Cultural Relativity Law Definition

There is no reason for the relativist to be paralyzed, as critics have often claimed. [24] But a relativist will recognize that criticism is based on its own ethnocentric norms and will also recognize that condemnation can be a form of cultural imperialism. Despite these advantages, cultural relativism has been criticized for creating a system motivated by personal bias. Because people tend to prefer to be with other people who have similar thoughts, feelings, and ideas, they tend to separate into neighborhoods, communities, and social groups that share certain perspectives. In this context, cultural relativism is an attitude of fundamental methodological importance as it draws attention to the importance of the local context in understanding the importance of certain human beliefs and activities. As Virginia Heyer wrote in 1948: “Cultural relativity, to formulate it in the most blatant abstraction, indicates the relativity of the part to the whole. The piece acquires its cultural significance through its place in the whole and cannot maintain its integrity in any other situation. [10] 1. Can you think of examples of universal values that replace the particularities of cultures? What are the challenges associated with setting international standards for morality in cultural relativism?2. Societies and some aspects of their moral frameworks change over time.

How is social progress possible in the theory of cultural relativism? Who are the agents of change? Well, while part of the interest in anthropology (called solial cultural studies) in its early days lay in exoticism and remoteness, even this ancient motivation eventually contributed to a broader result. Anthropologists have become aware of the diversity of cultures. They began to see the huge range of its variations. From then on, they began to regard it as a totality, as no historian of an era or a single people would probably do, nor any analyst of its own type of civilization. They have become aware of culture as a “universe”, or a vast field in which we today and our own civilization occupy only one place among many others. The result was an extension of a fundamental point of view, a departure from unconscious ethnocentrism to the theory of relativity. This shift from naïve egocentrism in its time and place to a broader view based on objective comparisons is much like the shift from the original geocentric hypothesis of astronomy to the Copernican interpretation of the solar system and the resulting even greater expansion into a universe of galaxies. For Kroeber and colleagues, this understanding of culture and the principle of cultural relativism was the fundamental contribution of anthropology and what distinguished anthropology from similar disciplines such as sociology and psychology. While this formulation clearly reflects the type of example used by anthropologists in the development of cultural relativism, Renteln believes that it lacks the spirit of the principle. As a result, he supports another formulation: “There are or cannot be value judgments that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of certain cultures.” [23] Cultural relativism seeks to counter ethnocentrism by promoting understanding of cultural practices unknown to other cultures. For example, it is a common practice for same-sex friends in India to hold hands while walking in public.

Moral relativism, on the other hand, is an assertion that what is really right or wrong is what this culture says is right or wrong. While moral relativists believe that cultural relativism is true, they are expanding their claims much more. It was James Lawrence Wray-Miller who provided an additional tool for clarifying or warning the theoretical foundations of cultural relativism by dividing it into two binary analytic continuas: vertical and horizontal cultural relativism. Ultimately, these two analytical continuities share the same fundamental conclusion: that human morality and ethics are not static, but fluid, and vary between cultures depending on the period and current state of a particular culture. In its most extreme form, what we can call radical cultural relativism would claim that culture is the only source of validity of a moral right or rule.