What is Cultural Relativism?

The word has two meanings, the first moral and political, the second methodological. Methodologically, cultural relativism means that while the anthropologist is in the field, he or she temporarily suspends ("brackets") their own esthetic and moral judgements. The aim is to obtain a certain degree of "understanding" or "empathy" with the foreign norms and tastes. Morally and politically, cultural relativism means that we respect other cultures and treat them as "as good as" one's own. During fieldwork one frequently discovers that this is not as easy as it may sound.

Like any idea, cultural relativism as a moral project may be caricatured, as it often is in critical accounts. These tend to spring from one of two points of view: (1) From an e.g. nationalist viewpoint, cultural relativism may be perceived as a threat - as an acid that dissolves one's nation, culture, identity, safety. Like most anthropologists, I do not share