Cultural relativism and understanding values in context

Cultural relativism is the view that a culture's values should be understood in their own context, not judged by another culture's standards, and Franz Boas first articulated the idea in 1887. What helps us understand values across cultural frameworks, and how can we make sense of apparent disagreements between them? The lessons consider how judgments relate to cultural and historical contexts.

2 articles, 1 book · about 2 hr 15 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   cultural relativism · Wikipedia · 27 min read

   On cultural relativism, Herodotus recounts how Darius the Great asked Greeks and Callatiae about their funeral customs. The Greeks practiced cremation and the Callatiae funerary cannibalism, and each people was dismayed and abhorred at the other's practice. Margaret Mead's research on adolescent female sexuality in Samoa is the most famous use of cultural relativism as cultural critique. By contrasting the ease and freedom enjoyed by Samoan teenagers, Mead called into question claims that the stress and rebelliousness of American adolescence is natural and inevitable. James Lawrence Wray-Miller divided cultural relativism into vertical and horizontal analytical continuums, linking understanding across cultural frameworks to the norms and conditions of each culture's historical period and present circumstances. He says present-day judgments of past cultures' beliefs or practices must be grounded in the norms and conditions of their historical periods to be intellectually useful.

2. Read
   Relativism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) · plato.stanford.edu · 60+ min read

   Philosophers and anthropologists have used data on diverse belief systems, conceptual frameworks and ways of life to support arguments for cultural relativism. Empirical diversity alone does not establish relativism, but relativism is often taken as a natural response because it makes sense of diversity without explaining who is in error. Relativism offers a way of settling or explaining away what appear to be profound disagreements on questions of value, knowledge and ontology, and the relativizing parameter often involves people, their beliefs, cultures or languages. The co-variance definition asks what is relativized and what it is relativized to.

3. Book
   

   The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down · Bookshop.org

   The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman chronicles Lia Lee's treatment and the cultural conflict between her family and American healthcare professionals. Fadiman presents both the doctors' and family's perspectives, including their contrasting spiritual and scientific explanations for Lia's condition.

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