CHAPTER TEN

CULTURAL RELATIVITY

by Hugh M. Lewis

The doctrine of cultural relativity has been a cornerstone of cultural anthropology, and, though heavily criticized, remains an intractable problem of general anthropological theory. Relativity concerns the objective qualities of different forms of knowledge in the world. Relativism concerns a more reflexive notion of our doctrines and preconceptions about these qualities of our knowledge. There are many varieties of relativity and relativism. In another manuscript I have outlined at least 20 different, distinguishable forms of relativism or relativity. In general, relativity and relativism concern the ontological and existential status of human knowledge in a most basic way--the ability to know with any certainty that something is objectively true. 

The question of relativity enters in when the claim is made that certainty of knowledge is always relative--we can be more or less certain about something--but can never be absolute or final. Science in this sense is based upon a relativistic orientation, and the Popperian doctrine of falsification is implicitly rooted in the doctrine of the relative uncertainty of our propositional or observational knowledge. Thus there is nothing intrinsically inimical between scientific knowledge and the doctrine of relativism or the relativity of knowledge--in fact and theory they are actually complementary, even demanding one another. Thus there is little that is rational about anti-relativistic orientations that themselves claim to be scientific--this anti-relativism misinterprets the doctrine of relativism in a strong, deterministic form, one that is in its own absolute character paradoxically self-contradictory. It is not a question of whether or not culture or our knowledge of culture is relative, but in delineating precisely how, in what way, and to what extent, it is so.

Relativism also entails the presupposition that all knowledge is situated within a context of knowledge, and this context must be taken into account in our formulations and presuppositions of the certainty of knowledge. This leads to what Ben Ami Scharfstein refers to as the inherent dilemmas of context.

To understand the dilemmas of cultural relativism, we must see that the doctrine of cultural relativity depends upon a holistic approach to cultural knowledge, one that precludes analytical reductionism (but not analysis) as the exclusive theoretical approach to such knowledge. Knowledge must be construed within the context of its culture in which it originates and takes shape. It gains its full value only when comprehended from within the framework of whole patterning which cultural knowledge takes. The dilemma of a holistic approach to culture is that such holism is incomplete and partial--itself relative to the same contexts it attempts to surmount. It is the relativism of the whole of the cultural orientation in which knowledge is situated that underlies what Kuhn refers to as the dynamics of scientific paradigms and the kind of conversion experience that underlies and is a precursor to seeing the new gestalt of a scientific theory and the abandonment of old theories. The paradigmatic structure of knowledge, that systems of knowledge cohere into domains that are internally coherent and that provide a whole gestalt of understanding and seeing the world which is separate from other alternative ways of knowing, especially as this knowledge is symbolically and culturally embedded, is what best accounts for the anthropological relativism and relativities of such knowledge.

To some extent then, the relativity of culture is rooted to the holism and internal coherence which a particular cultural orientation provides. It is beyond the scope of this essay to delineate precisely the relationships of language and culture and psychological organization of mind to foster the gestalt and realissum that a cultural orientation provides, except to not that the nexus of these relationship is in the symbolic organization of cultural psychological reality. Symbolic functioning and behavior provides the key to understanding the ways that cultural orientations work and how these might be relative in relation to alternative or discrepant cultural realities. In brief, symbol systems as cultural systems of information are semi-determined, partially closed networks--integrated to such a degree that one such system cannot easily be merged with another system, unless critical changes in the internal organization of such systems are affected. In general, such systems tend to destructive displace or replace one another, as often as they tend to merge or amalgamate. The end product of such amalgamation appears to be a relative reduction in the degree of symbolic differentiation, and the emergence of a syncretic or hybrid version that combines at different levels symbolic elements from the alternate orientations.

We do not need to suffer a great deal of culture shock, or to review the history of cargo cult or revitalization movements which occur with radical acculturation, or to study the development of child acquisition or the anomalies of feral children, to realize that in a very basic way, culture and the anthropological realities this term encompasses are relative and we cannot escape the existentiality which this relativity entails.