Cultural relativism became popularized after World War II in reaction to historical events such as "Nazism, and to colonialism, ethnocentrism and racism more generally.
The works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus detail ancient Greek arguments for cultural relativism as part of the tenth of the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus.
[8] According to George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer:[9] 20th century social and cultural anthropology has promised its still largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts.
Ethnocentrism may take obvious forms, in which one consciously believes that one's people's arts are the most beautiful, values the most virtuous, and beliefs the most truthful.
Franz Boas, originally trained in physics and geography, and heavily influenced by the thought of Kant, Herder, and von Humboldt, argued that one's culture may mediate and thus limit one's perceptions in less obvious ways.
[11] 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.
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.
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.
[13]Boas's student Alfred Kroeber described the rise of the relativist perspective thus:[15] 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.
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.
[16]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.
In using portraits of other cultural patterns to reflect self-critically on our own ways, anthropology disrupts common sense and makes us reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions.
By contrasting the ease and freedom enjoyed by Samoan teenagers, Mead called into question claims that the stress and rebelliousness that characterize American adolescence is natural and inevitable.
While breeding a healthy scepticism as to the eternity of any value prized by a particular people, anthropology does not as a matter of theory deny the existence of moral absolutes.
If all surviving societies have found it necessary to impose some of the same restrictions upon the behavior of their members, this makes a strong argument that these aspects of the moral code are indispensable.
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.
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.
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.
Although Steward and Barnett seemed to be suggesting that anthropology as such should restrict itself to purely academic affairs, people within and without the academy have continued to debate the ways non-anthropologists have used this principle in public policy concerning ethnic minorities or in international relations.
But it does require anyone engaged in a consideration of rights and morals to reflect on how their own enculturation has shaped their views: There is no reason why the relativist should be paralyzed, as critics have often asserted.
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.
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.
[29]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.
In a distinguished lecture before the American Anthropological Association in 1984, Clifford Geertz claimed that the critics of cultural relativism did not really understand, and were not really responding to, the ideas of Benedict, Herskovits, Kroeber and Kluckhohn.
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.
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.
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.