Advantages And Disadvantages Of Cultural Relativism

Assess the merits and pitfalls of cultural relativism in contemporary anthropology.

Cultural relativism is a contentious methodological and theoretical stance in anthropology, which advises that cultures should only be contemplated in their own context. This was conceptualised by Franz Boas (Boas, 1904). It rests on the idea that cultures are formed through the accumulative process of enculturation. Each culture has evolved in its own circumstances, thus it cannot be judged from a different framework (Herskovitz, 1955). The applicability of cultural relativism when it was founded has become divergent to its use today. As the world is becoming increasingly globalised through the spread of universal morality and migration, cultural relativism

Extreme cultural relativism lacks a moral compass (Messer, 1993). In a contemporary Australian context, anthropologist Peter Sutton’s main condemnation of cultural relativism in The Politics of Suffering is that it has enabled the neglect of the most vulnerable members of society. This has eventuated through the omission of anthropologists and government employees to report child abuse in Indigenous communities (Sutton, 2000). As an ethnographer, it is an ethical dilemma whether to critique the people who have kindled a mutual sense of trust, or to try to change their ways by imposing subjective norms of what is just and humane. Yet several contemporary ethnographers have become activists against the very practices they were studying. Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a notable example who was conducting an ethnography on organ trafficking. Scheper-Hughes decided to eschew cultural relativism and reveal her ethnographic findings to the public “so that measures could be taken to correct abuses that were threatening to under- mine transplant medicine as a humane practice”(Scheper-Hughes, 2004). This type of anthropology is referred to as “militant anthropology”, which contradicts moral relativism and cultural relativism to place a sense of universal human rights above the objective documentation of