Cultural Values

The notion of “cultural values” brings together two powerful social science concepts to produce a concept that is seductive yet slippery and contentious. It is seductive in that it purports to explain or interpret human behavior, especially differences in behavior between groups, through an emphasis on how human lives are also differently valued moral lives. It accomplishes this through deploying the concept of value as that which makes people conceive of what is right, beautiful, and good and, hence, what is desirable. Thus, groups with behavioral differences are viewed as different because of differing values or cultural values. The concept of value becomes further sharpened by distinguishing the desirable from the desired; the former is based on a strong notion of moral justification, whereas the latter restrictively refers to nothing more than a preference. Such an emphasis on value as valuable for the understanding of social action assures a critical space for cultural approaches to human behavior as distinct from conventional sociological, political, and economic approaches, which emphasize social institutions, social relations, power, and market or nonmarket commodity transactions.

Nevertheless, the carefully crafted notion of value, when qualified as cultural value, quickly becomes slippery and contentious when used uncritically. Whereas intense debate over the precise scope, [Page 194]meaning, and valence of the concept “culture,” especially within the discipline of anthropology and the sociology of culture, makes its users mindful of overstating its explanatory value, the same cannot be said for the concept “cultural value.” While debate over cultural values usefully seeks to distinguish between moral evaluation and factual cognition, or between the desirable and the desired, seldom does one encounter questions as to whether and how values relate to structures of power. For example, can one indeed separate a cultural value from, say, a political value? Those knowledgeable in social and anthropological thought have pointed out that to value is to introduce hierarchy. Hence, values are very much political, concerned with the organization of power and inequality by definition. In what sense, then, can a value be cultural? In other words, the problem with the concept “cultural values” is not that people do not operate with values that influence their actions, but rather that it is difficult to demonstrate what exactly is a cultural value, and hence it is intellectually misleading to assume that this is self-evident. That such fundamental distinctions are not clear in the use of the term is not due to an oversight in the development of the concept but is more a result of overstating the case for cultural values by treating the concept “cultural” uncritically. Consequently, it fatally leaves open fundamental questions about its own explanatory or interpretive validity.

Even a cursory appreciation of the debates around culture (taking this to be somewhat more problematic than the use of the term value by itself) ought to, at least minimally, caution us against using the term cultural values easily. This entry first delineates the development of the concept “culture,” then highlights examples of how cultural values frame popular discourses on social problems, and finally poses the problem of human rights as an example of how cultural values may not be the best way to look at social problems. Throughout this entry, the term cultural values is viewed as problematic.

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