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.Ĭultural relativism was, in part, a response to Western ethnocentrism. The one has been the salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global Westernization. Fischer: Ģ0th century social and cultural anthropology has promised its still largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts. As a methodological and heuristic deviceĪccording to George E. The works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus detail ancient Greek arguments for cultural relativism as part of the tenth of the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus. They practiced cremation and funerary cannibalism, respectively, and were each dismayed and abhorred at the proposition of the other tribes' practices. 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. There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's 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. 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 inevitably-after careful considerations of their relative merits-choose that of his own country. Herodotus ( Histories 3.38) observes on the relativity of mores ( νόμοι): 2 As a methodological and heuristic device.The popularization of cultural relativism after World War II was somehow a reaction to such historical events as Nazism, and to colonialism, ethnocentrism and racism more generally. Whether or not these claims necessitate a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate. Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Boas believed that the sweep of cultures, to be found in connection with any subspecies, is so vast and pervasive that there cannot be a relationship between culture and race.
The term became common among anthropologists after Boas' death in 1942, to express their synthesis of a number of ideas he had developed.
The first 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 latter's 1917 book Culture and Ethnology. our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes." However, Boas did not coin the term. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: "civilization is not something absolute, but. It was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of another. Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture.
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