Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Their Limits

Judging another culture by the standards of your own, usually without noticing you're doing it (ethnos = a people, at the center).

Mild: flinching at unfamiliar food or assuming 'real breakfast' means eggs and coffee. Toxic: the 19th-century ladder of savagery–barbarism–civilization used to justify colonialism and missionization.

A practice can only be understood within the whole system of meanings, histories, and constraints in which it occurs — describe accurately from the inside before evaluating.

Franz Boas and his students — Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, and Margaret Mead.

Methodological: understand before you judge — the working tool of practicing anthropologists. Moral: no cross-cultural moral judgment is ever legitimate — much harder to defend and rejected by most anthropologists.

Described by E. E. Evans-Pritchard: a woman marries a dead man and bears children by a living kinsman who count as the dead man's heirs — an elegant legal device in a patrilineal system where a name and cattle line must not die out.

Read it against Indian agrarian economics: oxen plow, dung fuels and fertilizes, and slaughtering breeding stock in a bad year destroys next year's harvest.

Drafted largely by Herskovits for the AAA Executive Board, it warned the UN that a declaration built on Western premises could become another instrument of domination.

Widow immolation in colonial India, banned by the British in 1829 — the ban was both an imperial imposition and, plausibly, a good thing.

They show where relativism runs out: irreversible harm to non-consenting people and atrocity cannot be shielded from judgment just by being labeled 'cultural practice.'