Anthropology
Open Access

Cultural Relativism: Types and Implications

Statin Karanmiana^{* *}Correspondence: Statin Karanmiana, Department of Biological Science, University of RSA, Kimberley, South Africa, Email:

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Description

Culture is a broad term that includes both the information, beliefs, arts, laws, conventions, abilities, and habits of the individual as well as the social behaviour, institutions, and norms present in human society. Culture can also show the mode a group thinks, their practices, or behavioral patterns, or the views of the world. The theory of "cultural relativism" states that a person's ideas and practises should be considered in view of their own culture. The norms and values of one culture shouldn't be evaluated by the norms and values of another, according to proponents of cultural relativism. It claims that there are no universal truths and that each culture must be understood in its own particular words since they cannot be transformed into universally understood terms. Cultural relativism is the ability to recognize another culture on that culture's terms and, and subsequently not making decisions based on the standards of one's own culture. Certain epistemological and methodological claims are part of the cultural relativism theory. According to cultural relativism, ethical standards vary between cultures and what is right in one culture may not be judged wrong in another. Cultural relativism implies that no society is better than another; they are simply different. This assumption has several corollaries, including the following: different societies have different moral codes, there is no objective standard to magistrate how good or bad these ethical codes are, and that the job of those who study cultures is not to compare these civilizations to their own, but to describe them. According to moral relativism, what is accepted as normal in one culture is always correct in that same culture. The argument that there is no objective standard by which to judge what is right or wrong is not as powerful in terms of culture. Ethnocentrism, which encourages people to view the world through the lens of their own culture, is in contrast to cultural relativism.

Implications

According to the cultural relativist viewpoint, no culture is superior to another in terms of its systems of politics, law, or other institutions. This is due to the fact that cultural relativism holds that cultural norms and values receive their meaning from a particular social context. Since there is no objective definition of good or evil, every decision and assessment of what is right or wrong must be made on an individual basis in each community, according to the theory of cultural relativism. In reality, cultural relativists work to advance knowledge of customs like eating insects and sacrifice killing that are unfamiliar to other cultures.

Types

Absolute and critical cultural relativism are two distinct subcategories. Absolute cultural relativists claim that nothing that takes place within a culture must and should not be questioned by strangers. Critical cultural relativism, on the other hand, raises concerns about power dynamics as well as who is accepting certain cultural practices and why. Cultural relativism challenges beliefs about the objectivity and universality of ethical truth. In general, cultural relativism believes that there is no such thing as universal truth and ethics; there are many cultural codes. Furthermore, the code of one culture has no special status, but is merely one among many.