11 Facts About Cultural relativism

Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture.

Proponents of cultural relativism tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of another.

The principle of cultural relativism thus forced anthropologists to develop innovative methods and heuristic strategies.

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.

Cultural relativism provided an example of this in his 1889 article "On Alternating Sounds".

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Cultural relativism 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.

Marcus and Fischer's attention to anthropology's refusal to accept Western culture's claims to universality implies that cultural relativism is a tool not only in cultural understanding, but in cultural critique.

Cultural relativism relativity means, on the contrary, that the appropriateness of any positive or negative custom must be evaluated with regard to how this habit fits with other group habits.

Cultural relativism was especially interested in deriving specific moral standards that are universal, although few if any anthropologists think that he was successful.

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.

Obviously, Cultural 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.