Relativism Relativized
Relativism is itself an important issue. Because anthropologists championed it for so long, they have perhaps been unduly reluctant to recognize its limitations.
It is, after all, a very comfortable - and comforting - doctrine: we should respect all culture as equally moral and therefore all systemic practices as equally valid. Yet obviously this will not do.
In practice, the principles recognition of local values does not commit us to extreme relativism, a position in which respect for all cultures is reduced to an absurd caricature: it becomes a socially impossible and logically self contradictory argument in which al moral and empirical judgment is suspended.
For how then does one deal with cultural values like ethnocentrism? How is one to confront genocide?
Clearly, cultural relativism, it it is so to have any meaning at all, must be resituated in a pragmatic vision.
Expressed as a general ethical Diktat rather than as a socially responsible position, cultural relativism ends up defeating the purpose for which it was originally, and with the best of intentions, formulated as an epistemological creed.
The rethinking of relativism requires a specifically historical reconsiderations its role. And it is the specifically historical accessibility of the parts toward the present configuration of power that makes a critical “purchase,” feasible as well as desirable.
By the same token it is the demonstrable effects of documented processes of environmental and social intervention that make it absurd to regard all causal explanations as equally satisfactory or all outcomes as equally beneficial; but we must always ask whom they harm or benefit, thereby situating them in a particularly social environment.
The common reluctant of anthropologists to get involved is an abdication of responsibility, easier to sustain when we rest on a universalist form of relativism.
Against this catatonic condition, a reminder that we inhabit a socially and historically specific moment, a different moment, is the best antidote.
Here, the issue of accountability is crucial. We simply cannot predict what will be the effects o our interventions, and moral prescription is a poor substitute for accepting that responsibility.
Relativism Relativized
Relativism is itself an important issue. Because anthropologists championed it for so long, they have perhaps been unduly reluctant to recognize its limitations.
It is, after all, a very comfortable - and comforting - doctrine: we should respect all culture as equally moral and therefore all systemic practices as equally valid. Yet obviously this will not do.
In practice, the principles recognition of local values does not commit us to extreme relativism, a position in which respect for all cultures is reduced to an absurd caricature: it becomes a socially impossible and logically self contradictory argument in which al moral and empirical judgment is suspended.
For how then does one deal with cultural values like ethnocentrism? How is one to confront genocide?
Clearly, cultural relativism, it it is so to have any meaning at all, must be resituated in a pragmatic vision.
Expressed as a general ethical Diktat rather than as a socially responsible position, cultural relativism ends up defeating the purpose for which it was originally, and with the best of intentions, formulated as an epistemological creed.
The rethinking of relativism requires a specifically historical reconsiderations its role. And it is the specifically historical accessibility of the parts toward the present configuration of power that makes a critical “purchase,” feasible as well as desirable.
By the same token it is the demonstrable effects of documented processes of environmental and social intervention that make it absurd to regard all causal explanations as equally satisfactory or all outcomes as equally beneficial; but we must always ask whom they harm or benefit, thereby situating them in a particularly social environment.
The common reluctant of anthropologists to get involved is an abdication of responsibility, easier to sustain when we rest on a universalist form of relativism.
Against this catatonic condition, a reminder that we inhabit a socially and historically specific moment, a different moment, is the best antidote.
Here, the issue of accountability is crucial. We simply cannot predict what will be the effects o our interventions, and moral prescription is a poor substitute for accepting that responsibility.
Relativism Relativized
