Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism is the idea that beliefs are affected by and best understood within the context of culture. It is a theory and a tool used by anthropologists and social scientists for recognizing the natural tendency to judge other cultures in comparison to their own and for adequately collecting and analyzing information about other cultures, without this bias. Cultural relativism was born out of and can also be applied to epistemology, which is the philosophical study of human knowledge. Empiricism is the theory that knowledge and understanding come from experience with the world. Cognitive relativists claim that differing belief systems are equally valuable, such as theories about what exists and how people interact with the world. Epistemological relativism acknowledges the role one's environment plays in influencing an individual's beliefs and even the concepts behind the words contained in a language.

Moral relativism is often mistakenly assumed to be the same concept as cultural relativism. While there are similarities, there are also key differences. Relativistic moral judgments are determined relative or according to the values and beliefs held by a particular culture. In the extreme sense this implies that there is no universal right and wrong in ethics. Most ethicists consider relativistic theories to be inferior to stricter normative, or rule-directed, theories that prescribe how a person ought to act. (If there is no absolute right and wrong, then there is no purpose in debating ethical questions. Morality would be empty and instead just describe how people act rather than how they ought to act.) Many people operate with a relativistic approach, however, in an effort to avoid [Page 632]the dangers of ethnocentrism—the same pitfall that anthropologists sought to correct through cultural relativism. Ethnocentric thinkers focus on the values of their own group as superior to those of others. Behaviors and beliefs in a different culture are compared and judged according to a narrow idea of what is normal. Cultural relativism—also sometimes called “pluralism”—cautions against unfairly condemning another group for being different and instead respects the right for others to have different values, conduct, and ways of life. Cultural relativism approaches awareness of cultural differences as a tool for appreciating and analyzing other cultures without assuming one's own group to be superior.

The concept of cultural relativism was developed by Franz Boas (1858–1942) and his anthropology students. Boas sought to study cultures of people in terms of how they interacted with their environment, and he acknowledged that rather than holding a single set of unchanging core beliefs, the ideas valued by most cultures changed over time. He observed that individual members of a community both affect and are affected by the larger whole. The implication of this changed the way anthropologists approached what were formerly understood to be distinctions between modern and traditional cultures. Because the interactions between the individual and the society were active in both directions, there was no longer a basis for assuming traditional cultures to be unchanging and modern cultures exclusively dynamic, or in motion. Boas proposed that there was room for both progress and enduring values in both types of society. Furthermore, because of the potential for rapid change, his theories encouraged anthropologists to conduct their studies from within the culture itself, or ethnographically. Thus began a new paradigm for methods of collecting and analyzing cultural data.

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