Cultural relativism

Compare cross cultural sensitivity, moral relativism, aesthetic relativism, social constructionism, and cognitive relativism.

He mentions an anecdote of Darius the Great who illustrated the principle by inquiring about the funeral customs
of the Greeks and the Callatiae, peoples from the extreme
western and eastern fringes of his empire, respectively.
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual They practiced cremation and funerary cannibalism, rehumans beliefs and activities should be understood by spectively, and were each dismayed and abhorred at the
proposition of the other tribes practices.
others in terms of that individuals own culture.
The epistemological claims that led to the development
of cultural relativism have their origins in the German
Enlightenment. The 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 a priori concepts of time and space.

It was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the rst few decades of the 20th
century and later popularized by his students. Boas rst
articulated the idea in 1887: "...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.[1]
However, Boas did not coin the term.
The rst use of the term recorded in the Oxford English
Dictionary was by philosopher and social theorist Alain
Locke in 1924 to describe Robert Lowie's extreme cultural relativism, found in the latters 1917 book Culture
and Ethnology.[2] The term became common among anthropologists after Boas death in 1942, to express their
synthesis of a number of ideas Boas had developed.
Boas believed that the sweep of cultures, to be found
in connection with any sub species, is so vast and pervasive that there cannot be a relationship between cultures and races.[3] Cultural relativism involves specic
epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or
not these claims necessitate a specic ethical stance is a
matter of debate. This principle should not be confused
with moral relativism.

Although Kant considered these mediating structures universal, his student Johann Gottfried Herder argued that
human creativity, evidenced by the great variety in national cultures, revealed that human experience was mediated not only by universal structures, but by particular
cultural structures as well. The philosopher and linguist
Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that
would synthesize Kant and Herders ideas.
Although Herder focused on the positive value of cultural
variety, the sociologist William Graham Sumner called
attention to the fact that ones culture can limit ones
perceptions. He called this principle ethnocentrism, the
viewpoint that ones own group is the center of everything, against which all other groups are judged.

Epistemological origins

2 As a methodological and heuristic device

Herodotus (Histories 3.38) observes on the relativity of

mores ():

According to George Marcus, Michael Fischer, and Sam

Bohart,

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he
thought best, he would inevitablyafter careful considerations of their relative merits
choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs,
and the religion he was brought up in, to be
the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that
anyone but a madman would mock at such
things. There is abundant evidence that this is
the universal feeling about the ancient customs
of ones country. (tr. Aubrey de Selincourt)

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 scientic intentions, anthropology has stood
for the refusal to accept this conventional perception of homogenization toward a dominant
Western model.[4]
1

2 AS A METHODOLOGICAL AND HEURISTIC DEVICE

Cultural relativism was in part a response to Western ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism may take obvious forms, in
which one consciously believes that ones peoples arts
are the most beautiful, values the most virtuous, and beliefs the most truthful. Franz Boas, originally trained
in physics and geography, and heavily inuenced by the
thought of Kant, Herder, and von Humboldt, argued that
ones culture may mediate and thus limit ones perceptions in less obvious ways. He understood culture to
include not only certain tastes in food, art, and music, or
beliefs about religion. He assumed a much broader notion of culture, dened 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.[5]
This understanding of culture confronts anthropologists
with two problems: rst, how to escape the unconscious
bonds of ones own culture, which inevitably bias our perceptions of and reactions to the world, and second, how
to make sense of an unfamiliar culture. The principle of
cultural relativism thus forced anthropologists to develop
innovative methods and heuristic strategies.

2.1

As a methodological tool

Between World War I and World War II, cultural relativism was the central tool for American anthropologists
in this refusal of Western claims to universality, and salvage of non-Western cultures. It functioned to transform
Boas epistemology into methodological lessons.
This is most obvious in the case of language. Although
language is commonly thought of as a means of communication, Boas called attention especially to the idea that
it is also a means of categorizing experiences, hypothesizing that the existence of dierent languages suggests that
people categorize, and thus experience, language dierently (this view was more fully developed in the hypothesis of Linguistic relativity).
Thus, although all people perceive visible radiation the
same way, in terms of a continuum of color, people who
speak dierent languages slice up this continuum into discrete colors in dierent ways. Some languages have no
word that corresponds to the English word green. When
people who speak such languages are shown a green chip,
some identify it using their word for blue, others identify it using their word for yellow. Thus, Boas student
Melville Herskovits summed up the principle of cultural
relativism thus: Judgements are based on experience,
and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms
of his own enculturation.

Boas pointed out that scientists grow up and work in a

particular culture, and are thus necessarily ethnocentric.
He provided an example of this in his 1889 article, On
Alternating Sounds[6] A number of linguists at Boas
time had observed that speakers of some Native American languages pronounced the same word with dierent
sounds indiscriminately. They thought that this meant
that the languages were unorganized and lacked strict
rules for pronunciation, and they took it as evidence that
the languages were more primitive than their own. Boas
however noted that the variant pronunciations were not an
eect of lack of organization of sound patterns, but an effect of the fact that these languages organized sounds differently from English. The languages grouped sounds that
were considered distinct in English into a single sound,
but also having contrasts that didn't exist in English. He
then argued that cases Native Americans had been pronouncing the word in question the same way, consistently,
and the variation was only perceived by someone whose
own language distinguishes those two sounds. Boas student, the linguist Edward Sapir later noted that also English speakers pronounce sounds dierently even when
they think they are pronouncing the same sound, for example few English speakers realize that the sounds written with the letter <t> in the words tick and stick are
phonetically dierent, the rst being generally aricated
and the other aspirated - a speaker of a language where
this contrast is meaningful would instantly perceive them
as dierent sounds and tend not to see them as dierent
realizations of a single phoneme.
Boas students drew not only on his engagement with German philosophy. They also engaged the work of contemporary philosophers and scientists, such as Karl Pearson,
Ernst Mach, Henri Poincar, William James and John
Dewey in an attempt to move, in the words of 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 realized that if they were to conduct
scientic research in other cultures, they would need to
employ methods that would help them escape the limits
of their own ethnocentrism. One such method is that of
ethnography: basically, they advocated living with people
of another culture for an extended period of time, so that
they could learn the local language and be enculturated,
at least partially, into that culture.
In this context, cultural relativism is an attitude that is of
fundamental methodological importance, because it calls
attention to the importance of the local context in understanding the meaning of particular human beliefs and activities. Thus, 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 signicance by its place in the whole, and cannot
retain its integrity in a dierent situation.[7]

2.2

2.2

As a heuristic tool

As a heuristic tool

Another method was ethnology: to compare and contrast

as wide a range of cultures as possible, in a systematic
and even-handed manner. In the late nineteenth century,
this study occurred primarily through the display of material artifacts in museums. Curators typically assumed that
similar causes produce similar eects; therefore, in order
to understand the causes of human action, they grouped
similar artifacts together regardless of provenance.
Their aim was to classify artifacts, like biological organisms, according to families, genera, and species. Thus organized, museum displays would illustrate the evolution
of civilization from its crudest to its most rened forms.
In an article in the journal Science, Boas argued that this
approach to cultural evolution ignored one of Charles
Darwin's main 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 aecting that people and its productions, we cannot understand its meanings ....
Our objection ... is, that classication is not
explanation.[8]
Boas argued that although similar causes produce similar eects, dierent causes may also produce similar
eects.[9] Consequently, similar artifacts found in distinct
and distant places may be the products of distinct causes.
Against the popular method of drawing analogies in order to reach generalizations, Boas argued in favor of an
inductive method. Based on his critique of contemporary
museum displays, Boas 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.[8]

3
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 eld 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 ones 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.
This conception of culture, and principle of cultural relativism, were for Kroeber and his colleagues the fundamental contribution of anthropology, and what distinguished anthropology from similar disciplines such as
sociology and psychology.
Ruth Benedict, another of Boas students, 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. Her book, Patterns of
Culture, did much to popularize the term in the United
States. In it, she explained that:
The study of custom can be protable only after certain preliminary propositions have been
violently opposed. In the rst place any scientic 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 elds 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.[11]

Boas student Alfred Kroeber described the rise of the

relativist perspective thus:[10]
Benedict was adamant that she was not romanticizing socalled primitive societies; she was emphasizing that any
Now while some of the interest in anthropolunderstanding of the totality of humanity must be based
ogy in its earlier stages was in the exotic and
on as wide and varied a sample of individual cultures as
the out-of-the-way, yet even this antiquarian
possible. Moreover, it is only by appreciating a culture
motivation ultimately contributed to a broader
that is profoundly dierent from our own, that we can
result. Anthropologists became aware of the
realize the extent to which our own beliefs and activities
diversity of culture. They began to see the
are culture-bound, rather than natural or universal. In this

COMPARISON TO MORAL RELATIVISM

context, cultural relativism is a heuristic device of funda- 4 Comparison to moral relativism

mental importance because it calls attention to the importance of variation in any sample that is used to derive According to Marcus and Fischer, when the principle of
generalizations about humanity.
cultural relativism was popularized after World War II,
it came to be understood more as a doctrine, or position, than as a method. As a consequence, people misinterpreted cultural relativism to mean that all cultures are
both separate and equal, and that all value systems, how3 As a critical device
ever dierent, are equally valid. Thus, people came to
use the phrase cultural relativism erroneously to signify
moral relativism.
Marcus and Fischers attention to anthropologys refusal
to accept Western cultures claims to universality implies People generally understand moral relativism to mean
that cultural relativism is a tool not only in cultural un- that there are no absolute or universal moral standards.
derstanding, but in cultural critique. This points to the The nature of anthropological research lends itself to the
second front on which they believe anthropology oers search for universal standards (standards found in all societies), but not necessarily absolute standards; neverpeople enlightenment:
theless, people often confuse the two. In 1944 Clyde
Kluckhohn (who studied at Harvard, but who admired
and worked with Boas and his students) attempted to adThe other promise of anthropology, one less
dress this issue:
fully distinguished and attended to than the
rst, has been to serve as a form of cultural
The concept of culture, like any other piece of
critique for ourselves. In using portraits of
knowledge, can be abused and misinterpreted.
other cultural patterns to reect self-critically
Some fear that the principle of cultural relativon our own ways, anthropology disrupts comity will weaken morality. If the Bugabuga do
mon sense and makes us reexamine our takenit why can't we? Its all relative anyway. But
for-granted assumptions.[4]
this is exactly what cultural relativity does not
mean.
The critical function of cultural relativism 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.[12] Although Cook is misconstruing cultural relativism to be identical to moral relativism, his point still applies to the broader understanding
of the term. Relativism does not mean that ones views
are false, but it does mean that it is false to claim that ones
views are self-evident.
The critical function was indeed one of the ends to which
Benedict hoped her own work would meet. The most famous use of cultural relativism as a means of cultural
critique is Margaret Mead's dissertation research (under Boas) of adolescent female sexuality in Samoa. By
contrasting the ease and freedom enjoyed by Samoan
teenagers, Mead called into question claims that the stress
and rebelliousness that characterize American adolescence is natural and inevitable.
As Marcus and Fischer point out, however, this use of
relativism can be sustained only if there is ethnographic
research in the United States comparable to the research
conducted in Samoa. Although every decade has witnessed anthropologists conducting research in the United
States, the very principles of relativism have led most anthropologists to conduct research in foreign countries.

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
ts 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 scientic 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.[13][14]
Although Kluckholn was using language that was popular
at the time (e.g. savage tribe) but which is now considered antiquated and coarse by most anthropologists,
his point was that although moral standards are rooted
in ones culture, anthropological research reveals that the

5
fact that people have moral standards is a universal. He diverse cultures, especially cultures that had been or are
was especially interested in deriving specic moral stan- still under European colonial or imperial domination), the
dards that are universal, although few if any anthropolo- document ended by making two substantive claims:
gists think that he was successful.[13]
Even where political systems exist that deny citiThere is an ambiguity in Kluckhohns formulation that
zens the right of participation in their government,
would haunt anthropologists in the years to come. It
or seek to conquer weaker peoples, underlying culmakes it clear that ones moral standards make sense in
tural values may be called on to bring the peoples
terms of ones culture. He waes, however, on whether
of such states to a realization of the consequences
the moral standards of one society could be applied to anof the acts of their governments, and thus enforce a
other. Four years later American anthropologists had to
brake upon discrimination and conquest.
confront this issue head-on.

4.1

Statement on human rights

World-wide standards of freedom and justice, based

on the principle that man is free only when he lives as
his society denes freedom, that his rights are those
he recognizes as a member of his society, must be
basic.

The transformation of cultural relativism as a heuristic

tool into the doctrine of moral relativism occurred in the
context of the work of the Commission of Human Rights
of the United Nations in preparing the Universal Decla- These claims provoked an immediate response by a number of anthropologists. Julian Steward (who, as a sturation of Human Rights.
dent of Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, and as a proMelville Herskovits prepared a draft Statement on Hufessor at Columbia University, was situated rmly in the
man Rights which Executive Board of the American AnBoasian lineage) suggested that the rst claim may have
thropological Association revised, submitted to the Combeen a loophole to exclude Germany from the advocated
mission on Human Rights, and then published.[15] The
tolerance, but that it revealed the fundamental aw in
statement begins with a fairly straightforward explanation
moral relativism: Either we tolerate everything, and
of the relevance of cultural relativism:
keep hands o, or we ght intolerance and conquest
political and economic as well as military in all their
The problem is thus to formulate a statement
forms. Similarly, he questioned whether the second prinof human rights that will do more than phrase
ciple means that anthropologists approve the social caste
respect for the individual as individual. It must
system of India, the racial caste system of the United
also take into full account the individual as a
States, or many other varieties of social discrimination in
member of a social group of which he is part,
the world.[16] Steward and others[17] argued that any atwhose sanctioned modes of life shape his betempt to apply the principle of cultural relativism to moral
havior, and with whose fate his own is thus inproblems would only end in contradiction: either a prinextricably bound
ciple that seems to stand for tolerance ends up being used
to excuse intolerance, or the principle of tolerance is reThe bulk of this statement emphasizes concern that the vealed to be utterly intolerant of any society that seems
Declaration of Human Rights was being prepared primar- to lack the (arguably, Western) value of tolerance. They
ily by people from Western societies, and would express concluded that anthropologists must stick to science, and
values that, far from being universal, are really Western: engage in debates over values only as individuals.
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 dierent 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.

5 Current debates

The debates over the Statement on Human Rights, then,

was not merely over the validity of cultural relativism, or
the question of what makes a right universal. It forced
anthropologists to confront the question of whether anthropological research is relevant to non-anthropologists.
Although Steward and Barnett seemed to be suggesting
that anthropology as such should restrict itself to purely
academic aairs, people within and without the academy
have continued to debate the ways non-anthropologists
have used this principle in public policy concerning ethnic
minorities or in international relations (see this interview
Although this statement could be read as making a proce- or this article on cultural relativism and human rights for
dural point (that the Commission must involve people of examples of this debate).

5 CURRENT DEBATES

Political scientist Alison Dundes Renteln has recently

argued that most debates over moral relativism misunderstand the importance of cultural relativism.[18] Most
philosophers understand the Benedictine-Herskovitz formulation of cultural relativism to mean

the Vietnam War, anthropologists became especially attentive to relations of domination and subjugation that
link Western and non-Western societies, and that structure relations within any given society. In the context of
the Cold War, however, anthropologists once again confronted the relationship between politics and science.

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.[19]

Boas and his students understood anthropology to be

an historical, or human science, in that it involves subjects (anthropologists) studying other subjects (humans
and their activities), rather than subjects studying objects
(such as rocks or stars). Under such conditions, it is
fairly obvious that scientic research may have political
consequences, and the Boasians saw no conict between
their scientic attempts to understand other cultures, and
the political implications of critiquing their own culture.
For anthropologists working in this tradition, the doctrine of cultural relativism as a basis for moral relativism
was anathema. For politicians, moralists, and many social
scientists (but few anthropologists) who saw science and
human interests as necessarily independent or even opposed, however, the earlier Boasian principle of cultural
relativism was anathema. Thus, cultural relativism came
under attack, but from opposing sides and for opposing
reasons.

Although this formulation clearly echoes the kinds of example anthropologists used in elaborating cultural relativism, Renteln believes that it misses the spirit of the
principle. Accordingly, she supports a dierent formulation: there are or can be no value judgements that are
true, that is, objectively justiable, independent of specic cultures.[20]
Renteln faults philosophers for disregarding the heuristic
and critical functions of cultural relativism. Her main argument is that in order to understand the principle of cultural relativism, one must recognize the extent to which
it is based on enculturation: the idea that people unconsciously acquire the categories and standards of their
culture. This observation, which echoes the arguments
about culture that originally led Boas to develop the principle, suggests that the use of cultural relativism in debates of rights and morals is not substantive but procedural. That is, it does not require a relativist to sacrice
his or her values. But it does require anyone engaged in a
consideration of rights and morals to reect on how their
own enculturation has shaped their views:
There is no reason why the relativist should be
paralyzed, as critics have often asserted.[21] 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.
Renteln thus bridges the gap between the anthropologist
as scientist (whom Steward and Barnett felt had nothing
to oer debates on rights and morality) and as private individual (who has every right to make value judgements).
The individual keeps this right, but the scientist requires
that the individual acknowledge that these judgements
are neither self-evident universals, nor entirely personal
(and idiosyncratic), but rather took form in relation to the
individuals own culture.

5.1

Post-colonial politics

In the wake of the breakup of the British and French colonial empires, and in the wake of the American defeat in

5.2 Political critique

On the one hand, many anthropologists began to criticize the way moral relativism, in the guise of cultural relativism, is used to mask the eects of Western colonialism and imperialism. Thus, Stanley Diamond argued that
when the term cultural relativism entered popular culture, popular culture coopted anthropology in a way that
voided the principle of any 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 gure,
prone to newsworthy and shallow pronouncements about the cosmic condition of the human
race. It has the eect 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 rst 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

7
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 redenition 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.[22]
George Stocking summarized this view with the observation 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.[23]

5.3

Political defense

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, Cliord 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.[24] Consequently, the various critics and proponents of cultural relativism were talking past one another. What these dierent positions have in common,
Geertz argued, is that they are all responding to the same
thing: knowledge about other ways of life.
The supposed conict between Benedicts and
Herskovitss 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, Kroebers and Kluckholns verities - Kroebers were mostly about messy creatural
matters like delirium and menstruation, Kluckholns 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 anthrpos 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 oered 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 signicant, and thus as insignicant, 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 concludes this discussion by commenting, As I
have already suggested, I myself nd provincialism altogether the more real concern as far what actually goes on
in the world is concerned.
Geertz' defense of cultural relativism as a concern which
should motivate various inquiries, rather than as an explanation or solution, echoed a comment Alfred Kroeber
made in reply to earlier critics of cultural relativism, in
1949:[25]
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 nd.
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 suce 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.

6 Use by nations
Several nations have used cultural relativism as a justication for limiting the rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, despite World Conference on Human Rights rejects it as a refugee of human rights violation. A 2011 study by international legal expert Roger

Lloret Blackburn, examining the Universal Periodic Re- [7]

views, distinguishes several dierent groups of nations.
One group consists of nations where the current regime
has been installed by revolution and that deny the need for [8]
political plurality: China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cuba and
Iran. Another group are certain Islamic nations that deny
equal rights for men and women and adhere to Sharia and
certain traditional practices: Yemen, Iran, Pakistan. A [9]
third possible group, are nations that give special rights to
groups such as minorities: Malaysia, Mexico, Indonesia,
and Colombia.[26]
[10]

See also
Emotivism
Ethnocentrism

REFERENCES

Heyer, Virginia 1948 In Reply to Elgin Williams in

American Anthropologist 50(1) 163-166
Boas, Franz 1974 [1887] The Principles of Ethnological
Classication, in A Franz Boas reader ed. by George W.
Stocking Jr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
ISBN 0-226-06243-0. page 62,62
Boas, Franz 1887 Museums of Ethnology and their Classication, in Science 9: 587-589.
Kroeber, Alfred (1948) Anthropology p. 11. Harcourt
and Brace, New York.

[11] Ruth Benedict 1959 [1934] Patterns of Culture Boston:

Houghton Miin Company, page 3
[12] Cook, John 1978 Cultural Relativism as an Ethnocentric
Notion, in The Philosophy of Society

Emic and etic

[13] Kluckhohn, Clyde 1944 Mirror For Man

Global justice

[14] https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/80-241/guided_
inquiries/articles/cultural_rel.html

Historical particularism
Intercultural competence
Moral relativism
Relativism
Situational ethics
Universality (philosophy)
Xenocentrism
Human Rights

[15] Executive Board, American Anthropological Association

1947 Statement on Human Rights in American Anthropologist 49(4) 539-543
[16] Steward, Julian 1948 Comments on the Statement of Human Rights in American Anthropologist 50(2) 351-352
[17] Barnett, H.G. On Science and Human Rights in American Anthropologist 50(2) 352-355. June 1948.
[18] Renteln, Alison 1988 Relativism and the Search for Human Rights in American Anthropologist 90(1) 56-72
[19] Frankena, William 1973 Ethics

References

[1] Franz Boas 1887 Museums of Ethnology and their classication Science 9: 589
[2] cultural, adj.
and n.", OED Online, Sept 2009,
Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/
entry/50055630 , citing Lockes article The Concept of
Race as Applied to Social Culture, Howard Review 1
(1924): pp. 290-299.
[3] Glazer, Mark (December 16, 1994). Cultural Relativism. Texas: University of Texas-Pan American. Retrieved June 13, 2007.
[4] George Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: The Experimental Moment
in the Human Sciences Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. page 1
[5] Franz Boas 1963 [1911] The Mind of Primitive Man New
York: Collier Books. page 149
[6] Franz Boas 1889 On Alternating Sounds, American Anthropologist 2:47-53

[20] Schmidt, Paul 1955 Some Criticisms of Cultural Relativism in Journal of Philosophy 52: 780-791
[21] Hartung, Frank 1954 '"Cultural Relativity and Moral
Judgements in Philosophy of Science 21: 11-125
[22] Stanley Diamond 2004 [1974] In Search of the Primitive
New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers page 110
[23] Stocking, George W. Jr. 1982 Afterward: A View from
the Center in Ethnos 47: 172-286
[24] Geertz, Cliord 1984 Anti-Anti-Relativism in American Anthropologist86 (2) 263-278.
[25] Kroeber, Alfred 1949 An Authoritarian Panacea in
American Anthropologist 51(2) 318-320
[26] Roger Lloret Blackburn, Cultural Relativism in the
Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council,
ICIP Working Papers 2011/3, Institut Catal Internacional per la Pau, Barcelona, September 2011, http://
www.upr-info.org/sites/default/files/general-document/
pdf/-blackburn_upr_cultural_relativism.09.2011.pdf

Further reading
Ankerl, Guy. 2000. Global Communication without Universal Civilization. vol.I: Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati,
Chinese, and Western. Geneva: INU PRESS, ISBN
2-88155-004-5
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
Jarvie, I. C. 1995 Cultural Relativism (a critique)
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 Cliord Geertz
and His 'Anti Anti-Relativism'" in American Anthropologist 89(4): 935-939
Rachels, James, 2007, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-282574-X
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 978-019-530539-5

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