Review on

Cultural Relativism

By Mark Glazer

Cultural relativism is a key methodological which is extremely important in the subject Anthropology. It is the key to understanding scientific anthropology as they are the key to understanding of the anthropological frame of mind, says Mark Glazer. Cultural relativism itself means that no culture is ever right or wrong because what is correct in one culture may be incorrect in another therefore all cultures are equal, never superior to one another and never incorrect.

Back in time anthropologist believed that studying a culture required cold and neutral eyes and only one set of views so that a particular culture’s merit and demerits could be understood without consideration of another. This notion was believed to have helped in studying one culture in depth.

Franz Boas, an anthropologist was the first to have considered not one but many cultures at the same time. Boas was the one who discovered Cultural Relativism. Along with him his students, which included Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, etc, were all associated with this perspective. Boas published his views on this comparative method for the first time in 1896. Following Boas, his student Alfred Kroeber made basic tenets of Cultural Relativism and Ruth Benedict was the most important practitioner of Cultural Relativism. For Benedict cultural anthropology is a disciplined that studies differences between cultures. Robert Lowie, another major cultural relativist, came closer to Boas’ views on Cultural Relativism by deeply rooting into the philosophy of science and accepted cultural relativism as a science.

Therefore, by the end of the text, I understood how cultural relativism may have caused a loss in the depth of study in one culture, it has broaden the knowledge we have of various cultures and how to respect and understand different cultures.