Cultural Relativism vs. Ethnocentism - which is more...

To view one’s own culture as the universal by which all others are judged would be ultimately subjective, as our perceptions of cultural differences are shaped largely by our immersion in our own culture. An ethnocentric approach stems from judging an alternate culture in relation to one’s own pre-conceived cultural values, held to be superior; the parallax phenomenon, the inability to escape our own biases, prevents objective analysis of different cultures. A cultural relativist maintains the post-modernist view that there is no moral or cultural high-ground with which to judge one culture in relation to another, thus each culture must be understood from its own perspective, and within its own context. Some practices may appear bizarre†¦show more content†¦This view would be essentially subjective, as it relies upon the biases of the observer; the judgement is superficial and does not require any further understanding of the context of the Trobriand’s f ears. From a cultural relativist’s perspective, the subject requires contextual understanding before judgement. The Islanders’ history of attack from rival Dobu islanders with a propensity for cannibalism caused Trobriand society to maintain powerful political controls to protect the society from outside infiltration (Glass, 1988, p57). Rigid controls on bodily hair and gender segregation, although strange to a Western observer, are just symptoms of a society’s survival mechanisms. Through relativism, logical and objective deductions can be made about practices that would be seemingly inferior from a partisan, ethnocentric viewpoint. The radical implication of cultural relativism is that every cultural practice or belief requires an attempt to understand it from a sympathetic perspective, no matter how abhorrent the practice may seem (Greenwood amp; Stini, 1977, p182, as cited in Schultz amp; Lavenda, 2005, p25). However, relativistic thinking does not give free licence and acceptance to all practices; for example, female genital mutilation. There are boundaries drawn by cross-cultural universal values that require an observer to question why a cultural group practices