On the misuse of cultural relativism
Jun. 1st, 2006 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootCultural relativism.
Cultural relativism is a useful mental tool, especially in the field of anthropology but also in day to day life in a global world. It can be boiled down to the reminder that not all cultures are the same, and the conceptual categories of one may well not be what you need to understand another.
This can also be rendered, especially by frustrated anth teachers, as: it's not yours, you are not at home, do not try to make this other place/time/people into your own, because they're NOT! (Case in point of failure to remember, or even consider, this: Wallis Budge's translation of the Book of the Dead.)
This is, as I say, especially useful for people from a dominant, privileged or mechanically/technologically advanced culture who are going off to study people who are not any or all of those things. It keeps the arrogance of understanding (more accurately, assumed understanding) in check.
The thing is, what cultural relativism does is make sure a person does not either a) assume they know all the whys and wherefores or b) dismiss everything unfamiliar to them as stupid and barbaric.
It does not mean that one does not make judgements about what one encounters.
Cultural relativism, especially of the non-anth-specific philosophical variety, does not mean "Oh, it's their own way, they're not from our culture, we can't judge", because that's bullshit. Of course we can judge. And so can they. And so we all do. Pretending otherwise won't help, and the notion that "outsiders have no right to judge" is exactly the kind of thing that prevents both legislation and action against violence inside the family. We have every right to judge, all of us, about everything.
The responsibility of an intelligent and thoughtful person is not to cease judging. It is, rather, to keep in mind that being outside a situation makes some things easier to see and others harder. And that the thing in question might be one of the ones that's harder. An intelligent and thoughtful person has a responsibility to always be willing to look at new information and take that information into account, no matter how well they think they understand the situation already.
An intelligent and thoughtful person also has a responsibility to evaluate the information, of course, taking into consideration the source and occassion.
It's always a balancing act. Always in motion. Judgements that are stable, that have stopped, that are satisfied... those are the ones that are categorically mistaken, not neccessarily in content but in process. Those are the judgements that are insupportable, because time always goes on and you never know when new information will come to light that might change the whole question into something else.
The fact that good judgements are never final, never absolute and never finished does not let anyone off the hook from making them.
Or changing them.
What cultural relativism does is remind us that we might be wrong. Not that we are certain to be wrong, when we are judging someone else's cultural activities, because having grown up with something or not grown up with it does not confer automatic and eternal rightness or wrongness. But that we might be wrong, and should remember where we're standing.
Because another way to boil down cultural relativism is: be aware of your own position.
No one is unbiased, whether inside or outside of a situation. Nor is it always clear where the in/out line lies. This is the other reason no one can make absolute judgements, because every judgement comes from a very specific life experience.
That does not invalidate the judgements in question.
The trick, in all cases, is to be aware of the interest one may have when judging a given cultural practice because one is female or white or the employee of an oil corporation or a dog owner. Be aware of the interest and ask oneself, not whether one's position is influencing one's judgement because of course it will, but instead whether it is obscuring one's ability to view and consider all the information involved. That is what one must strive to avoid, not the making of ongoing judgements as best one can.
In the end, this can be a powerful tool in making judgements and then choosing where and when to act on them. What it should never be is an excuse to avoid the responsibility, as a thinking human being, to have opinions on how human beings act towards each other.
Cultural relativism is a useful mental tool, especially in the field of anthropology but also in day to day life in a global world. It can be boiled down to the reminder that not all cultures are the same, and the conceptual categories of one may well not be what you need to understand another.
This can also be rendered, especially by frustrated anth teachers, as: it's not yours, you are not at home, do not try to make this other place/time/people into your own, because they're NOT! (Case in point of failure to remember, or even consider, this: Wallis Budge's translation of the Book of the Dead.)
This is, as I say, especially useful for people from a dominant, privileged or mechanically/technologically advanced culture who are going off to study people who are not any or all of those things. It keeps the arrogance of understanding (more accurately, assumed understanding) in check.
The thing is, what cultural relativism does is make sure a person does not either a) assume they know all the whys and wherefores or b) dismiss everything unfamiliar to them as stupid and barbaric.
It does not mean that one does not make judgements about what one encounters.
Cultural relativism, especially of the non-anth-specific philosophical variety, does not mean "Oh, it's their own way, they're not from our culture, we can't judge", because that's bullshit. Of course we can judge. And so can they. And so we all do. Pretending otherwise won't help, and the notion that "outsiders have no right to judge" is exactly the kind of thing that prevents both legislation and action against violence inside the family. We have every right to judge, all of us, about everything.
The responsibility of an intelligent and thoughtful person is not to cease judging. It is, rather, to keep in mind that being outside a situation makes some things easier to see and others harder. And that the thing in question might be one of the ones that's harder. An intelligent and thoughtful person has a responsibility to always be willing to look at new information and take that information into account, no matter how well they think they understand the situation already.
An intelligent and thoughtful person also has a responsibility to evaluate the information, of course, taking into consideration the source and occassion.
It's always a balancing act. Always in motion. Judgements that are stable, that have stopped, that are satisfied... those are the ones that are categorically mistaken, not neccessarily in content but in process. Those are the judgements that are insupportable, because time always goes on and you never know when new information will come to light that might change the whole question into something else.
The fact that good judgements are never final, never absolute and never finished does not let anyone off the hook from making them.
Or changing them.
What cultural relativism does is remind us that we might be wrong. Not that we are certain to be wrong, when we are judging someone else's cultural activities, because having grown up with something or not grown up with it does not confer automatic and eternal rightness or wrongness. But that we might be wrong, and should remember where we're standing.
Because another way to boil down cultural relativism is: be aware of your own position.
No one is unbiased, whether inside or outside of a situation. Nor is it always clear where the in/out line lies. This is the other reason no one can make absolute judgements, because every judgement comes from a very specific life experience.
That does not invalidate the judgements in question.
The trick, in all cases, is to be aware of the interest one may have when judging a given cultural practice because one is female or white or the employee of an oil corporation or a dog owner. Be aware of the interest and ask oneself, not whether one's position is influencing one's judgement because of course it will, but instead whether it is obscuring one's ability to view and consider all the information involved. That is what one must strive to avoid, not the making of ongoing judgements as best one can.
In the end, this can be a powerful tool in making judgements and then choosing where and when to act on them. What it should never be is an excuse to avoid the responsibility, as a thinking human being, to have opinions on how human beings act towards each other.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:12 pm (UTC)*crawls away into a corner again*
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 05:33 pm (UTC)Man, you should see some of the things people in the Rhetoric and Composition field put forward as The Next Wonderful Discovery in Learning.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 06:01 pm (UTC)I remember one article which referred to a site called Star Carr in Yorkshire as "the cradle of civilisation", which was a rather wonderful example of outright weirdness -- I think this did turn out to be something an archaeologist had mentioned while showing reporters around.
We do also sometimes have the problem of making things immediate enough to get reported upon, as well. If an excavation has been going on for years, what justifies it getting written about now? Trying to find new angles can work well or can err... not. *laughs*
Oh? What sort of things? *curious*
(I win at tangental rambling. Or something.)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 06:14 pm (UTC)Lessee. Rhet Comp has, for the past few years, been all about portfolio grading. For first-years taking a required, basic-skills class. Because it's more "holistic" and "less stressful". Oh, yeah, let's not tell them what scores they're getting until the very end! That'll make them more confident and less stressed, you betcha.
Another of my favorites is the current emphasis on the Personal Essay. That is, the first assignment is to write about one's personal life. A scholarly essay, which most of them haven't the slightest how to write, about their personal lives. After all, students should Write What They Know! This has the added benefit of hitting first-time teachers in the face with tales of rape, drugs, theft and so on. Mostly because the poor kids are trying to find something "meaningful" to write about, instead of devolving into My Summer Vaction--which is, of course, the natural state of that assignment.
And this is the department that keeps saying they're the ones on the cutting edge, the ones who listen to student needs. *shakes head* Oi.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 06:50 pm (UTC)I should just be glad that (although individual lecturers may not be so great) my department as a whole really does look after its students pretty well. Noticeably better than the university as an entire unit does. Heh.
Oh yes, and the other source of so much weirdness in reporting is on archaeolgy is - of course - Stonehenge. Just mentioning Stonehenge is enough to make a lot of archaeologists want to curl up into little balls and try to pretend the world doesn't exist. (Others will just start ranting, and have enough material to keep going for weeks if not successfully derailed.)
And during research for an essay a while back I came across something which had gone from a press release reading along the lines of "skeleton found at [site] still wearing hobnail boots" to some fantastic story of a female iron-age woman who was some kind of sex symbol, according to the Sun. The archaeologists took it in pretty good humour and had a t-shirt made with the article and a picture of a skeleton in high-heeled boots on it, but you get the general idea of how these things can go. ^^
I'm sorry, this really has nothing to do with anything, I just can't seem to stop typing. *laughs*
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 06:57 pm (UTC)And do feel free to type. *grins* Stories of other departments are always good.
... so, what's wrong with Stonehenge? *blinks innocently*
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 07:42 pm (UTC)Oh. Stonehenge. *coughs* We have a course about Public Archaeology and it has been commented that most of what you need to do to pass is rant about Stonehenge.
It's hard to know where to start, really... it's such an iconic site for British archaeology and even of national identity, but in terms of the way it has been investigated, presented, and reported on, the whole thing is a mess. So many different groups see themselves as having some kind of claim to it - most notably modern Druids, archaeological researchers, and English Heritage (who run the site for tourists) - and have very different ideas of what should be done with it. As a result, nothing gets done. Then there's all the mad theories people come up with about it (and the problem with crackpot theories is that sometimes people get hold of them and take them as examples of the kind of things archaeologists come up with)... and the way it's presented, if you actually visit the site, is... disappointing bordering on depressing. You go through a concrete tunnel under the main road - which runs within 20m or so of the monument itself - past some actually kind of amusingly bad reconstruction drawings of a lot of stone-age men with neat little mustaches, and then up to the monument, which you can't get even close to (obviously there are issues with damage to the monument if you allow people right up to the stones but surely people could be allowed a little closer??). There are no information-boards about the site in this area at all. In fact, there's only one anywhere, and - much to my amusement - it was put up by the National Trust, not English Heritage. (I have this image of sneaky ninja sign-placement on the part of NT which I can't quite shake.) The overall impression I have of the site is that it's utterly divorced from its context - it's presented so much as "a site", which is a very false concept, and there's no sense of where it fits in with any culture or even with its immediate surroundings. It's part of what seems to be a very large ritual landscape, of which it is only one part, but it's all anyone knows about.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 07:53 pm (UTC)It was extremely... isolated, which makes is a bit hard to remember, actually. I got much more of a sense of the history of the thing from the cathedral. Which was under construction at the time, if I recall.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 08:19 pm (UTC)Avebury is a much more interesting site. It's lovely.
It's sad because Stonehenge does have potential, it's just being so badly mishandled.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:37 pm (UTC)...this would be a good one to clean up and post in your essays journal. For what it's worth.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 09:01 pm (UTC)I think this topic is a fascinating one. My background in anthropology is different--I preferred bones and fossils to living cultures--but the same applies. I don't know how many times I'd get pissed because people tried to interpret cultural evidence into something they deemed "civilized" just because they felt that the site was too recent to be as wild as it seemed. On the flipside, the interpretation of neadertal-as-savage-barbarian frustrates the hell out of me, because the homo sapiens of the same era are considered to be cultural and wonderful.
I'd like to read a polished essay, if you write it. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 09:17 pm (UTC)And very much yes. I find myself less and less willing to define any /culture/ as barbarian, though every culture in existence seems to have /practices/ I find barbaric.
*laughing* I've been on a real essay-roll, lately. Maybe there was something in the latest package of coffee.
The trick is to find internal criticism of those things
Date: 2006-06-02 12:40 am (UTC)Then it ceases to be "We (modern) (white) (Europeans) (Americans) (Christians) are *so* much more civilized than thpse ancient foreign brown heathen savages" and "I agree with So-and-So of Such-and-Such, the respected teacher of ancient wisdom, where he says that X/Y/Z is an abomination and should be prohibited. You know you're ignoring your own wisdom tradition selectively, just the way we do, right?"
Re: The trick is to find internal criticism of those things
Date: 2006-06-02 12:48 am (UTC)Moreover - that not *everything* is a moral issue
Date: 2006-06-02 12:35 am (UTC)--Prescription: a dose of cultural relativism.
OMG they're eating BUGS!!1! That's so DISGUSTING, what horrible people!
--Prescription: a dose of cultural relativism.
OMG they're burning their dead relatives instead of burying them/burying their dead relatives instead of burning them!1!11!1 That's so disrespectful!!11!!1!
--Prescription: a good dose of cultural relativism.
OMG His hair is down below his collar, how absolutely FOUL and DISSOLUTE and REBELLIOUS a lad!!! He should be thrown into boot camp ASAP!!1!
--Prescription:
a good dose of cultural relativisma kick in the backside ASAPOMG WTF they're killing their neighbors!!1!!
--Prescription: a phone to dial 911 or the equivalent thereof.
Re: Moreover - that not *everything* is a moral issue
Date: 2006-06-02 12:45 am (UTC)