Cultural Relativism

9 Key excerpts on "Cultural Relativism"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  International Law of Human Rights

  • Michael K. Addo(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  9 arguments that relativists could or should advance will also occasionally be anticipated, even though such arguments may not yet have been articulated by relativist scholars or governments.

  In the context of the debate about the viability of international human rights, Cultural Relativism may be defined as the position according to which local cultural traditions (including religious, political, and legal practices) properly determine the existence and scope of civil and political rights enjoyed by individuals in a given society.10 A central tenet of relativism is that no transboundary legal or moral standards exist against which human rights practices may be judged acceptable or unacceptable.11 Thus, relativists claim that substantive human rights standards vary among different cultures and necessarily reflect national idiosyncracies. What may be regarded as a human rights violation in one society may properly be considered lawful in another, and Western ideas of human rights should not be imposed upon Third World societies.12 Tolerance and respect for self-determination preclude crosscultural normative judgments. Alternatively, the relativist thesis holds that even if, as a matter of customary or conventional international law, a body of substantive human rights norms exists, its meaning varies substantially from culture to culture.13

  The critique advanced here of Cultural Relativism shall be limited in several important ways. First, the paper will only deal with violations of civil and political rights—the so-called “first generation” rights. Cultural Relativism will not be analyzed in relation to other human rights that may be part of international law, such as the socioeconomic or “second generation” rights.14 Second, Cultural Relativism must be distinguished from the thesis that governments, especially those of the Third World, may suppress, delay or suspend civil and political rights in an effort to achieve a just economic order. While the issue of whether socioeconomic rights should in certain situations have priority over civil and political rights has received a great deal of attention in human rights literature,15 it differs from the problems raised by Cultural Relativism stricto sensu .16

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Culture of Intolerance

  Chauvinism, Class, and Racism in the United States

  • Mark Nathan Cohen(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FOUR The Real Meaning of Cultural Relativism Cultural Relativism —roughly, the willingness to look thought-fully and tolerantly at other cultures—can help resolve many of our tensions and some of our problems. Even business leaders are now talking about the need to expand and supplement our paradigms (the standard models of our thinking, molded by culture and limited by our cultural blinders) to get the best results. Expanding and sup-plementing our existing paradigms—real freedom of thought—are what Cultural Relativism and anthropology are all about. But relativism is a dirty word among some scholars, pundits, and politicians. It is easily dismissed because very few people take the time to understand what it means. Critics of relativism like Allan Bloom resent the idea that other peopled behavior might be com-pared to—much less equated with or found superior to—our own. They fear that acceptance of relativism might create chaos and un-dermine our own (supposedly high) standards. They also fear that we might unthinkingly accept whatever other people do as part of our own lifestyle. They caricature relativism, describing it as the morally bankrupt assumption that no judgment of other people's behavior is possible. According to those critics, relativists believe that any behavior is as good as any other. According to those critics, relativism means that there is no truth, no morality, and no way to judge good and evil. Those same critics often hold, even if subconsciously, the as-sumption that our own behavior doesn't need to be evaluated be-cause it is obviously correct or superior. But, too often we measure • 111 • THE REAL MEANING OF Cultural Relativism the shortcomings'* of others by our own cultural standards and fail to recognize our imperfections according to their standards—or even our own. In their scientific research, anthropologists try to describe and analyze other people's behavior without being judgmental.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women

  • C. Howland(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  II · Responses to Religious Fundamentalist Assertions of Cultural Relativism Chapter 5 · Relativism, Culture, Religion, and Identity Michael Singer I. RELATIVISM AND CULTURE H uman beings in many places and at many times have searched for a universal sense of truth, values, ethics, morality, and justice. Rel- ativism is the view that this search is hopeless and futile because the concepts of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, rights and duties, can exist and be valid only within a specific context that defines them and gives them meaning, and consequently they can have no universal valid- ity. 1 Relativism rejects any claim of universal human rights based on nat- ural law, and equally rejects any universal process for interpreting treaties that could support universal human rights standards. A relativist claim provokes the question: “Relative to what?” 2 What is the specific context, or type of context, that defines truth, values, and so forth? One response is that each individual defines his or her own sense of truth and values, in which case relativism is effectively reduced to subjec- tivism. 3 A different and relatively recent response is that the defining con- text is “culture”; this approach is then called Cultural Relativism. 4 Cultural Relativism is in fact a hybrid doctrine derived from relativism, with empirical and normative input from anthropology, 5 and developed initially in reaction against Western assertions of cultural superiority. An- thropologists study the commonalities of groups of human beings sharing a culture.They define the culture of the group in various ways, but gener- ally in terms of a supposedly shared group process by which meaning is as- signed to behavior, social action is articulated, and social modes for guiding and governing behavior are developed. 6 The term “culture” or “society” is 46 Michael Singer often used to denote the group that shares, and is defined by sharing, a common culture.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Ethical Issues in International Communication

  • Alexander G. Nikolaev(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  However, it should be noted that throughout this overview, I have interpreted Cultural Relativism in epistemological terms. I have given it continuity with its origins in anthropology as cognitive, aesthetic and conceptual in character. For its first half-century, the epistemological definition prevailed. But, as George Marcus and Michael Fisher (1999) argue, after the Second World War, Cultural Relativism was popularized to mean that since cultures are separate and equal, value systems are equally valued no matter how different they are. Cultural Relativism became redefined as moral relativism. 26 Ethical Issues in International Communication Those of us in communications tend to follow this redefinition and in doing so we exacerbate the problem of relativism rather than resolve it. Our emphasis on particulars is one reason. We work at the juncture of globalization and local identities. Both of them are happening simul- taneously, but in communications (and in news especially) we empha- size specifics. This age is caught in the contradictory trends of cultural homogeneity and resistance. Unique to our complicated era is commu- nication technology on a worldwide scale, but tribalism is fierce at the same time and identity politics have become dominant in world affairs. Open information is a working formula for sustaining the planet, but ethnic self-consciousness these days is considered to be essential to cul- tural vitality. The integration of globalization and multiculturalism is the extraordinary challenge, but the media’s penchant for immediacy in everyday affairs makes integration difficult. In our passion for ethnogra- phy, for diversity, for the local, we typically allow cultural relativity to slide into philosophical relativism. Moreover, our preoccupation with narrative in communication stud- ies usually leaves Cultural Relativism unattended. Stories are symbolic frameworks that organize human experience.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity

  Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States

  • David A. Hollinger(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  But cultural rela- tivism has been more than a scholarly will to see someone else’s culture from the inside. The second, ideological use of moral and epistemic humility has brought Cultural Relativism directly into philosophy and “culture wars.” Ideologically, Cultural Relativism has been a critical device fash- ioned for the purpose of undermining the authority of aspects of a home culture. The climax of Margaret Mead’s (1901–1978) sig- nificantly subtitled Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (1928) was a breezy, homiletic commentary on the customs of the United States and Samoa, suggesting that middle class Americans of the 1920s might im- prove the rearing of their adolescent girls by taking some cues from the sexually relaxed life of the South Pacific. 5 Reflection on the possible implications for “Western Civilization” of what had been discovered about other cultures, especially “primitive” ones, is what made anthropology in the cultural relativist mode a major episode in the intellectual history of the twentieth century, rather than simply another movement within a discipline. The scientific virtues of Cultural Relativism were advanced the most vocally, and with the most public notice, by men and women who invited attention as social critics, not simply as practitioners 170 Cultural Relativism • of an esoteric Wissenschaft. Some of the relativizing anthropolo- gists went on to offer Cultural Relativism as a “philosophy.” Her- skovits did this frequently, including in his widely used college textbook of 1948, Man and His Works, inviting rebuttals of exactly the kind that struck Geertz, a generation later, as misunderstand- ings of the epistemic and moral humility that anthropologists had contributed.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Culture and International Law

  Proceedings of the International Conference of the Centre for International Law Studies (CILS 2018), October 2-3, 2018, Malang, Indonesia

  • Hikmahanto Juwana, Jeffrey Thomas, Mohd Hazmi Mohd Rusli, Dhiana Puspitawati, Hikmahanto Juwana, Jeffrey Thomas, Mohd Hazmi Mohd Rusli, Dhiana Puspitawati(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  178 value, including the value of human rights, on a society or culture that does not accept the validity of that value. Therefore, no culture is justified in trying to force its ideas to be accepted by other cultures, or “ No culture is justified in attempting to impose on others what must be understood as its own ideas. 24 The characteristics that are always present in the view of Cultural Relativism include: 25 each culture possess different moral code; there is no standard objection to judge that one social code is better than other social code; moral code from our society is merely one from many other codes, and has no higher status; there is no universal truth on ethics, means that there is no single moral truth that applies to everybody; moral code from a culture applies only to the respective culture ’ s environment; and it ’ s deemed arro-gance when we try to judge other person ’ s deed. Such notion of Cultural Relativism can be seen from the opinion of the Panel which explicitly states that Indonesia has banned anti-religious campaigns and misinterpreted religion. This is a characteristic of freedom of religion according to Indonesian law, therefore it becomes one of the elements that distinguishes Indonesia from other countries, especially the West where human rights apply universally to all people everywhere, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, culture, and other distinguishing factors. 26 According to the Constitutional Court, blasphemy articles can not only be seen from the legal aspect but also philosophically which places freedom of religion in the Indonesian-ness perspective, hence the practice of diversity in other countries cannot be equated with the practices that occur in Indonesia. 27 Things such as the basis of divinity and religious values become a measure or parameter to distinguish good law from bad law, even to determine the constitutionality of a legal product.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Origins of Indigenism

  Human Rights and the Politics of Identity

  • Ronald Niezen(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Relativism in anthropology — guided by the notions that there are no universally applicable standards of human conduct and that, conversely, cultures or societies must be viewed in context with an appreciation of relati vism and rights 101 human variety and complexity—is usually understood to take one form only, a general rejection of anything too sweeping in its generality in the face of human differences, but there are in fact two distinct paths taken to arrive at this point, each with different implications for the claims of indigenous peoples. I will refer to them as empirical and self-reflexive relativism. Empirical relativism emerged early on, starting in the late nineteenth century, in reaction against the evolutionist premise of the superiority of civilization. An American “school” of anthropology sometimes referred to as “historical particularism” rejected evolutionism and pseudoscien-tific racism, while ennobling fieldwork and ethnographic reporting of small-scale societies. Franz Boas, who led this intellectual movement, began cautiously with a postponement of the effort to find scientifically valid laws of cultural behavior, at least until sufficiently exhaustive and reliable data had been gathered by dedicated field researchers on a suffi-cient variety of cultures. Premature theoretical paradigms, lacking the proper body of factual knowledge, were inevitably flawed, or worse, so-cially destructive. The result was radical induction, driven by the convic-tion that only through description of the variety of human cultures could we ever hope to arrive at any idea of the paths of cultural transmission and the regularities of human history. Somewhere along the line, the empirical, particularist study of cul-tures acquired a strongly flavored relativism. Cultures, isolated and re-ified by anthropological reporting, each had their own integrity, their own worldview, their own way of establishing order in a chaotic uni-verse.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Human Rights and Cultural Diversity

  Core Issues and Cases

  • Andrew Fagan(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  . . The universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question. From a rudimentary universalist perspective, an appeal to established custom or tradition can never condone or justify the violation of human rights. Violations are simply inexcusable irrespective of how deeply rooted they may be within the collective identity of any given cultural 40 Human Rights and Cultural Diversity community. Thus, human rights and the norms they fundamentally rest upon are universally valid and others’ refusal to acknowledge them as such is liable to being construed as acts hostile towards human rights. Non-compliant cultural communities may thereby become targets for reform and intervention by other communities which (legiti-mately or otherwise) lay claim to the moral title of defenders of the faith of human rights. In response, many have criticised this approach for being unduly censorious or morally intolerant. The strongest advocates of this form of criticism consist of those who explicitly reject moral universalism in favour of an opposing doctrine which is typically referred to as cul-tural and moral relativism. Relativism is an established way of thinking about the sources and status of moral reasoning and beliefs. It has been defined in the following terms: moral relativism . . . often takes the form of a denial that any single moral code has universal validity, and an assertion that moral truth and justifiability, if there are such things, are in some way relative to factors that are culturally and historically contingent. (Wong 1991: 442) Moral relativism rejects the claim that there can exist moral principles and forms of moral identity that are not themselves fundamentally shaped by social and cultural conditions: morality is a constituent element of distinct social forms. Moral relativism has sometimes been confused with other doctrines, such as nihilism.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Relativism: A Guide for the Perplexed

  • Timothy M. Mosteller(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  No one is to say which of these cultures are right or wrong, and therefore, no way of acting or casting judgement can be entirely right or wrong. While every person has a sense of what is true or false, this varies for every individual, with no one holding the power to correct another’s perception of the world. All three of these students are expressing a form of moral relativism. Students 2 and 3 are especially hinting at the idea that moral judge-ment from one party to another is not the type of thing that ought to be done. Regardless of the fact that saying, ‘You shouldn’t push your morality on someone else’ is in fact a pushing of morality on one person by another (just another example of how relativism can be self-defeating), there is something amiss with the claim that tol-erance can or should be a basis for ethical relativism. We might be able to distinguish two types of tolerance: political tolerance (PT) and moral tolerance (MT). Political tolerance might be thought of as the idea that in a pluralistic culture and ‘global village’ there must be tolerance of di ff erent opinions, beliefs, prac-tices and views at the level of political or societal interaction. Political tolerance is something that can be extended to all members of a liberal democracy, for example, under the aegis of a constitu-tional authority. PT, however, is often con fl ated with MT, where MT is the ethically relativistic view that there are no neutral moral stan-dards by means of which to adjudicate between competing moral beliefs or practices. Students among others often believe that, since 55 ETHICAL RELATIVISM we want PT, we should advocate MT. The problem is that PT is not even possible without MT. If MT were true, then the type of politi-cal environment, say a Western liberal democracy, where PT could fl ourish, would be no better than a political environment, say a reli-gious fundamentalist theocracy, which is something the advocate of PT would want to deny.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book