Cultural Relativism
The Anthropologist Who Refused to Flinch
The moment you call another culture's practice 'barbaric,' you've stopped doing anthropology and started doing autobiography.
The Idea
Cultural relativism is one of those ideas that sounds like common sense until you actually try to apply it — and then it becomes one of the most demanding intellectual commitments a person can make. The concept, developed in its modern form by Franz Boas in the early twentieth century, holds that a culture's beliefs and practices should be understood on their own terms, within their own context, rather than measured against the yardstick of the observer's home culture. This was a direct challenge to the Victorian assumption that human societies existed on a single evolutionary ladder, with European civilization conveniently at the top. Boas noticed something that his predecessors had missed: the same behaviour can mean completely different things in different contexts, and you cannot understand what you are looking at until you understand the world that produced it. Giving away possessions, for instance, might look like reckless impoverishment to an outside eye; in certain Pacific Northwest communities, it was the primary means of accumulating social prestige and maintaining community bonds. What makes this idea genuinely difficult — and genuinely powerful — is the distinction between methodological and moral relativism. The first says: suspend judgment long enough to understand. The second says: all judgments are equally valid. Boas and his students, including Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, meant the first. Critics who accuse cultural relativism of moral cowardice are usually arguing against the second. Holding that distinction clearly is harder than it sounds.
In the World
In 1947, the American Anthropological Association did something that still sparks debate: it declined to endorse the newly drafted Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The AAA, heavily influenced by Boasian thinking, submitted a statement arguing that the document reflected Western liberal assumptions and could become a tool for cultural imperialism — a way for powerful nations to impose their values on others under the banner of universal principles. The statement was largely written by Melville Herskovits, one of Boas's students, and it raised a genuinely uncomfortable question: who decides what counts as a universal right? The drafters of the declaration were predominantly American and European. Could a document produced by that particular group of people at that particular historical moment — just two years after the world's most industrialised nations had unleashed the most destructive war in history — really claim to speak for all of humanity? The backlash was immediate and has never fully subsided. Critics pointed out, with some force, that cultural relativism provided intellectual cover for atrocities: if you are committed to withholding judgment across cultural lines, what do you say about genocide, forced marriage, or the deliberate targeting of civilians? Herskovits spent years trying to refine the position, arguing that relativism was a research method, not a moral blank cheque. The AAA eventually reversed course and has since endorsed several human rights frameworks. But the original statement did something valuable: it forced a reckoning with whose universalism we are actually talking about.
Why It Matters
Most of us will never do fieldwork in another society, but we practise a crude version of cultural relativism — or fail to — every day. It shows up in how you read news about places you have never been, how you react to unfamiliar food, rituals, or family structures, and how quickly you reach for the word 'weird' to describe something that simply isn't yours. The Boasian insight is a useful corrective to the tendency to treat your own culture as the default setting for humanity. It cultivates a particular kind of intellectual patience: the willingness to ask 'what is this doing?' before asking 'is this right?'. That pause — between observation and verdict — is where real understanding lives. But the harder lesson is knowing when to end the pause. Methodological relativism is a starting point, not a destination. Understanding a practice in its context is not the same as endorsing it, and some of the most ethically serious anthropologists have been the ones most willing to sit with that tension — to understand deeply and still disagree. That combination of genuine curiosity and moral seriousness is rarer than either quality alone.
A Question to Ponder
Is there a belief or practice from your own culture that, seen from the outside, might look just as puzzling — or troubling — as the ones you find hardest to understand elsewhere?
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