Cultural Relativism
David Perusek, Kent State University at Ashtabula
Missing footnotes
Cultural relativism, or at least the idea of cultural relativism, is in trouble. Not only is
it the case, as Robert Ulin suggests in the [previous/following] article that “cultural
relativism is among the most misunderstood and socially charged concepts
associated with anthropology today,”1 it is also one of the most passionately
contested notions in all of contemporary intellectual life. Pregnant with real-world
political implications from the start, cultural relativism by now inspires critics from
all points along the political spectrum. After having long been regarded by Western
traditionalists as a gateway to and icon of moral degeneration, criticized by
philosophers as a negation of the idea of universal truth in ethics2, and denounced as
evil by clergy – most notably by Joseph Ratzinger whose pontifications on the
subject now carry the weight of his recent ascendancy to the papacy3 – cultural
relativism is increasingly under fire from human rights activists, socialists,
communists, and left-leaning thinkers the world over.
In fact, the situation is so bad that Maryam Namazie, public intellectual and Director
of the Worker Communist Party of Iran has, for instance, taken to calling cultural
relativism “this era’s fascism” and is demanding that it be consigned to “the garbage
cans of history,”4 while just this past February (2006), a group of twelve
internationally prominent intellectuals, most with deep roots in the Islamic World,
and among them Salmon Rushdie, brought forth a manifesto denouncing cultural
relativism as an anti-democratic doctrine that facilitates what they call “the new
totalitarianism-Islamism.”5 How ironic.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the anthropological concepts of culture and
cultural relativism had broken into the universe of ideas as revolutionary tools of
social analysis and human understanding. The former consigned elitist, ethnocentric,
racist notions of culture to the shadows of intellectual life, while the later sounded
the death knell for social evolutionism and announced the possibility of new levels of
human understanding across cultures. A century later, the historically liberating
concepts of culture and cultural relativism, while facing real challenges within
anthropology itself are as widely misunderstood, distorted and selectively applied
outside of it, as at any time in their history. In vulgar and caricatured form, they
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have come, as often as not, to serve as signifiers that distort reality, pre-empt
intellectual effort and retard meaningful social analysis.
I intend in what follows, to highlight the contours of this calamity and to offer
suggestions for thinking about culture and cultural relativism in ways that may
contribute to restoring their critical edge and liberating potential. I will argue the
importance of recognizing that culture and cultural relativism have been mutually
constitutive from the start and that cultural relativism ought not be regarded as an
idea that took shape independent of the culture concept or as a doctrine that stands
on its own. I will suggest that culture and cultural relativism developed not only as a
response to what anthropologists were learning about societies, peoples and
difference “out in the world,” but also in direct and critical opposition to what others
around them were saying and doing in the name of culture, and I will argue that
preserving the critical dimensions of these concepts will require that we too pay
attention to discourses of culture and difference and, like our ancestors – indict them
as need be. I will suggest that historical accident in the early development of
anthropology may have played a latent role in the problematic diffusion of cultural
relativism and offer an antidote for that. Finally, I offer a further critical grounding
for discussions of cultural relativism by asserting the primacy of participantobservation not just “in the field” – but everywhere – as the single context in which
cultural relativism may be fully apprehended and applied. All of that may be best
accomplished, and the depth of the current calamity better understood by starting
with a backward glance at the meaning of culture a century ago.
Within the intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century, “culture” had been
viewed as a de-facto, unambiguous good, as “sweetness and light,” and as a property
of the select few – both across populations and within them.6 From within that
landscape, Westerners looked out upon a world of savages and barbarians waiting to
evolve, waiting to be cultivated, waiting to acquire culture and so, to become
civilized. Not only were societies thought to differ from one another owing to the
presence or absence of culture within them, but also, because of the “racial stock” of
the populations that inhabited them. Those were the hegemonic notions of culture,
peoples and difference that animated intellectual life of the nineteenth century and
that functioned both as lenses on the world and mandates for conquering and
exploiting it. Indeed, social evolutionism, with “civilization” at its apex and
“culture” at the center of that, provided the secular ideological legitimation for
nineteenth century colonialism. Together with its religious counterpoint – salvation
through the one true faith – social evolutionism cloaked naked exploitation in a
mantle of benevolence and made of the colonial project a noble enterprise whereby
the peoples of the world would be helped along the path that leads from savagery,
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through barbarism, to the light of civilization in this life, while the light of Christ
offered them eternal salvation in the next one.
The inherently material purposes, functions, and consequences of European
colonialism were thus facilitated and buffered – as acts of collective violence must
always be – by ideas diffused as common sense assumptions about the way things are
and ought to be. In this instance, those ideas were about culture; about what it is;
about who did and did not possess it; and about what all of that meant for
understanding the world and acting within it. It was within that context that the
anthropological culture concept was conceived and upon such a landscape that it
emerged to tear away at the ideological cloak constructed of social evolutionism and
at the profoundly ethnocentric notions of culture that held it together. It is also, I
submit, against this backcloth that the anthropological culture concept, and with it,
cultural relativism, may be seen as having been extraordinary breakthroughs in the
world of ideas and as analytical instruments of justice in a world of global
exploitation.
By 1871, when Sir Edward B. Tylor put forward his famous, and still widely
circulating definition of “civilization or culture” as that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society,” anthropological theory was
transforming the concept of culture by expanding, democratizing, and relativizing it.7
Here (in Tylor’s definition), culture is no longer the private property of the
aristocratic few, nor solely the music of Mozart and Bach, the art of Michelangelo
and Rembrandt, the prose of Shakespeare and Milton.
Here, culture is
unambiguously defined in inherently relativistic terms that apply both within and
across societies. Here culture, comprised of nearly everything but the kitchen sink, is
recognized as a property of societies and characteristic of peoples everywhere. And
while Tylor’s definition has been regularly criticized through the years for what some
have called “its self-defeating eclecticism,”8 it stood in stark contrast to “culture” as
understood in the intellectual and popular discourses of its day precisely because it
was relativistic and universal. It universalized culture as relative.
The construction of what would eventually be labeled “cultural relativism” has
continued from that day to this as much outside of explicit considerations of cultural
relativism as within them. The relativizing of culture that begins in the earliest
anthropological definitions of the concept underwent a significant latent expansion
simply for instance, by means of the advent of academic anthropology and its
success over a century of practice. In a number of crucial but regularly unremarked
upon ways, anthropology began constructing an image of cultural relativism when it
took its place within the division of academic labor which generally ceded the study
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of the U.S. and other Western societies to sociology, while focusing the
anthropological lens on the lives and communities of distant others. As Boas
himself stated the case, the “limitation of the field of the work of the anthropologist
is more or less accidental, and originated because other sciences occupied part of the
ground before the development of modern anthropology.”9
Anthropology’s place, at the time of its emergence and within the academic division
of labor, brought with it a significant, if largely unwritten, mandate for the discipline:
To recognize and communicate the relative equality of sociocultural constellations –
“cultures” – in the positive senses of their functionality, worthiness as objects of
study, and potential contributions to what might be learned about being human.10
As important as such a message was and continues to be, it has had the effect of
extending to culture a positive aura that obscures the oppressive dimensions of
culture(s) everywhere. In universalizing the relative equality and “worth” of cultures,
anthropology’s message to the world, embedded in its unwritten mandate, may have
shaped a cultural relativism that skews culture in a relatively positive and so,
somewhat distorted direction.
Moreover, as doing anthropology quickly became synonymous with undertaking
pilgrimages to distant and exotic locales, a further relativizing image of culture began
to take form as culture came to be seen as something one must journey to encounter,
something out there; the authentic property of authentic others, discernable in part
by the temporal distance between the “here” and the “there,” the “them” and the
“us.”11 This had the effect of suggesting that culture here and now could go
unmarked as something self-evident, uninteresting, and even trivial, in a “white
bread” sense, while interesting and consequently deep and “real” culture resided
elsewhere.
This, I submit, is a powerful latent construction of culture as relative; one that comes
nearly full circle in setting Western culture apart from the rest; one that has been
endemic to the structure and practice of academic anthropology from its inception;
one so widely diffused in the world as to be iconic of anthropology itself; quite
possibly the loudest message on cultural relativism ever communicated by
anthropology to the world.
And so, we do well to recognize that cultural relativism was being constructed
inherently, in anthropological theory, and latently, through anthropological practice,
long before anyone ever used or encountered the phrase “cultural relativism.” There
are no definitions of that phrase (of which I am aware) until it starts appearing in
textbooks well into the twentieth century. And with good reason. We have
necessarily been better at characterizing than defining cultural relativism (and more
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willing to do so) because attempts at definition reify and alter what is really a fluid
intellectual stance or approach to understanding the world around us. 12 As an
intellectual stance, attitude, or approach to sociocultural reality, what we call “cultural
relativism” must necessarily be appropriated idiosyncratically within the conscious
depths of living individuals as they experience, reflect upon and attempt to
understand the world – and then, even from moment to moment in the course of
lived experience. Reification suffocates nuance, movement and process, opens the
door to dogmatism and ossification and has the capacity to make of cultural
relativism a forgone conclusion about data rather than an approach to it. An
injunction to open minds, in such circumstances, may serve instead to close them.
The first completely explicit expression – it is decidedly not a definition – of a
culturally relativistic stance, that I have been able to find, was put forward by Franz
Boas when he observed that “civilization is not something absolute but…relative,
and our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.” 13 The
year was 1887. In the context of that year, as a historically situated remark within the
intellectual landscape I began by describing, Boas’ observation must be seen primarily as
an indictment of nineteenth century discourses of culture and otherness, as a countervailing
intellectual stance, and as a constituent element of a developing culture concept
rather than as a dogma external to it. As with the culture concept itself, this early
articulation of cultural relativism came into being and drew its power from within an
historical dialectic of competing and opposite ideas: Absolute culture as the
“sweetness and light” that surrounded the civilized few and, in its absence, defined
the barbaric and savage many, and social evolutionism presiding over and neatly
arranging the lot. While the anthropological concept of culture and intellectual
stance of cultural relativism were, in part, generated by the fieldwork of
anthropologists it is crucial to recognize that they were also generated by and
articulated in response to what others at the time were saying and doing in the name
of culture. That is what gave them power. That is how cultural relativism, born of
and developing within anthropological conceptions of culture, became a deep timbre
in the voice of a developing anthropology that began to resonate in the world. In
other words, culture and cultural relativism became powerful tools of social analysis
and human understanding because our ancestors listened to, took seriously, and
indicted what others around them were saying and doing in the name of culture.
So must we if we are to preserve the gifts of our ancestors. And the stakes have
seldom, if ever, been higher. With democracy, justice, diversity, civil society, and
humanity itself increasingly wedged between two ends of a tightening absolutist vice,
elegantly described by Benjamin Barber as “McWorld” and “Jihad,” the events of
everyday life the world over foreground culture and cultural relativism as arguably
never before and constitute an inescapable crucible for cultural relativism (and
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anthropology) in the early and foreseeable years of this new century.14 As the
globalizing forces of McWorld and Jihadism make heightened participant-observers
of everyone, either a vigorous, critically informed, and critically applied cultural
relativism will emerge or, as Maryam Namazie would already have it, cultural
relativism may indeed be relegated to “the garbage cans of history.”15
Paying attention and responding to ambient constructions of culture and otherness
today will mean taking into account the many vulgar distortions of culture and
cultural relativism emanating from within the ranks of putative relativists themselves,
diffused within a generally relativistic post-modern zeitgeist, embraced often enough
as absolute relativism, and circulating freely in the world around us. Central to our
present and necessarily on-going struggle with cultural relativism must be a concern
with what Anthony Giddens reminds us is the “double hermeneutic” of social
inquiry: the re-emergence of our ideas back into the wider world in which they were
generated.16 Paying attention to that may be sobering enough and should occasion a
sense of urgency. I have in mind (and will elaborate on some of) the corrupt and
corrupting appropriations of cultural relativism and of the culture concept itself,
rampant among identity politicians, flaunted in politically correct posturing, valorized
in post-modernist celebrations of fragmentation, and lodged within the recesses of
“cultural diversity” and “multiculturalism” now firmly in the grasp of managed
capitalist society.17 Ideas too are dialectical and taking seriously what others are
saying and doing with the culture concept and cultural relativism offers an important
opportunity to evaluate the synthesis wrought from a century or so of
anthropological ideas abroad in and colliding with the world. The picture is not
pretty.
By the end of the twentieth century, questions of justice and equality in the United
States were being routinely and consistently cast in cultural terms that masked
injustice and obscured the structural production of inequality. Inequality itself was
being positioned as a function of “mainstream culture” – often by those who stood
the most to lose by it. “Cultural Diversity” and Multiculturalism” became
multimillion dollar industries and tools of social control grafted into the structure
and function of McWorld. “Culture” and “race” became synonymous terms,
provincialism masqueraded as progressivism, ethnocentrisms of every sort were
lionized and became virtually immune from attack behind shields of fetishized
culture, distorted cultural relativism, and ecstatic acolytes of “cultural sensitivity.”
Jihadism (to borrow again from Barber), flourished within a “discursive ferment”
that emerged in response to McWorld’s “political, economic, and technical
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incitement to talk about”18 culture, and culture again came to serve profoundly
ideological ends.
In the nineteen-nineties as a doctoral student in anthropology at a major American
university in the Midwest, I was so jarred by the valorization and distortion of culture
on my campus, that I abandoned a tentatively approved dissertation topic in medical
anthropology to study it. Not only had I been struck by the sudden and pervasive
use of the word “culture” wherever one looked or listened, I was amazed by
newspaper headline announcing things like “Cultures to Meet” and “Conference
Seeks Bond Between Cultures,” and I was touched and alarmed by undergraduates
who, in sincere and sometimes poignant attempts to make sense of their lives and
the world around them, were using the terms culture and race interchangeably.
There was, for instance, the case of the student interviewed in the campus newspaper
about an upcoming event, who declared that he “hope[d] to see all kinds of cultures
there so they can see the diversity the university has.”19 There was the letter to the
editor in which a female student describing an incident of sexual harassment
deployed the word “culture” as a synonym for “race” – not while discussing culture
or race – but in the course of relating a traumatic life event; in the course of
discussing other things; in the course of living her life and interpreting the world
around her. After noting in her letter that, when she turned and screamed at her
tormentors (who had commented on her “juicy ass” and said “I wish I had a
condom”), they called her a “racist white bitch,” she wrote, “as if I would gladly have
put up with such vulgar and demeaning comments from a male of my own
culture”!20 And there was the study group of five or six students in a class for which
I was the teaching assistant, that proposed an exercise in participant-observation
whereby they would observe the interactions of mall cashiers and customers “to see
if cashiers treat people from different cultures differently.” When I asked the
students how they would be able to identify the cultural backgrounds of people
strolling towards cash registers, the question produced stammers and incredulity.21
And while examples such as these got my attention and focused the gaze of my
study, they turned out to be altogether typical, and I eventually called the dissertation
that came out of that study, Cultural Diversity, Ideology, and Social Control In Higher
Education: Teach Your Children Well, in hopes of conveying through that title,
something of the conclusions I arrived at.
In the course of that study, I encountered identity politicians who had converted the
problematic phrase “people of color” into the hideous phrase, “people of culture,”
and so, in three little words, had managed to recreate the nineteenth century
assumption that culture is a property of some people and populations but not of
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others. While engaged in the study, I bore witness to the transformation of cultural
relativism from an injunction to open one’s mind by suspending immediate
judgments in order to make informed one’s later,22 into a dogma whose adherents
imposed it as a pre-emptive conclusion about, rather than as an approach to social
inquiry. I watched as culture and as biology (which I came to call “raceculture” –
one word), melded with absolute cultural relativism, made its way into the arena of
popular American jihadist slogans. Two of them became favorites of graffiti artists
and silkscreeners alike: “It’s a Black Thang – You Wouldn’t Understand” and soon
after that, “It’s a Womyn Thing – You Wouldn’t Understand” became commonplace
on walls and t-shirts around American campuses and elsewhere. The former declares
that unless you are born to it, “it” is beyond comprehension, while the latter places
understanding, empathy, and imagination beyond the grasp of half of the human
race. Nihilistic relativism? Both make of implied “cultures” closed, bounded,
impenetrable entities surrounded by moats, encircled by barbed wire, and monitored
from within guard towers staffed by little Ayatollahs of identity politics. Both negate
the possibility of understanding and, for that matter, the very premise of
anthropology itself.
There is, of course, no shortage of related examples. They range from Leonard
Jeffries, professor and former chair, of the Black Studies department at New York
University, dividing the world into violent “ice people” and warm “sun people”23 on
the basis of color who, along with other centrists of various stripes, effectively reanimates nineteenth century social evolutionary taxonomies by simply inverting the
cast of characters, to Western intellectuals celebrating the commodification and sale
of hip-hop misogynist thuggery to the ethnically marked suburbs of Paris, as the
cultural diffusion of “resistance” among the oppressed.
By the end of the twentieth century the very word “culture,” in the hands of
managed capitalist society, was being stripped of its anthropological “context,
history, and signification and infused with new and mystificatory conceptual content
of particular use”24 to the social order, while cultural relativism, energized and
distorted by the hyper-subjectivism of a post-modern zeitgeist became a free floating
signifier, began to cut indiscriminately in every direction and increasingly took the
form of its own negation as absolute relativism grounded in nothing more than the
hand that wields it.25
The hand that wields such relativism may strike in the interests of power and
domination as readily as in any other interests and often more effectively. For
example, Maryam Namazie cites the German court case that followed the 1997
murder of an eighteen-year-old woman by her father “for refusing to marry the man
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he had chosen.”26 The “court gave him a reduced sentence, saying he was practicing
his religion and culture.”27 She also cites the ruling of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign
Affairs which, when confronted by petitions from Iranian asylum seekers, declared
that “Iran’s prisons are satisfactory for Third World standards” and so, paved the
way for their return to that repressive theocratic state and whatever awaited them
there.28
While reading the text of Namazie’s speech on the subject of cultural relativism,
delivered in Toronto at a forum on Women’s Rights in Iran, I was struck by a
juxtaposition that seems to encapsulate the calamity with which those of us
committed to the value and on-going usefulness of cultural relativism are today
confronted. In the following passage, Namazie rather perfectly articulates a fairly
sophisticated anthropological position with regard to the fluidity, openness, and
contradictions of cultural constellations while denouncing at the same time cultural
relativism. Although the reader and I may well think that what she denounces is a
distorted, vulgar cultural relativism and not cultural relativism as we understand it,
the question becomes “where and how does that conception depart from our own”
and “how do we communicate the difference to the world?” Here are her remarks:
Cultural relativists say Iranian society is Muslim, implying that
people choose to live the way they are forced to. It’s as if there are
no differences in beliefs in Iran, no struggles, no communists, no
socialists, and no freedom-lovers. If so, why have 150,000 people
been executed for opposing the Islamic republic of Iran? If it’s the
entire society’s culture and religion, why does the Islamic regime
need such extensive tools for repression? If it’s people’s beliefs why
does the regime control their private lives – from their sexual
activities, to what videos they watch, to what music they listen to? If
the entire society is Muslim, why did Zoleykhode Kodkhoda enter a
voluntary sexual relationship for which she was buried in a ditch and
stoned? If it is people’s culture, why did the residents of Bukhan
revolt against the stoning and save her life? Why are thousands of
women rounded up in the streets for “improper” veiling – if it’s
their culture and religion? How come, after two decades of terror
and brutality, the universities are still not Islamic, according to an
official of the regime? Though it’s untrue, even if every person
living in Iran had reactionary beliefs, it still wouldn’t be acceptable.
If everyone believes in the superiority of their race, does that make it
okay?29
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And how, anthropologists must ask and try to answer, did cultural relativism come
to mask such internal complexities and contradictions of “cultures”?
In such denunciations of cultural relativism, either Namazie, like Rushdie and the
other signatories of the manifesto rejecting cultural relativism, are narrow minded
absolutists (they are not), they never grasped the meaning of cultural relativism as a
liberating anti-imperialist force (no way), or they are listening more carefully and
responding more urgently than many of their anthropologist contemporaries, to
what others in the world around them are saying and doing in the name of culture
and cultural relativism. I take the latter to be the case, and I make three further
assumptions. First, that those signatories and all who share their view have
themselves long cultivated and relied upon the intellectual stance of cultural
relativism in order to interpret and, in many cases, re-present the world around them
(relativism, like its opposite absolutism, being a necessary touchstone on a
continuum of thought). Second, that they themselves would be intellectually
paralyzed without it. And third, that if what such people are actually objecting to is
not “cultural relativism” as anthropology conceives or wants it to be, the time has
never been more ripe, nor the need more urgent, for anthropology to articulate and
communicate to the world just what cultural relativism is or ought to be. That
project begins, I believe, not only in taking seriously the objections of honest critics
but in taking seriously what others in the world around us are saying and doing in
the name of culture. That is, after all, how culture and cultural relativism emerged in
the world of ideas more than a century ago.
It is easy enough to wield cultural relativism against naked (especially Western)
ethnocentrism, to bring it to bear in considerations of cliterodectomy, initiatory
fellatio, infanticide, etc., and to apply it to the battles of the past which, it is true,
continue to linger. But it is also formulaic – and safe to simply do so. In the safety
and sanctity of our classrooms and internal discourses we may wind up preserving
culture and cultural relativism as beautiful museum pieces – artifacts of what may
come to be seen as anthropology’s golden age – if we ignore what is being done to
and with them in the world around us. As John Dewey once observed, “saints
engage in introspection [while] burley sinners. rule the world.”30 And so, some
suggestions and a final movement of thought.
We must pay better attention to what others are saying and doing in the name of
culture and cultural relativism in the world around us. We must challenge and indict
reified, racialized, essentialist constructions of culture and reified, dogmatic, and
reactionary appropriations of cultural relativism wherever we find them. We do
well, in that regard, to remember that culture, and with it relativism, was conceived
in just such a crucible, that the power of anthropologically relativized culture
gathered within that crucible, and that our ancestors, to the (significant) extent that
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they were able, drove culture and relativism like spikes through the heart of the
reigning reified, racist, ethnocentric, constructions of culture and otherness that
surrounded them.
We ought also, I believe, to be more mindful of ways in which our own latent
constructions of culture and relativism have been problematic. If, for instance, the
iconic association of anthropology with the distant and exotic has skewed
perceptions of culture and cultural relativism in problematic ways, we can correct
some of that by, at long last, granting Americanist work full citizenship among us.
And if the historic “unwritten” mandate of our discipline meant that in the course of
conveying the relative equality of sociocultural constellations as objects of study and
valid slices of the human experience, we latently invested culture(s) everywhere with
a (positive) patina that distorts reality, that too is correctable. Balance is possible,
and contemporary racialized constructions of “cultures” as unambiguous de-facto
goods, as once again, “sweetness and light,” must give way, if we emphasize that
while culture enables, it also constrains; that cultures both liberate and oppress those
suspended in their webs.
In his famous “Anti Anti-Relativism” lecture, Clifford Geertz observed that “what
the so-called relativists want us to worry about is provincialism.”31 I worry about it
too, but never so much as when witnessing provincialism in the guise of
progressivism, ethnocentrism veiled in a shroud of culture, and both defended by
invocations of distorted cultural relativism. But Geertz has also characterized
culture(s) as “webs of significance” people themselves have spun 32 and in that
characterization lies hope – once again – of developing cultural relativism through
engagements of the culture concept rather than in its own explicit terms. To view
cultures as webs of significance is to recognize that, as in all webs, living beings may
become entrapped, may suffocate, may indeed be devoured. To convey that
universal existential reality would mean, among other useful things, universalizing
the relative equality of so-called cultures in deep, human being centered ways: Not in
terms of the relatively positive, but in terms of the absolutely negative capacity of all
cultures to hold sway over, constrain, and yes, oppress human beings stuck, for good
and bad, by accidents of birth, within them. One need only to remember Jules
Henry to recognize Culture Against Man as part of our tradition but, one need only be
objective to recognize that we have generally muted the point in myriad respects.33
A Concluding Suggestion
To the extent that cultural relativism has become a free floating signifier that can,
and much of the time does, mean anything to anyone, an important means of
preserving it as a useful tool may be to ground it as far as possible. In addition, to
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grounding cultural relativism within its rightful place as part of the culture concept
itself, in addition to grounding it in considerations of what culture is and how it
works in our lives, tying cultural relativism to participant – observation may be
especially useful. In one of the adjoining articles, Thomas Johnson observes that, in
contrast to the philosopher, “…for most anthropologists, cultural relativism is really
more about an assumed position of research methodology that involves participantobservation,” and he emphasizes that “participant-observation is itself a dialogue
between self and other.”34 Yet in “Relativism and the Search for Human Rights,”
Alison Dundes Renteln presents a contrasting view by suggesting that, while some
anthropologists have attempted to highlight the link of cultural relativism to
methodology, that link is, at best, a tertiary concern.35 Whatever the relative merits
or shortcomings of her argument may be, it is Johnson who, in connecting cultural
relativism to participant-observation, locates it (to echo Marx) “not in any fantastic
isolation or abstract definition”36 but in the living intellectual processes of real
people under definite conditions of inquiry and development, conditions that create
the space in which cultural relativism is more than an ossified abstraction.
That space, in which the deep dialogue between self and other, animated by a living
cultural relativism largely unfolds, is the space of the hyphen in the middle of our
juxtapositional (if not oxymoronic) phrase, participant-observation. Participantobservation is a process made real and synthesized solely by the consciousness of
the individual who, perched upon the hyphen, gives it life not just in the field, but
potentially everywhere: post field in relation to data, while constructing
ethnographies, and always, while engaged in and attempting to understand the
world. While I do understand participant-observation in the perfectly literal terms
of fieldwork, I only grasp its meaning in terms of the consciousness engendered by
being perched upon the hyphen in the existential moment of “being there.” And I
understand being there, only secondarily as being there in a particular place and
primarily as “being there” upon the hyphen of a dialectical relationship between living
in the world and reflecting upon it. There, the deepest dialogue between self and
other transpires as one moves between the particular and universal; between the
emic and etic; between the ephemeral, transitory and somewhat more permanent;
between micro and macro levels of data and analysis and, make no mistake, between
absolute and relative poles of thought and frames of understanding. It is there, I
submit, amidst all of the on-going, moment to moment, contingent, messy,
exhilarating, knowledge producing reflexivity, unfolding in real time, in the deep
existential space of life upon the hyphen, that cultural relativism is real and
apprehendable as part of a synthesis that occurs – and can only occur – in the living
depths of particular human beings.
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David Perusek, Cultural Relativism
There, in robust form, cultural relativism is an approach to the phenomenal world,
not a conclusion about it; part of a struggle with information, not the outcome of
that struggle; a particular “kind of intellectual effort,” 37 not the outcome of
intellectual effort; an apprehendable and applicable slice of consciousness crucial to
living in and understanding the world. Everything else is reification and, in
Hegalian, Marxist, and biblical terms, idolatry.38 If we can agree upon, focus on, and
communicate that reality, cultural relativism may yet escape both the “garbage cans
of history” and the “wonderhouse” of anthropology’s, future – past, golden era.39
So go my thoughts on the subject. They are, for whatever, they are or are not worth,
my contribution to an anthropological discussion that must, if anything, intensify as
the dialectic of McWorld and jihadism unfolds and the events of everyday life the
world over bring questions of culture and cultural relativism center stage and make
participant-observers of everyone.40
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