Cultural relativism

Between World War I and II, cultural relativism was the central tool for American anthropologists in this rejection of Western claims to universality, and salvage of non-Western cultures. It functioned to transform Boas' epistemology into methodological lessons.

This is most obvious in the case of language. Although language is commonly thought of as a means of communication, Boas called attention especially to the idea that it is also a means of categorizing experiences, hypothesizing that the existence of different languages suggests that people categorize, and thus experience, language differently (this view was more fully developed in the hypothesis of Linguistic relativity).

Thus, although all people perceive visible radiation the same way, in terms of a continuum of color, people who speak different languages slice up this continuum into discrete colors in different ways. Some languages have no word that corresponds to the English word green. When people who speak such languages are shown a green chip, some identify it using their word for blue, others identify it using their word for yellow. Thus, Boas's student Melville Herskovits summed up the principle of cultural relativism thus: "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation."

Boas pointed out that scientists grow up and work in a particular culture, and are thus necessarily ethnocentric. He provided an example of this in his 1889 article "On Alternating Sounds".[9] A number of linguists at Boas's time had observed that speakers of some Native-American languages pronounced the same word with different sounds indiscriminately. They thought that this meant that the languages were unorganized and lacked strict rules for pronunciation, and they took it as evidence that the languages were more primitive than their own. Boas, however, noted that the variant pronunciations were not an effect of lack of organization of sound patterns, but an effect of the fact that these languages organized sounds differently from English. The languages grouped sounds that were considered distinct in English into a single sound, but also having contrasts that did not exist in English. He then argued the case that Native Americans had been pronouncing the word in question the same way, consistently, and the variation was only perceived by someone whose own language distinguishes those two sounds. Boas's student, the linguist Edward Sapir, later noted also that English speakers pronounce sounds differently even when they think they are pronouncing the same sound. For example, few English speakers realize that the sounds written with the letter ⟨t⟩ in the words tick and stick are phonetically different, the first being generally aspirated and the other unaspirated; a speaker of a language where this contrast is meaningful would instantly perceive them as different sounds and tend not to see them as different realizations of a single phoneme.

Boas's students did not draw only on his engagement with German philosophy. They also engaged the work of contemporary philosophers and scientists, such as Karl Pearson, Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, William James, and John Dewey in an attempt to move, in the words of Boas's student Robert Lowie, from "a naively metaphysical to an epistemological stage" as a basis for revising the methods and theories of anthropology.

Boas and his students realized that, if they were to conduct scientific research in other cultures, they would need to employ methods that would help them escape the limits of their own ethnocentrism. One such method is that of ethnography: basically, they advocated living with people of another culture for an extended period of time, so that they could learn the local language and be enculturated, at least partially, into that culture.

In this context, cultural relativism is an attitude that is of fundamental methodological importance, because it calls attention to the importance of the local context in understanding the meaning of particular human beliefs and activities. Thus, in 1948 Virginia Heyer wrote: "Cultural relativity, to phrase it in starkest abstraction, states the relativity of the part to the whole. The part gains its cultural significance by its place in the whole, and cannot retain its integrity in a different situation."[10]

Another method was ethnology: to compare and contrast as wide a range of cultures as possible, in a systematic and even-handed manner. In the late nineteenth century, this study occurred primarily through the display of material artifacts in museums. Curators typically assumed that similar causes produce similar effects; therefore, in order to understand the causes of human action, they grouped similar artifacts together—regardless of provenance. Their aim was to classify artifacts, like biological organisms, according to families, genera, and species. Thus organized museum displays would illustrate the evolution of civilization from its crudest to its most refined forms.

In an article in the journal Science, Boas argued that this approach to cultural evolution ignored one of Charles Darwin's main contributions to evolutionary theory:

It is only since the development of the evolutional theory that it became clear that the object of study is the individual, not abstractions from the individual under observation. We have to study each ethnological specimen individually in its history and in its medium.... By regarding a single implement outside of its surroundings, outside of other inventions of the people to whom it belongs, and outside of other phenomena affecting that people and its productions, we cannot understand its meanings.... Our objection...is, that classification is not explanation.[11]

Boas argued that although similar causes produce similar effects, different causes may also produce similar effects.[12] Consequently, similar artifacts found in distinct and distant places may be the products of distinct causes. Against the popular method of drawing analogies in order to reach generalizations, Boas argued in favor of an inductive method. Based on his critique of contemporary museum displays, Boas concluded:

It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.[11]

Boas's student Alfred Kroeber described the rise of the relativist perspective thus:[13]

Now while some of the interest in (so called solial culture science) anthropology in its earlier stages was in the exotic and the out-of-the-way, yet even this antiquarian motivation ultimately contributed to a broader result. Anthropologists became aware of the diversity of culture. They began to see the tremendous range of its variations. From that, they commenced to envisage it as a totality, as no historian of one period or of a single people was likely to do, nor any analyst of his own type of civilization alone. They became aware of culture as a "universe", or vast field in which we of today and our own civilization occupy only one place of many. The result was a widening of a fundamental point of view, a departure from unconscious ethnocentricity toward relativity. This shift from naive self-centeredness in one's own time and spot to a broader view based on objective comparison is somewhat like the change from the original geocentric assumption of astronomy to the Copernican interpretation of the solar system and the subsequent still greater widening to a universe of galaxies.

This conception of culture, and principle of cultural relativism, were for Kroeber and his colleagues the fundamental contribution of anthropology, and what distinguished anthropology from similar disciplines such as sociology and psychology.

Ruth Benedict, another of Boas's students, also argued that an appreciation of the importance of culture and the problem of ethnocentrism demands that the scientist adopt cultural relativism as a method. Her book, Patterns of Culture, did much to popularize the term in the United States. In it, she explained that:

The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.[14]

Benedict was adamant that she was not romanticizing so-called primitive societies; she was emphasizing that any understanding of the totality of humanity must be based on as wide and varied a sample of individual cultures as possible. Moreover, it is only by appreciating a culture that is profoundly different from our own, that we can realize the extent to which our own beliefs and activities are culture-bound, rather than natural or universal. In this context, cultural relativism is a heuristic device of fundamental importance because it calls attention to the importance of variation in any sample that is used to derive generalizations about humanity.

It was James Lawrence Wray-Miller who provided an additional clarification tool, or caveat, of the theoretical underpinnings of cultural relativism by dividing it into two binary, analytical continuums: vertical and horizontal cultural relativism. Ultimately, these two analytical continuums share the same basic conclusion: that human morality and ethics are not static but fluid and vary across cultures depending on the time period and current condition of any particular culture.

Vertical relativism describes that cultures, throughout history (vertical—i.e., passage through past and future), are products of the prevailing societal norms and conditions of their respective historical periods. Therefore, any moral or ethical judgments, made during the present, regarding past cultures' belief systems or societal practices must be firmly grounded and informed by these norms and conditions to be intellectually useful. Vertical relativism also accounts for the possibility that cultural values and norms will necessarily change as influencing norms and conditions change in the future.

Horizontal relativism describes that cultures in the present (horizontal in time—i.e., the present period of the culture) are products of the prevailing norms and conditions developed as a result of their unique geographies, histories, and environmental influences. Therefore, moral or ethical judgments, made during the present, regarding a current culture's belief system or societal practices must account for these unique differences to be intellectually useful.

The transformation of cultural relativism as a heuristic tool into the doctrine of moral relativism occurred in the context of the work of the Commission of Human Rights of the United Nations in preparing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

Melville J. Herskovits prepared a draft "Statement on Human Rights" which Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association revised, submitted to the Commission on Human Rights, and then published. The statement begins with a fairly straightforward explanation of the relevance of cultural relativism:[18]

The problem is thus to formulate a statement of human rights that will do more than phrase respect for the individual as individual. It must also take into full account the individual as a member of a social group of which he is part, whose sanctioned modes of life shape his behavior, and with whose fate his own is thus inextricably bound.

The bulk of this statement emphasizes concern that the Declaration of Human Rights was being prepared primarily by people from Western societies, and would express values that, far from being universal, are really Western:

Today the problem is complicated by the fact that the Declaration must be of world-wide applicability. It must embrace and recognize the validity of many different ways of life. It will not be convincing to the Indonesian, the African, the Chinese, if it lies on the same plane as like documents of an earlier period. The rights of Man in the Twentieth Century cannot be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture, or be dictated by the aspirations of any single people. Such a document will lead to frustration, not realization of the personalities of vast numbers of human beings.

Although this statement could be read as making a procedural point (that the Commission must involve people of diverse cultures, especially cultures that had been or are still under European colonial or imperial domination), the document ended by making two substantive claims:

1. Even where political systems exist that deny citizens the right of participation in their government, or seek to conquer weaker peoples, underlying cultural values may be called on to bring the peoples of such states to a realization of the consequences of the acts of their governments, and thus enforce a brake upon discrimination and conquest.
2. Worldwide standards of freedom and justice, based on the principle that man is free only when he lives as his society defines freedom, that his rights are those he recognizes as a member of his society, must be basic.

These claims provoked an immediate response by a number of anthropologists. Julian Steward (who, as a student of Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, and as a professor at Columbia University, was situated firmly in the Boasian lineage) suggested that the first claim "may have been a loophole to exclude Germany from the advocated tolerance", but that it revealed the fundamental flaw in moral relativism:[19]

Either we tolerate everything, and keep hands off, or we fight intolerance and conquest—political and economic as well as military—in all their forms." Similarly, he questioned whether the second principle means that anthropologists "approve the social caste system of India, the racial caste system of the United States, or many other varieties of social discrimination in the world.

Steward and others argued that any attempt to apply the principle of cultural relativism to moral problems would only end in contradiction: either a principle that seems to stand for tolerance ends up being used to excuse intolerance, or the principle of tolerance is revealed to be utterly intolerant of any society that seems to lack the (arguably, Western) value of tolerance.[20] They concluded that anthropologists must stick to science, and engage in debates over values only as individuals.[20]

Boas and his students understood anthropology to be a historical, or human science, in that it involves subjects (anthropologists) studying other subjects (humans and their activities), rather than subjects studying objects (such as rocks or stars). Under such conditions, it is fairly obvious that scientific research may have political consequences, and the Boasians saw no conflict between their scientific attempts to understand other cultures, and the political implications of critiquing their own culture. For anthropologists working in this tradition, the doctrine of cultural relativism as a basis for moral relativism was anathema. For politicians, moralists, and many social scientists (but few anthropologists) who saw science and human interests as necessarily independent or even opposed, however, the earlier Boasian principle of cultural relativism was anathema. Thus, cultural relativism came under attack, but from opposing sides and for opposing reasons.

On the one hand, many anthropologists began to criticize the way moral relativism, in the guise of cultural relativism, is used to mask the effects of Western colonialism and imperialism. Thus, Stanley Diamond argued that when the term "cultural relativism" entered popular culture, popular culture co-opted anthropology in a way that voided the principle of any critical function:

Relativism is the bad faith of the conqueror, who has become secure enough to become a tourist. Cultural relativism is a purely intellectual attitude; it does not inhibit the anthropologist from participating as a professional in his own milieu; on the contrary, it rationalizes that milieu. Relativism is self-critical only in the abstract. Nor does it lead to engagement. It only converts the anthropologist into a shadowy figure, prone to newsworthy and shallow pronouncements about the cosmic condition of the human race. It has the effect of mystifying the profession, so that the very term anthropologist ("student of man") commands the attention of an increasingly "popular" audience in search of novelty. But the search for self-knowledge, which Montaigne was the first to link to the annihilation of prejudice, is reduced to the experience of culture shock, a phrase used by both anthropologists and the State Department to account for the disorientation that usually follows an encounter with an alien way of life. But culture shock is a condition one recovers from; it is not experienced as an authentic redefinition of the personality but as a testing of its tolerance ... The tendency of relativism, which it never quite achieves, is to detach the anthropologist from all particular cultures. Nor does it provide him with a moral center, only a job.[25]

George Stocking summarized this view with the observation that "Cultural relativism, which had buttressed the attack against racialism, [can] be perceived as a sort of neo-racialism justifying the backward techno-economic status of once colonized peoples."[26]

By the 1980s many anthropologists had absorbed the Boasian critique of moral relativism, and were ready to reevaluate the origins and uses of cultural relativism. In a distinguished lecture before the American Anthropological Association in 1984, Clifford Geertz pointed out that the conservative critics of cultural relativism did not really understand, and were not really responding to, the ideas of Benedict, Herskovits, Kroeber and Kluckhohn.[27] Consequently, the various critics and proponents of cultural relativism were talking past one another. What these different positions have in common, Geertz argued, is that they are all responding to the same thing: knowledge about other ways of life.

The supposed conflict between Benedict's and Herskovits's call for tolerance and the untolerant passion with which they called for it turns out not to be the simple contradiction so many amateur logicians have held it to be, but the expression of a perception, caused by thinking a lot about Zunis and Dahomys, that the world being so full of a number of things, rushing to judgement is more than a mistake, it is a crime. Similarly, Kroeber's and Kluckholn's verities – Kroeber's were mostly about messy creatural matters like delirium and menstruation, Kluckholn's were mostly about messy social ones like lying and killing within the in-group, turn out not to be just the arbitrary personal obsessions they so much look like, but the expression of a much vaster concern, caused by thinking a lot about anthrōpos in general, that if something isn't anchored everywhere nothing can be anchored anywhere. Theory here – if that is what these earnest advices about how we must look at things if we are to be accounted as decent should be called – is more an exchange of warnings than an analytical debate. We are being offered a choice of worries. What the relativists – so-called – want us to worry about is provincialism – the danger that our perceptions will be dulled, our intellects constricted, and our sympathies narrowed by the overlearned and overvalued acceptances of our own society. What the anti-relativists – self-declared – want us to worry about, and worry about and worry about, as though our very souls depended on it, is a kind of spiritual entropy, a heat death of the mind, in which everything is as significant, and thus as insignificant, as everything else: anything goes, to each his own, you pays your money and you takes your choice, I know what I like, not in the couth, tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.

Geertz concludes this discussion by commenting, "As I have already suggested, I myself find provincialism altogether the more real concern so far as what actually goes on in the world." Geertz' defense of cultural relativism as a concern which should motivate various inquiries, rather than as an explanation or solution, echoed a comment Alfred Kroeber made in reply to earlier critics of cultural relativism, in 1949:[28]

Obviously, relativism poses certain problems when from trying merely to understand the world we pass on to taking action in the world: and right decisions are not always easy to find. However, it is also obvious that authoritarians who know the complete answers beforehand will necessarily be intolerant of relativism: they should be, if there is only one truth and that is theirs. I admit that hatred of the intolerant for relativism does not suffice to make relativism true. But most of us are human enough for our belief in relativism to be somewhat reinforced just by that fact. At any rate, it would seem that the world has come far enough so that it is only by starting from relativism and its tolerations that we may hope to work out a new set of absolute values and standards, if such are attainable at all or prove to be desirable.