Alternating Sounds” (1889). ^[4] Described by some linguists, contemporaries of Boas, “alternating sounds” is the phenomenon wherein speakers of a language pronounce a given word in two, distinct ways, the difference being a matter of specific phonetic elements, not of accent. For example, when some native-Japanese speakers speak English, many native English-speakers hear them alternate between pronouncing one word as “lice” and as “rice”. Moreover, nineteenth-century anthropologists observed that Native American language speakers pronounce a word in different ways in his or her own language. Naïvely, the ethnocentrism of said anthropologists had them believing they had perceived a feature unique to Native American languages.

Boas, however, argued that in those cases, Native Americans were consistently pronouncing said word in the same ways usual to their languages, and that the perceptual problem was that the anthropologists’ English language lacks a certain sound — akin to other languages lacking an equivalent word for the English “green”. Consequently, when English-speakers hear someone utter that sound (“green”) in another language, they systematically misperceive it as one of two similar sounds — as when non-Western people categorize a green-color chip as either “blue” or “yellow”.

Boas’s students did not only draw upon his engagement with German philosophy, but they also drew from the work of contemporary philosophers and scientists, such as Karl Pearson, Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, William James, and John Dewey, in attempting to progress, in the words of another Boas student, Robert Lowie, from “a naively metaphysical to an epistemological stage” as a basis for revising the methods and theories of anthropology.

Boas and his students understood that if they were to scientifically research other cultures, they would need to employ methods allowing them to escape their ethnocentric limitations. One such method is that of ethnography: living with the people of another culture for an extended period, in order to learn the local language and become partly acculturated to the culture being studied.

In that context, cultural relativism is an attitude of fundamental methodologic importance, because it calls attention to the importance of the local context for understanding the meaning of the studied culture’s particular beliefs and activities. In 1948, Virginia Heyer wrote: “Cultural relativity, to phrase it in starkest abstraction, states the relativity of the part to the whole. The part gains its cultural significance by its place in the whole, and cannot retain its integrity in a different situation.” ^[5]

[edit] As a heuristic method

Another method was 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 via museum cultural artefact diplays. Typically, curators assumed that like causes produce like effects; therefore, in order to understand the causes of human action, they grouped like artefacts together — regardless of provenance — into families, genera, and species, as in biology, thus organized, museums showed civilisational evolution from the crudest to the refined forms.

In an article in the journal Science, Boas argued that this approach to cultural evolution ignored one of Charles Darwin’s principal contributions to evolutionary theory:

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. ^[6]

Although like causes produce like effects, Boas argued that different causes might also produce like effects. Consequently, similar artefacts found in distinct, distant places might be products of distinct causes. Against the popular method of drawing analogies to establish generalizations, Boas argued in favour of an inductive method. Based upon his critique of contemporary museum displays, he concluded:

It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes. ^[6]

Alfred Kroeber, another student of Boas’s, described the rise of the relativist perspective thus: ^[7]

Now while some of the interest in anthropology in its earlier stages was in the exotic and the out-of-the-way, yet even this antiquarian motivation ultimately contributed to a broader result. Anthropologists became aware of the diversity of culture. They began to see the tremendous range of its variations. From that, they commenced to envisage it as a totality, as no historian of one period or of a single people was likely to do, nor any analyst of his own type of civilization alone. They became aware of culture as a “universe”, or vast field in which we of today and our own civilization occupy only one place of many. The result was a widening of a fundamental point of view, a departure from unconscious ethnocentricity toward relativity. This shift from naive self-centeredness in one’s own time and spot to a broader view based on objective comparison is somewhat like the change from the original geocentric assumption of astronomy to the Copernican interpretation of the solar system and the subsequent still greater widening to a universe of galaxies.

These conceptions of culture and of the principle of cultural relativism, were, for Kroeber and his colleagues, the fundamental contributions of anthropology, and what distinguished it from like disciplines, such as sociology and psychology.

Ruth Benedict, another student of Boas’s, also argued that an appreciation of the importance of culture, and the problem of ethnocentrism, demands that the scientist adopt cultural relativism as a method of study. In Patterns of Culture, she did much to popularize the term cultural relativism in the U.S., explaining that:

The study of custom can be profitable only after certain, preliminary propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization. ^[8]

Adamant that she was not romanticizing so-called primitive societies, Benedict emphasized that any understanding of the totality of humanity must be based upon a sample of cultures as wide and varied as possible. That by appreciating a culture profoundly different from one’s, is it possible to understand the extent to which the researchers’ beliefs and activities are culture-bound, rather than being natural and universal. In this context, cultural relativism is a fundamentally important heuristic device, for emphasizing the importance of variation in any sample from which are derived generalizations about humanity.

[edit] As a critical method

Marcus and Fischer’s attention to anthropology’s denying the claim to universality of Western culture implies that cultural relativism is an analytical study method useful both 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]

Cultural relativism’s critical function is widely understood; philosopher John Cook observed that “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 cultural relativism; meaning not that one’s cultural principles are false, but that claiming them as “self-evident” is false.

This critical function is one of the ends that Benedict hoped her work would meet. The most famous example of cultural relativism as cultural critique is Margaret Mead’s dissertation research (supervised by Boas) of Samoan adolescent female sexuality. By contrasting the sexual freedom and ease of practice enjoyed by Samoan adolescent women, Mead called into question the U.S. cultural claims stressing rebelliousness as characteristic of American adolescence as natural and inevitable.

As Marcus and Fischer indicated, however, this use of cultural relativism is sustainable only if there is ethnographic research of the U.S. culture comparable to the Samoan research. Despite there being such anthropologic research for every decade, the very principles of relativism have sent most anthropologists to study foreign cultures.

[edit] Comparison to moral relativism

Most contemporary anthropologists subscribe to the methodologic and heuristic research principles established by Frank Boas et al. Per Marcus and Fischer, after the Second World War, when cultural relativism was popularized, it was misinterpreted “more as a doctrine, or position, than as a method” of analysis. Said misinterpretation connoted that every culture is both separate and equal, and that every value system is equally valid, however different; hence, the erroneous popular usage equating “cultural relativism” to “moral relativism”.

Generally, laymen understand moral relativism as there being no absolute, or universal, moral standards. Moreover, the nature of anthropologic research lends itself to searching for universal, but not necessarily absolute, standards in every society; nevertheless, people confuse the one for the other. In 1944 Clyde Kluckhohn, (Harvard-schooled and an admirer and collaborator of Boas and his students) attempted to address this matter: ^[11]

The concept of culture, like any other piece of knowledge, can be abused and misinterpreted. Some fear that the principle of cultural relativity will weaken morality. “If the Bugabuga do it, why can’t we? It’s all relative, anyway.” But this is exactly what cultural relativity does not mean.

The principle of cultural relativity does not mean that because the members of some savage tribe are allowed to behave in a certain way that this fact gives intellectual warrant for such behavior in all groups. Cultural relativity means, on the contrary, that the appropriateness of any positive or negative custom must be evaluated with regard to how this habit fits with other group habits. Having several wives makes economic sense among herders, not among hunters. While breeding a healthy scepticism as to the eternity of any value prized by a particular people, anthropology does not as a matter of theory deny the existence of moral absolutes. Rather, the use of the comparative method provides a scientific means of discovering such absolutes. If all surviving societies have found it necessary to impose some of the same restrictions upon the behavior of their members, this makes a strong argument that these aspects of the moral code are indispensable.

Although Kluckholn used popular language (e.g. savage tribe) particular to his time, which contemporary anthropologists now consider antiquated and coarse, he noted that although there might be no universal moral standards, the research establishes that people having moral standards is a universal value, i.e. the one universal value is that no society practices an “anything goes” morality. He was especially interested in deriving specific moral standards that are universal; few, if any, anthropologists think he succeeded.

In his formulation, however, there is an ambiguity that for years haunted anthropology: that one’s moral standards apply only in one’s culture. He waffles, however, on whether or not the moral standards of one society are applicable in another society; four years later, U.S. anthropologists had to confront the matter.

[edit] The Statement on Human Rights

Cultural relativism, as a heuristic analytical method, was transformed to moral relativism in context of the U.N.’s Commission of Human Rights work in preparing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Melville Herskovits composed a draft Statement on Human Rights, revised by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, then submitted to the Commission on Human Rights for publication. ^[12] The Statement’s straightforward explanation begins with the relevance of cultural relativism:

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.

Its gist emphasizes concern that the Declaration of Human Rights was primarily prepared by Western societies, thus, would express Western values, that are far from being 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 the statement might being interpreted as making a procedural point — that the Commission must include non-Western peoples — especially from cultures that had been or remained under European colonial and imperial domination, the document concluded 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.

Some anthropologists immediately responded to those claims, among them, Prof. Julian Steward of Columbia University — who studied under Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, thus a Boasian — suggested that the first claim “may have been a loophole to exclude Germany from the advocated tolerance”, and that it reveals moral relativism’s fundamental flaw: “Either we tolerate everything, and keep hands off, or we fight intolerance and conquest — political and economic as well as military — in all their forms.” Like-wise, questioning if the second claim meant that anthropologists “approve the social caste system of India, the racial caste system of the United States, or many other varieties of social discrimination in the world”. ^[13]

Moreover, Steward and others argued that any attempted application of the principle of cultural relativism to moral problems would end in contradiction: either a principle that apparently stands for tolerance ends up being used to excuse intolerance, or the principle of tolerance is revealed as utterly intolerant of any society seemingly lacking the (arguably, Western) value of tolerance. They concluded that anthropologists must limit themselves to science, and participate in value debates only as private persons. ^[14]

[edit] Contemporary debates

The debates about the Statement on Human Rights were not solely about cultural relativism’s relevance, or about what is a universal right, because they forced anthropologists to confront the matter of whether or not anthropologic research is relevant to laymen. Although Steward and Barnett suggested that anthropology per se should restrict itself to academic matters, academics and laymen continue debating how non-anthropologists apply cultural relativism in public policy concerning ethnic minorities and in international relations. (see this interview and this article for debate examples about cultural relativism and human rights)

The political scientist Alison Dundes Renteln argued that most debates about moral relativism misunderstand the import of cultural relativism. ^[15] Most philosophers understand the Benedictine-Herskovitz formulation of cultural relativism to mean:

What is right or good for one individual or society is not right or good for another, even if the situations are similar, meaning not merely that what is thought right or good by one is not thought right or good by another . . . but that what is really right or good in one case is not so in another. ^[16] Although this formulation clearly refers to the examples anthropologists used in elaborating cultural relativism, Renteln thinks it misses the spirit of the principle. Accordingly, she advocates a different formulation: “There are or can be no value judgements that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures”. ^[17]

She faults philosophers for disregarding the heuristic and critical functions of cultural relativism, principally arguing that in order to understand the principle of cultural relativism, one must recognize the extent to which it is based upon enculturation: “the idea that people unconsciously acquire the categories and standards of their culture”. This observation, which refers to the original cultural arguments that led Frank Boas to develop the principle, indicates that using cultural relativism in debates about rights and morals is procedural, not substantive, i.e. it does not require the relativist to sacrifice his or her values, but does require those considering rights and morals to reflect upon how their own enculturation has shaped their views:

There is no reason why the relativist should be paralyzed, as critics have often asserted. But a relativist will acknowledge that the criticism is based on his own ethnocentric standards and realizes also that the condemnation may be a form of cultural imperialism. ^[18]

Renteln thus bridges the gap between the anthropologist as scientist (whom Steward and Barnett said has no right to debate rights and morality) and the anthropologist as private person (with the right to make value judgements). The private person retains the right, but the scientist requires that said person acknowledge that such judgements are neither self-evidently universal, nor entirely personal (and idiosyncratic), but are formed relative to his or her own culture.

For others, however, cultural relativism is a doctrine that provides answers to moral questions; per historian Wilcomb Washburn, “an explanation of, or solution to, cultural conflict”. ^[19] Moreover, in the guise of cultural relativism, moral relativism is used to minimize or dismiss social inequities and cultural politics in a given society; most anthropologists reject such moral relativism. Given that, since the end of the Second World War, laymen have applied cultural relativism and moral relativism as interchangeable doctrines, many U.S. anthropologists abandoned the relativism. In the 1950s, many turned to the model of structural–functionalism, developed in the U.K., for modelling their researches, and retreated from popular political debates about rights and morality.

[edit] Post-colonial politics

After the breakup of the British and French colonial empires, and Vietnam’s defeating the U.S., anthropology concerned itself with the domination and subjugation relations linking Western and non-Western societies, and that structure social relations in a society, however, in the context of the Russo–American Cold War, anthropologists again confronted the relationship between politics and science.

To Boas and his students, anthropology was an historical, human science, involving subjects (anthropologists) studying other subjects (people and their activities), not subjects studying objects (i.e. animals, rocks, stars). Under such conditions, scientific research will have political consequences, and the Boasians saw no conflict between their scientific attempts to understand cultures, and the political implications of critiquing their own culture. For anthropologists working in that tradition, the doctrine of cultural relativism as basis for moral relativism was anathema. For politicians, moralists, and many social scientists, and a few anthropologists, who saw science and human interests as necessarily independent, and even opposed, however, the original Boasian principle of cultural relativism was anathema, thus, cultural relativism was attacked from both sides, but for opposite reasons.

[edit] Political critique

On the one hand, many anthropologists criticize how moral relativism, in the guise of cultural relativism, is applied to mask the effects of Western colonialism and imperialism. Stanley Diamond argued that when the term cultural relativism entered popular culture, popular culture co-opted anthropology and voided the principle of critical function:

Relativism is the bad faith of the conqueror, who has become secure enough to become a tourist.

Cultural relativism is a purely intellectual attitude; it does not inhibit the anthropologist from participating as a professional in his own milieu; on the contrary, it rationalizes that milieu. Relativism is self-critical only in the abstract. Nor does it lead to engagement. It only converts the anthropologist into a shadowy figure, prone to newsworthy and shallow pronouncements about the cosmic condition of the human race. It has the effect of mystifying the profession, so that the very term anthropologist (“student of man”) commands the attention of an increasingly “popular” audience in search of novelty. But the search for self-knowledge, which Montaigne was the first to link to the annihilation of prejudice, is reduced to the experience of culture shock, a phrase used by both anthropologists and the State Department to account for the disorientation that usually follows an encounter with an alien way of life. But culture shock is a condition one recovers from; it is not experienced as an authentic redefinition of the personality, but as a testing of its tolerance. . . . The tendency of relativism, which it never quite achieves, is to detach the anthropologist from all particular cultures. Nor does it provide him with a moral center, only a job. ^[20]

George Stocking summarised this view, observing that “Cultural relativism, which had buttressed the attack against racialism, [can] be perceived as a sort of neo-racialism justifying the backward techno-economic status of once-colonized peoples”.^[21]

[edit] Political defence

On the other hand, the most common and popular criticisms of relativism are from political conservatives, not anthropologists, such as Stanley Diamond. By the 1980s, many anthropologists, holding the Boasian critique of moral relativism, re-evaluated the origins and uses of cultural relativism. In 1984, in a lecture to the American Anthropological Association, Clifford Geertz noted that conservative critics did not truly understand, and really were not responding to, the ideas of Benedict, Herskovits, Kroeber and Kluckhohn. ^[22] Consequently, cultural relativism’s proponents and opponents talked past each another, and, Geertz argued, their differing positions all have in common a response 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 delirium and menstruation, [and] 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 anthrōpos 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.

Geertz concluded: “As I have already suggested, I, myself, find provincialism altogether the more real concern as far as what actually goes on in the world is concerned”. Rather than being seen as explanation or answer, his defence of cultural relativism echoed Alfred Kroeber’s 1949 reply to earlier critics of cultural relativism: ^[23]

Obviously, relativism poses certain problems when, from trying merely to understand the world we pass on to taking action in the world: and right decisions are not always easy to find. However, it is also obvious that authoritarians who know the complete answers beforehand will necessarily be intolerant of relativism: they should be, if there is only one truth and that is theirs.

I admit that hatred of the intolerant for relativism does not suffice to make relativism true. But most of us are human enough for our belief in relativism to be somewhat reinforced just by that fact. At any rate, it would seem that the world has come far enough, so that it is only by starting from relativism and its tolerations that we may hope to work out a new set of absolute values and standards, if such are attainable at all or prove to be desirable.

[edit] See also

• Emotivism
• Ethnocentrism
• Global justice
• Historical particularism
• Intercultural competence
• Moral purchasing
• Moral relativism
• Relativism
• Situational ethics
• Xenocentrism

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Barzilai, Gad. 2003. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Herskovitz, Melville J. 1958 "Some Further Comments on Cultural Relativism" in American Anthropologist 60(2) 266-273
• Herskovitz, Melville J. 1956 Man and His Works
• Mathews, Freya 1994 "Cultural Relativism and Environmental Ethics" IUCN Ethics Working Group Report No 5, August 1994.
• Murphy, Robert F., 1972 Robert Lowie
• Nissim-Sabat, Charles 1987 "On Clifford Geertz and His 'Anti Anti-Relativism'" in American Anthropologist 89(4): 935-939
• Sandall, Roger 2001 The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays ISBN 0-8133-3863-8
• Wong, David, 2006, Natural Moralities, A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism, Oxford UP, ISBN 9780195305395