INQ-260AN | Cultural Relativity

Full Title: Cockfighting, Lip Discs, and Dog for Dinner: Understanding Cultural Relativity

Topic Description:

Cultures are the product of a particular historical trajectory and their achievements cannot be ascribed to racial differences; cultures must be studied holistically and no one belief or behavior can be studied out of context; and cultures produce in their members a tendency to see the world from a naively self-centered viewpoint that proclaims what they do to be “natural” and “right”. Only by a systematic and even-handed study of cross-cultural data (ethnology), is it possible for individuals to derive any generalizations about the tremendous range in human variation globally. If ethnographic fieldwork taught early anthropologists just one thing, it was that to know yourself—know the other. By living with others for extended periods of time, anthropologists learn to take other people’s cultural patterns seriously whether it be cockfighting in Bali, wearing lip discs in Brazil, or eating dog for dinner in India. The eye-opening diversity we encounter in the field, in turn, prompts us to reexamine the assumptions we, all too often, take for granted.

Counts as Global? No

Topic Approved: April 2010