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Anthropology · Chapter 3

Judge It Two Ways

Meet an unfamiliar practice and something happens before you can stop it: you compare it with your own way of doing things and a verdict arrives. Franz Boas argued that a practice has to be understood in terms of its own culture’s history, ecology and meanings before anyone renders that verdict. So do it deliberately. Pick a practice, read your first reaction through lens ①, then widen to lens ② and watch the context come into view.

The two lenses

What the context supplies

Pick a practicethen judge it twice

Six unfamiliar practices

Judged both ways0 of 6

Keep these straight

Ethnocentrism — judging another culture by the standards of your own, as though yours were the natural measure. Everyone starts here. The mistake is not having the reaction; it is stopping there.

Cultural relativism — Boas’s method: explain a practice by its own culture’s history, environment and meanings first.

Emic is the account insiders give of what they are doing. Etic is the outside analyst’s account. A full answer usually needs both, and they do not always agree.
Relativism has a limit, and it is a real one. Cultural relativism is a method for understanding, not a rule that every practice is equally good. Anthropologists separate methodological relativism — suspend the verdict while you learn — from moral relativism, which would forbid the verdict forever. The American Anthropological Association declined to endorse the draft Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947 on relativist grounds, then adopted its own Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights in 1999. Working out why a practice makes sense to the people who do it, and deciding whether it harms anyone, are two different operations. Lens ② is the first one. It does not excuse you from the second.