Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Strawberry Moon<\/p>\n
“The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.” – Ruth Benedict<\/p>\n
Long ago, back in the Paleozoic 1960’s I majored in anthropology.\u00a0 Anthropology taught me a lot, shaped my view of the world.\u00a0 In anthropology, long before it became fashionable enough to merit bashing on the then non-existent Fox News Network, multi-culturalism was an everyday conversation.\u00a0 Ruth Benedict, herself an early anthropologist and student of Franz Boas, the father of anthropology reflects just that sensibility in this quote.<\/p>\n
Anthropologist’s developed the idea of cultural relativism and it was and is crucial to anthropology as a discipline.\u00a0 Anthropologists do field work using the participant observer method, which involves immersing oneself in the cultural of another, then writing about it.\u00a0 Boas and the early anthropologists, among them Margaret Meade, had to undergo psychoanalysis as a preliminary to field work.\u00a0 This was to enable the field worker to grasp, as best he or she could, the difference between something they brought to the interaction and the actual expression of a different worldview.<\/p>\n
Cultural relativism meant that much as we might like to believe otherwise (manifest destiny, Hail Britannia) one culture’s solution to the way of surviving and flourishing is as valid as any others.\u00a0 This is the core idea behind multi-culturalism, not merely a liberal tolerance of difference, but suspension of our own values and beliefs in order to accord respect to the other.<\/p>\n
Does this have problems?\u00a0 Yes, it does.\u00a0\u00a0 Critics like Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue, say it represents an essential of Modernism, that is, ethical relativism.\u00a0 MacIntyre suggests we consider Hitler’s Nazi party or, I suppose, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.\u00a0 Using the notion of cultural relativism are we not bound to honor their horrific outcomes?<\/p>\n
Academics often get caught in the absolutizing of their notions.\u00a0 It’s either cultural relativism or a solid tradition, like the Thomistic Catholicism that MacIntyre puts forward.\u00a0 In fact, I think these are more tendencies, ways we lean when assessing data.\u00a0 Cultural relativism and the thinner soup of multi-culturalism are an inoculant, a vaccine against imperialism, against the unthinking imposition of a more powerful culture on a weaker one.<\/p>\n
Tradition, on the other hand, seems an inescapable and therefore most likely necessary ingredient of the human lived experience.\u00a0 Within in it we learn how to behave as an American, a Vietnamese, a Hmong, a Trobriand Islander.\u00a0 We come to assume that the tradition and the culture in which we are raised is normative, and, in fact, it is normative in the vast majority of situations which we encounter.\u00a0 It is when we cross cultures or traditions that questions arise that we may not have considered.<\/p>\n
Who says democracy\u00a0 is the only acceptable form of government?\u00a0 Who says individual rights always come before the needs of the tribe or the state?\u00a0 Who says marriage between homosexual couples is wrong, ipso facto?\u00a0 Who says circumcision is critical?\u00a0 Who says we cannot execute anybody we want to by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair?<\/p>\n
It occurs to me that cultural relativism is a necessary defense against the arrogance of power, just as tradition is a defense against the moral relativism that a global perspective seems to require.\u00a0 To position these two powerful aspects of human life, culture and tradition, against each other goes too far.\u00a0 Instead, we need to learn the lesson each has to teach us and apply them both with humility and care.<\/p>\n
NB:\u00a0 Back to Hitler and Pol Pot.\u00a0 We do not need to accept their violent prejudice as normative even under the notion of cultural relativism. What is necessary in those cases is to go within the culture of Germany and Cambodia, to mine their traditions and to critique them from within their worldviews.\u00a0 It can be done and can easily be shown to be possible.\u00a0 Then, we respect culture and yet have an avenue for expression of our deeply held values in a different cultural idiom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Strawberry Moon “The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.” – Ruth Benedict Long ago, back in the Paleozoic 1960’s I majored in anthropology.\u00a0 Anthropology taught me a lot, shaped my view of the world.\u00a0 In anthropology, long before it became fashionable enough to … Continue reading Cultural Relativism<\/span>