World Culture & Heritage20 Concepts & Facts

What Is Cultural Relativism? Franz Boas, Ethnocentrism Critique & Anthropological Methodology

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Cultural relativism is the foundational anthropological principle that an individual's beliefs, values, customs, and behaviors must be evaluated and understood within the context of their own culture rather than judged against the benchmarks of an outside society. Before this concept took root in academic thought, European thinkers commonly evaluated non-Western communities through ethnocentrism, a term coined by sociologist William Graham Sumner in 1906 to describe the habit of viewing one's own culture as the natural center of the universe while grading all other societies as backward or inferior. Cultural relativism directly challenges this self-centered framework by asserting that no single culture possesses an absolute, objective standard for measuring human worth or development.

The German-American anthropologist Franz Boas developed the conceptual foundation of cultural relativism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the theoretical framework of historical particularism. Boas strongly rejected the unilineal cultural evolutionism promoted by nineteenth-century scholars like Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor, who claimed that every human civilization passes along a single linear pathway from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Boas demonstrated through empirical fieldwork among Arctic Inuit and Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples that every human culture represents a unique historical adaptation shaped by local geography, internal innovation, and cross-cultural contact. His intellectual heirs, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, popularized these insights, demonstrating that personality traits, gender expectations, and social norms vary widely across distinct cultural landscapes.

In contemporary social science, scholars maintain a sharp distinction between methodological relativism and moral relativism. Methodological relativism operates as an investigative tool, requiring an anthropologist or field researcher to suspend personal cultural judgments during field research in order to understand how local traditions make sense from the inside, known as an emic perspective. In contrast, extreme moral relativism claims that because moral values are culturally constructed, no universal ethical standards can ever exist, a stance that creates friction with international human rights law. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 established that basic human dignity transcends local cultural traditions. Practicing cultural relativism therefore does not require accepting harmful practices, but rather demands intellectual humility, rigorous empathy, and objective investigation when studying the broad spectrum of human civilization.

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Cultural relativism posits that an individual's beliefs, values, and practices must be understood based on their own cultural context rather than judged against outside standards.

Sociologist William Graham Sumner coined the term ethnocentrism in his 1906 book 'Folkways', defining it as judging other cultures using one's own group as the superior benchmark.

Xenocentrism represents the opposite of ethnocentrism, occurring when an individual perceives foreign cultures, styles, or products as inherently superior to their own.

German-American anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativism through his fieldwork with Baffin Island Inuit and Pacific Northwest Kwakwaka'wakw peoples.

Boas introduced historical particularism, showing that cultures do not follow a predetermined developmental line but develop uniquely through internal invention and cultural diffusion.

Cultural relativism overturned 19th-century unilineal evolutionism championed by Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor, which classified societies into savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

Boas conducted an influential 1912 cranial morphology study of European immigrants to prove that human physical traits and head shapes respond dynamically to environment rather than static racial types.

Methodological relativism is an investigative heuristic requiring researchers to temporarily suspend personal cultural bias to accurately document and analyze local cultural systems.

Moral or philosophical relativism asserts that all ethical claims are culturally determined and that no cross-cultural, universal moral criteria exist.

#10

Mainstream contemporary anthropology embraces methodological relativism while rejecting extreme moral relativism that would justify human rights abuses.

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Linguist Kenneth Pike introduced the terms 'emic' (the insider's subjective perspective) and 'etic' (the outsider's analytical perspective), both central to relativistic field research.

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Ruth Benedict expanded cultural relativism in her 1934 book 'Patterns of Culture', arguing that societies select distinct personality configurations from the total arc of human possibilities.

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Margaret Mead applied Boasian relativism in 'Coming of Age in Samoa' (1928), arguing that adolescent emotional turbulence is culturally conditioned rather than biologically universal.

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Melville J. Herskovits submitted a memorandum on behalf of the American Anthropological Association in 1947 questioning the Western individualist bias of early universal rights drafts.

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The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, establishing universal legal protections that limit claims of cultural exceptionalism.

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Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas established extended participant observation and fluency in local vernaculars as standard fieldwork requirements to counter ethnocentric distortions.

#17

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity, emerged from Boasian anthropology, suggesting that the grammatical structure of a language shapes how its speakers perceive reality.

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Cultural determinism argues that human behavior, emotional responses, and cognitive categories are primarily acquired through enculturation rather than biological inheritance.

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Cultural relativism distinguishes between cultural ideals (what people say they should do) and real cultural behavior (what individuals actually practice in everyday life).

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In modern comparative legal studies, cultural relativism informs how international courts assess customary law, indigenous autonomy, and minority language preservation.

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Educator's Insight

Cultural relativism teaches researchers to view unfamiliar traditions through the eyes of the community practicing them rather than imposing outside cultural assumptions. Think of it as switching lenses: instead of calling an unfamiliar dietary rule, kinship pattern, or marriage custom bizarre, an observer asks what social purpose that custom fulfills within its local environment. Franz Boas pioneered this mindset to dismantle nineteenth-century racist theories that ranked human societies on an imaginary evolutionary ladder.

For competitive exams like UPSC Anthropology, Sociology, and General Studies, examiners frequently test the dividing line between methodological relativism and moral relativism. Remember this distinction: methodological relativism is a scientific research method for unbiased fieldwork, while moral relativism is an ethical philosophy. Watch out for multiple-choice questions that confuse ethnocentrism with xenocentrism; ethnocentrism favors one's own culture, while xenocentrism prefers foreign cultures. Connect Boas with his historical particularism framework to secure full marks.

What Is Cultural Relativism? Franz Boas, Ethnocentrism Critique & Anthropological Methodology

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