Analysing culture: Respect

Ethnocentrism: Issues for a (cientific) analysis of culture

Studying cultures as "a particular collective mind set of a particular social group", has an issue. If each person belong to a culture, their own mind set, so does the person who is studying cultures. That means you could try to measuring other culture with your own cultural values, and that wouldn't be objective neither cientific. Measure cultures with your own cultural values doesn't help you to understand others, because different cultures have different goals in life. Doing that, you only get an obvious and selfish conclusion: your culture is the best and you are the best person under your own rules! That has no sense and is called ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism is not only for those who research cultures, that happen too with everyone who has to face others cultures. In some sense, ethnocentrism is useful to keep coherency with your own culture (if people don't feel comfotable in their own culture, there is a problem, right?). But too much ethnocentrism conduce to racism and xenophobia. But often just give us more simple problems or tons of headache. As happened with WHO (World Health Organization), when they tried to vaccinate african people for first time. African parents avoided vaccinate their sons because bacteria and virus weren't part of their cultural explanation of illness and disease. Furthermore they who had done it, had experienced fever and other symptoms. Even some thought that whites were trying to kill them. Ethnocentrism made that WHO thinks western medicine had the same status in Africa than within western societies as European, Australian or USA. While africans response was rational - because in their experience nothing good had come from white people- WHO blamed unrational response and ignorance. Result: Failure. A failure that could be avoid from cultural relativism perspective.

Cultural relativism

One solution is given by historic particularism. Following this thought- basis of culturalism-, the key concept is cultural relativism. That means to analyze a culture we have to do it in their own frame, considering all their elements and how their interact. Each culture has their own context and history and it cannot be compare with others without pay attention to this frame. Every culture can only be interpreted in their own context that allow us to a cientific approach and reduce (but not delete) researcher bias.

In that way we can explain why !Kung in subsaharian Africa still practice "hunting and gathering" despite know agricultural technics. If we put their economy in their context (environment) we can see that Kalahari desert is not a place for agriculture. Following Howell and Lee calculations, to get the health and diet that !Kung already have, they only must work 3 hours per day while their agricultural neighbors have to do it for 10 hours and  have worse health. Who is more efficient? However Namibia and Botswana governments have put pressure to make them change their lifestyle and making them work more, forcing to adopt agriculture and cattle farming. Today !Kung have to face poverty and social issues.

Relativism problems

In many regions in Africa and Asia there is a islamic branch that used to practice female circumcision, which is clitoris mutilation when women reach adult age (that could be 12 years old). This means women have to face this painful tradition because the social beliefs of clitoris is a masculine feature that has to be eliminated. Just because is a cultural practice, their practioners accuse their detractor to be ethnocentric and defend their position basis on culture, despite the brutal torture.

Another example was south african apartheid. Where M.W. Eiselen used cultural relativism to justify social segregation between whites and blacks. His position was apartheid (segregation) protects cultural identity and integrity of africans cultures, where weren't desirable their westernization, because could cause social desintegration.

Does relativism applies to those situations?

Possible dilema solution

First we have to understand cultural relativism is an analysis tool to get a deeper understanding inside a context but not justify any practice just because is a cultural traditions. Often happens that after an analysis we get a contradiction. And that is what happen in the first case. Women are not agree but they cannot avoid it because they live in a masculine culture and have no power to change it. Nevertheless some changes have come. Same happen in the second case, when apartheid was abolished.

Justify hastily and without context a practice just because belong to a cultural tradition is bad as ethnocentrism and is not cultural relativism but moral relativism. Culture allows human adaptation because is dinamic, change across the time. That means is no argument to defend any behavior, but as a system, as a context. Cultural relativism doesn't forbid us to get an opinion, after deep analysis, and want some change.

Ferraro y Andriatta, 2010, Cultural Anthropology: An Applied Perspective.
Harris M. Cultural Anthropology
Kuper A. 2001, Culture: Anthropologist' Account