Cultural Relativism

Brad · August 18, 2002, 9:55am

the-tls.co.uk/this_week/stor … y_id=19513

I remember talking to Samoan guy in Japan. The fastest way to piss him off was to mention Margaret Mead.

I have no interest in Cultural Relativism (I find it incoherent precisely for the reasons mentioned in this article) but at the same time I do think we need to understand different cultures on their own terms before we blanketly condemn them. I see Cultural Relativism as the flip side of Western Imperialism. We’re not as good as we thought we were, so instead of putting ourselves on a pedastal, we put someone else there. The advantage to this is that ‘we’ becomes the we who condemn the West thereby keeping our Western arrogance intact without having to accept responsibility for Western atrocity. At the same time, when we put someone else on the pedastal, we can be shockingly blind to atrocities committed by them. It’s just us and them all over again.

From the text:

The image of a lost world of wise, peace-loving artists in harmony with the natural world is the invention of Western intellectuals disgruntled with the civilization that makes their lives so easy. In reality, many primitive societies were not only homicidal but also impressively eco-cidal. The Maoris, for example, managed, despite their relatively small numbers, to wipe out about 30 per cent of the indigenous species, including all twelve kinds of Moa, within a century of their arrival in an edenic New Zealand. This took place against the usual background of incessant tribal warfare, and a brutally unfair legal system which was reformed only when, as a result of a series of deals with the white settlers, which benefited the chiefs but not their people, the Maoris were marginalized in their own land and came under European law.

Such facts cut little ice with those who have the strength to dream. The career of Margaret Mead is illustrative. Her journalistic transformations of scanty field notes into a Polynesian idyll supported her fantasies of how human life would be if unshackled by the constraints of civic society. Coming of Age in Samoa , Sandall argues, was particularly persuasive in the Greenwich Village community where Mead had first hoped to make her name as a writer: it “resonated” with this avant-garde culture, where living for the moment, sexual liberation and the sovereignty of self-expression were the dominant ideas. No wonder she by-passed awkward truths about Samoa; such as the practice of enslavement, human sacrifice and eating prisoners, all routine before they were stamped out in the nineteenth century by governments working in close alliance with Christian missionaries.

Imagistar · August 21, 2002, 12:43am

Thanks for the link.

There will always be a segment of the population that defines itself by what it is against rather than what it is for.

When I was 10, I thought my Father was God; when I was 15, I thought he was the devil; when I was 25, I saw him for what he was: an extremely perceptive, restrained and magnanimous individual who was subject to occasional fits of exasperation, most of them triggered by me.

We go from dependence to independence to interdependence.

The “Western bashers” you describe are stuck in the independence stage. They are rebels. Intellectually, they may be mature, but psychologically, they are teenagers.

Rebels do not hate the West. After all, what do they know about it? What they really hate is their tendency to depend on the West. This phenomenon is readily observable in teenagers, who hate their parents for their inclination to need them.

Concerning Mead: I don’t know anybody who takes her seriously anymore. At the end of the day, she substituted advocacy for scholarship.

Brad · August 21, 2002, 12:59am

Well said. Intelligence does not equal maturity.

modemgum · August 28, 2002, 5:15am

Now a days, it is normal for people to doubt or not to trust that easily, wherein media is so widespread, that violence is seen on TV every second of every day leading to the influence towards people’s view on society as a whole. So unless the doubting of people, in terms of socialogical, psychological and interpersonal relationships, does not reach its extremes, such as paranoia or narcsism, then I can say cultural relativism is not such a bad thing.

Brad · August 28, 2002, 10:00am

Uh, well, the point was that it was an impossible thing. Don’t confuse cultural relativism with opposition. I see nothing wrong with that.