Anthropology Of Cultural Relativism Research Paper

In philosophy, to be sure, there has been a long tradition of relativistic thought. The Sophists’ cultivation of the contestatory rhetoric of community life and community organization is often taken as relativistic in implication and action, and Hume’s (1975) skepticism about general observations including any universal moral principles is surely relativistic in spirit. Kant’s view of the constructed nature of the meta-physical and Hegel’s historicism are instrumental in the development of the more radical relativisms found in Marx and Nietzsche. Modern-day pragmatism continues this perspectivalism, whether in the works of Foucault (1979), Derrida (1993) or Rorty (1989). These scholars focus, respectively, on knowledge as conditioned by power, knowledge as conditioned by rhetorical or textual construction, and knowledge as conditioned by social solidarity. Such views have steadily and perhaps definitively been undermining overarching claims to metaphysical universals. It has certainly given rise, in respect to moral philosophy, to a ‘rational relativism.’

Anthropology, a discipline mainly emergent since the mid-nineteenth century, has not been immune to these philosophical developments and the crisis of representation and legitimation they usher in. Indeed, it has become, through its various arguments for cultural and linguistic autochthony, a central player in the relativism universalism wars. The interest of anthropologists, particularly in the issue of cultural relativism, derives first from ethnographic field experience of the variable proverbial wisdom of local life lived on the ground, as it were, or from the fact that anthropologists usually work comparatively across cultures and, therefore, across cultural and language perspectives, or from the long interest in anthropology in the difficult problem of universal human rights. Philosophy, understandably, has reacted by exercising pointed critique of the incoherence of anthropological relativism—it is inescapably self-refuting and it under-mines its own truth claims—and the perniciousness of anthropological relativism—it undermines philosophical commitment to the improvement of thought.

The anthropology of Franz Boas is generally seen as the fountain head of cultural relativism in American anthropology. Although originally a physicist, Boas was increasingly cautious both about universalization of things human and the hierarchization of human groups which often accompanied such practice. His chief intellectual opponent was classic evolutionism, with its invidious ranking of societies on a scale from savagery to civilization. His chief popular opponent was racism, or in its benign form, the Civilizing Mission. Indeed one of Boas’ few popular books, in an otherwise vast oeuvre—The Mind of Primitive Man (Boas 1938)—attacked ‘racial determinism,’ that is, the association between biology and ‘personality’ (by which he meant behavior in the broadest sense). He did this by focusing on the shaping force of culture upon behavior and understanding (that is, upon ‘mind’). In this book, therefore, itself preceded by any number of lectures and papers dating from the late-nineteenth century, Boas early laid the ground work for the ‘cultural relativism’ of his students, although this was not a term he employed to any extent.

There are several other classic stimuli to relativistic views in the Boas oeuvre. In ‘The study of geography’ (Boas 1887), while resisting geographical determinism, he stimulated thinking on methodological relativism by pointing to two different and justifiable approaches to field data, the nomothetic or law-seeking and the idiographic or descriptive, each of which, differently attuned to local circumstance, gave different yet necessary understandings of the field data. It may be said, particularly in postmodern times, that although increasingly convinced by the ‘structuring power of tradition,’ Boas in his emerging relativism never abandoned entirely the universalist hope of the scientific mission and method and the seeking, however cautiously, of lawful generalizations.

Cultural relativism in its strong form is identified with two of Boas’ foremost students, Ruth Benedict and Melville J. Herskovits. In her widely read Patterns of Culture, Benedict (1934) took particular aim at universalist notions of the normal and abnormal. This argument was made effective through its arresting portraits of three cultures, Pueblo, Dobu, and Northwest Coast Indians, whose characteristic behaviors, abnormal from a Western perspective, are portrayed as normal from the local perspective.

Benedict repeatedly resisted ethnocentric and provincial views of the normal and argued a ‘Great Arc of human possibility’ (Benedict 1934, p. 34) of which no culture could take full advantage and on which every culture had to make its particular choices. It was Melville Herskovits, however, who most directly framed the issue of ‘cultural relativism’ in his general text Man and His Works (Herskovits 1948), and whose collected arguments could be posthumously published as Cultural Relativism (Herskovits 1972).

None of the Boasians, including Herskovits, were out and out relativists in the epistemological sense that they gave up on the possibilities of discovering universals beyond the fact of cultural relativity. In all their writings there appears the promise of those eventual discoveries. They are all to be considered, rather, methodological and moral relativists whose main aim was to resist ignorance of and moral superiority towards other cultures, and exploitative intolerance of them. The aim was to increase mutual respect and tolerance in the world. Herskovits argued, however, that such cultural relativism was not derived from any kind of moral philosophy, but rather from the empirical anthropological observations on diversity by field-working anthropologists. Nevertheless, he struggled with many dilemmas of philosophical type in his ‘cultural relativism’: negotiating the universal and the particular, the practical and the ethical, the ‘is’ and the ‘ought,’ anthropological science and anthropological humanism, the cross-cultural and the within-cultural view, the applied and the philosophical. His strategy was to convert these dilemmas, which arise from the fate of the field-working man or woman of science finding himself or herself inescapably situated in the fold of philosophy, into the revelatory paradoxes of anthropological practice (Fernandez 1990).

The heyday of ‘cultural relativism’ in the USA—in the sense of seeking to define a durable doctrine in the face of persistent assault from various moral philosophies on the one hand and philosophies of science on the other—were the decades of the mid-twentieth century, the 1930s through the 1960s. Subsequently, however, some notable contributions to this enduring issue have come forth together with a contemporary challenge to relativistic thought: the human rights movement. Marshall Sahlins (1976), although not espousing ‘cultural relativism’ in its paradoxical sense of moral obligation to defend diverse local moral orders, nevertheless conducted a compelling argument against the culture-free universalization, mainly among economists and political economists, which accepts utility interests as the dominant principle in practical reasoning. In the 1980s, a notable argument developed over relativism and the role of culture in determining reality principally among three anthropologists: Renato Rosaldo, Clifford Geertz and Melville Spiro.

Rosaldo (1989) addresses the impact on older notions of the stable truths and dispassionate objectivities of classic social analysis made by awareness of both the anthropologist and his or her informants as ‘positioned (and repositioned) subjects’ recurrently engaged in an ongoing dramatic process of ‘relational understanding.’ In such a process truth becomes a very moving target only perspectivally to be apprehended, if at all, and in any case best interpreted by narrative analysis firmly set within and not beyond cultural contexts. While not espousing a straight-line cultural relativism, he notes and resists the return of a ‘nostalgia’ for the authoritative, often imperious, truths of objective social science—a nostalgia often expressed in an attack on a stereotyped notion of relativism.

This strategy of skepticism has also been that of Geertz, the central player in the interpretive approach that puts the play of perspectives at the center of anthropological inquiry. In 1984 he offered an intricate argument, exemplified in the double negative of the title of the article, ‘Anti–anti relativism’ (Geertz 1984). He takes to task the resurgence of absolutist interests in affirming some metaphysical or, what is the same, very physical, that is to say biological, realities behind the influence of cultural and language differences. This search for ‘nature’s own vocabulary,’ and the security of objective biological truths on this side of culture, truncates what anthropology is all about, and Geertz questions the kind of ‘hearty common sense’ that simply ignores the diversity of life-ways plentifully evidenced in the anthropological archive. While writ-ten in defense of that broadly rather than narrowly humanizing knowledge of diversity laboriously acquired by anthropology, Geertz neither directly espouses in any direct way the moral commitments present in an earlier ‘cultural relativism’ nor denies the probability that on the other side of culture there may be some universals to discover.

In defense of the possibility of scientific, which is to say universal, measurability and explanation across cultural boundaries, Spiro (1986) develops a useful contrast between three types of cultural relativism: descriptive (that there are important empirical differences between cultures), normative (that evaluative judgement of the norms expressed in these differences are always relative to cultural contexts and hence not generalizeable) and epistemological (that culture determines what we know and how we know it). Spiro accepts descriptive relativism and the perspectivalism it reflects, and the cautions of field methods it enjoins. He rejects the strong form of normative relativism, which argues against any possibility of cross-cultural judgement of human practices, as well as epistemological relativism in general, which would argue both for ontological incommensurability between cultures and for the irrelevance or perversity of the discovery of biological and psychological commonalities in humankind. It has been the tendency, he argues, in the fin-desiecle age of textual hermeneutics, to espouse an immoderate form of epistemological relativism; some-thing that the earlier cultural relativists, although committed to descriptive and moderate normative relativism, never did. The consequence is simply to deny the possibilities of an explanatory science of humans anchored in a valid and verifiable logic of discovery, with all the implications for professional authority that such a denial of principled comparative inquiry entails.

In the 1990s, an important area of challenge to cultural relativism arose in the argument for universal human rights. At first glance, cultural relativism would seem to be an impediment to such universalization of a value. Indeed, oppressive states proclaiming state sovereignty over their citizens often claim justification in ‘cultural relativism.’ This defense begs the question for all concerned of cultural boundaries within states, which is to say the question of the definition of culture and its boundaries in a pluralizing, globalizing world. That the relation between cultural relativism and universal human rights need not be taken as inevitably oppositional is seen in recent efforts on the part of the Human Rights Commission of the American Anthropological Association, to posit a species-wide disposition to create culture and cultural difference, and the corresponding right to such creation and such difference as long as it does not impose on that right in others (American Anthropological Association 1998, Turner 1997). There may remain problems with this enlightenment argument, as theory and practice, but it effectively moves the debate away, as for example does Geertz’ argument before it, from a simple and fruitless opposition in which one or another pole of the debate is confined to a demonic reading. Also, it preserves the practical and methodological aspects of cultural relativism as a posture of critical inquiry.

In reviewing this century-long argument over relativism in the social sciences, we may note several principal points. First, there is the tendency for stereotypic views of the opposite argument to emerge, with the consequence that the opponent’s views are trivialized and simplified. Second, strong and moderate forms of cultural relativism in its various aspects (descriptive, normative and epistemological) must be distinguished if the argument is to obtain to any clarifying power. Third, the methodological aspect of cultural relativism and its importance, in its descriptive and normative aspect, as a posture of inquiry must be recognized for those, mostly but not exclusively anthropologists, who have chosen to work in other cultures. Fourth, the discussion of cultural relativism is inevitably related to one’s definition of culture and particularly cultural boundedness. Fifth, it must be recognized that the logics of inquiry differ significantly between the sciences and the humanities. Hence the discussion of relativism is itself relative to what disciplinary faculty is anchoring and being evoked in the discussion. Sixth, there is a politics of relativism which is inevitably present—the Boasian relativists, for example, were pronouncedly egalitarian, pluralist, and anti-authoritarian in their values. Relativism has been a recurrent irritation, a valuable provocation, and a useful restraint on imperious inquiry in the academy, and has produced over this long period some of the most interesting arguments about just how individual scholars and researchers with different agendas working in different cultures with differing worldviews are to come together and engage in productive and fair-minded inquiry. Without the gadfly of relativism, the horsemen of social science, galloping through their agendas of investigation, might well be more roughshod, less discriminating, less insightful, and less empathetic beings.

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