Cultural relativism 2.0

Current Anthropology

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 363-373

  Brown, Michael F ^a  

^a WILLIAMS COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 48749085095     PISSN: 00113204     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/529261     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. After offering a thumbnail sketch of the emergence of cultural relativism from the work of Boas and his students, D'Souza argues that the triumph of relativist thinking in American intellectual and political circles made it impossible to criticize features of African-American culture that D'Souza deems dysfunctional: "An initial openness to the truths of other cultures degenerates into a close-minded denial of all transcultural standards" (1995, 384). Citing the work of Elijah Anderson, D'Souza insists that a ubiquitous ideology of relativism keeps inner-city blacks caught in a conflict between "a hegemonic culture of pathology and a besieged culture of decency" within their own communities (p. 528).
2. For discussion of relativism and pluralism, see Appiah (2006), Howard (1995), Lukes (2003), Moody-Adams (1997), and Rorty (1986). Among those who judge cultural relativism to be intellectually bankrupt or at least gravely flawed I would include Arkes (1986), Aya (1996), Boudon (2004), Cook (1999), Gellner (1985), Jarvie (1984, 1993), Li (2006), and Zechenter (1997).
3. For discussion of the complexities and ambiguities of Boas's position on relativism, see Stocking (1968, 230-33) and Lewis (1999). Robert Lowie (1956, 1009) recalls that in his classes Boas "unremittingly preached the necessity of seeing the native from within." "As for moral judgments of aboriginal custom," Lowie writes, "we soon learnt to regard them as a display of anachronistic naïveté."
4. Herskovits (1972 [1955], 15) declares: "The principle of cultural relativism, briefly stated, is as follows: Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation."
5. The coining of the term "ethnocentrism" is conventionally attributed to the sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). For discussion of how ethnocentrism and relativism fit into Sumner's work, see Shone (2004).
6. Kroeber (1952, 137) invokes a similar analogy when he states, "Reference in this matter is to values as they exist in human societies at given times and places; to values as they make their appearance in the history of our species; in short, to values as natural phenomena occurring in nature - much like the characteristic forms, qualities, and abilities of animals as defined in comparative zoology."
7. For more detailed discussion of pluralism in American anthropology with respect to Herskovits's ideas about cultural relativism, see Lewis (1999, 720).
8. As early as the 1830s, Auguste Comte (1976 [1830-42], 89) argued that one of the ways positivist sociology differed from theology and metaphysics was that it had a "tendency to render relative the ideas which were at first absolute." This transition from the absolute to the relative was for Comte a decisive step in the creation of social science.
9. On Herder, see, for example, Denby (2005); on Bastian, Koepping (1995); on Westermarck's moral relativism, Stocking (1995, 156).
10. Two much-cited collections that pursue this line of investigation are Wilson (1970) and Hollis and Lukes (1982).
11. Many recent works consider the debate within anthropology about the Declaration of Human Rights, including Messer (1993), Engle (2001), and Glendon (2001).
12. For an informative discussion of this issue, with particular attention to the status of women and minorities, see Nagengast (1997).
13. For recent essays arguing against claims of moral (or liberal) imperialism, see Stoll (2006) and R. Wilson (2006).
14. Coming from a different theoretical milieu from Wendy Brown's, MacIntyre (2000, 153) insists that "[tolerance] is not in itself a virtue and too inclusive a toleration is a vice."
15. Representative discussions of major categories of relativism can be found in Hatch (1983) and Spiro (1986).
16. Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture (1986) is arguably the most influential meditation on the political dilemmas of intercultural translation. Of particular relevance is a chapter by Talal Asad (1986, 164) that dissects Gellner's optimistic claims of translatability and concludes that "the anthropological enterprise of cultural translation may be vitiated by the fact that there are asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant societies."
17. Henrietta Moore (2005, 54) puts the question more tactfully when she asks, "If truths are actually incommensurable then what is the purpose of cross-cultural understanding and comparison?" Likewise, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006, 31) asks, "And without a shared world, what is there to discuss?"
18. Fundamentalists consistently reject cultural relativism for its allegedly nihilistic assumptions, calling to mind the declaration of Terry Eagleton (2003, 214) that "fundamentalism is fearful of nihilism, having failed to notice that nihilism is simply the mirror-image of its own absolutism."
19. The latter approach can be sampled in a work by the political scientist Hadley Arkes in a chapter entitled "The Fallacies of Cultural Relativism; or, Abbott and Costello Meet the Anthropologist." Arkes declares: "The truth . . . is that in all these societies, distant as they have been in time and space, there has ever been but one set of moral premises, one understanding of the logic of morals." He continues (pp. 154-55): "If these societies have not been in agreement, I have suggested that the causes are to be found in matters far less portentous than a difference in moral premises. The disagreements can be attributed, without pretension, to faulty or incomplete reasoning from right premises, or to an insufficiently cultivated sense of the canons and requirements of moral reasoning."
20. The question of where the truths of sorcery should be seen to lie is far knottier than I can deal with here. For a subtle, epistemologically nuanced attempt to do justice to these questions, see West (2007). The ethical dilemmas faced by ethnographers when confronted by socially destructive witchcraft accusations are vividly depicted in Wesch (2007).
21. A much-cited example of a highly formalized attempt to define such concepts as fairness, equality, social responsibility, and the contours of a well-ordered society is Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971).
22. For discussion, see Webster (1995) and, in a more general way, the observations of Latour (2004) on the excesses of contemporary critical theory. Strang (2006) argues that the distinction between indigenous and anthropological knowledges has been exaggerated. Anthropologists and their subjects, she argues, have long been engaged in a dialogical process that in her view is heading toward a common synthesis.
23. The obvious exception to this statement is methodological relativism, which continues to hold sway in anthropology and other social sciences.
24. A recent example is McKinnon and Silverman (2005), which offers more than a dozen essays that challenge various universalizing claims - largely coming from evolutionary psychology - that the authors deem reductionist. See also McKinnon (2005).
25. Herskovits (1972 [1958], 57) acknowledged the legitimacy of empirically grounded work on human nature. "As far as I know," he wrote, "there is no relativist who would exclude from the anthropological repertory the study of values, or who would deny to human behavior its common psychological base. Nor do relativists deny the importance of research which would refine our knowledge of the nature and functioning of this common base . . . ."
26. A recent example is the lively debate provoked by Daniel L. Everett's (2005) assertion that the language of the Pirahã people of Brazil lacks certain grammatical features that many linguists believe common to all human languages.