Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is an antonym for ethical or sociological universalism. While Universalist positions assume that there is only one universal ethics, or a sociological theory that applies to all people and situations of cultural relativism limits the use of certain ethical concepts and sociological categories on the culture that produced them, and holds at best a partial correspondence, but by no means a translation into the terms of another culture possible. He understood, however as an alternative to ethnomethodology. Cultural relativism is an important part of multiculturalism.
General
The cultural relativism tries to avoid ethnocentrism, looking at one's own culture as authoritative and classifies all other cultures in terms of one's own worldview and judged. It was created in response to the naturalistic thinking of the 19th century. The cultural relativism emphasizes a pluralism of cultures and posits that cultures can not be compared or evaluated from the perspective of another culture. Certain intra- cultural forms of behavior should always be seen in the light of the associated social, value system and cultural understanding.
Accordingly, cultural phenomena can be understood, assessed and considered only in their own context ( emic perspective ). At the same time this creates the problem that the cultural relativism values such as human rights are universal.
After Melford Spiro can distinguish three types of cultural relativism: the descriptive, the normative and epistemological.
Important representatives of cultural relativism are Julius Evola, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Ray Birdwhistell. Franz Boas, who made the cultural relativism to the central premise of cultural research, Spiro assigns the descriptive form.
Cultural relativist argument
Dealing with concepts such as " human rights" and "market economy" shows that these can be incorporated into non-Western cultural spaces without being rejected that but then can be interpreted kulturrelativistisch, so its normative content, the values of the local culture confirmed:
An interesting feature of the - often unconscious - application of semiotics to construct a cultural relativism argument is especially when it is used effectively in the discussion between representatives from different " cultures " and thus points to similarities in the discussion culture of the people.
Cultural relativism in the criticism
In the critique of cultural relativism is advised, because he, inter alia, requires, for example, deregister from the Islamic culture dating people that human rights do not need to consider because these are a product of Western culture, and therefore committed by Muslims human rights violations should not be denounced because it "racist ", " ethnocentric " and " Eurocentric " was.
This attitude is in turn denounced by others derived from the Islamic culture people (eg Bassam Tibi ). These lead to, for example, it was just racist to want because of the culture of origin ascribed to them by denying people the right to human rights.
In the Chinese cultural sphere, the cultural critic Bo Yang shaped the image of the " soy sauce barrel ", in the light coming from outside China cultural influences would keep loaded until they have adopted a unified Chinese tastes and lost their original core. He illustrated so that the Chinese, in his view, the assimilation of acquired concepts from other cultures.
On the philosophical level, it is argued against the cultural relativism that the " self-application " the claim of cultural relativism to universal acclaim nugatory: Finally, the cultural relativism itself is a standard that would be accepted only within a given culture, or, more precisely, within certain currents the "Western" culture. Of his own principles ago of cultural relativism must reject the universality of such a standard. Of his own principles ago of cultural relativism could make no claim to universal recognition. In the recent anthropology cultural relativism, therefore, was accused of being a self- ethnocentrism.