David Perusek, Cultural Relativism

David Perusek, Cultural Relativism

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 ethics[2], 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 papacy[3] – 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 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 participant-observation 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, 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 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 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 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 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.