Nearly 24 years ago, in his academic paper “Sows' Ears and Silver Linings: A Backward Look at Ethnography” (Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2000, pp. 169-189), respected cultural anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz wrote the following in response to printed comments from invited commentators:
“We anthropologists have a heritage of our own. Our predecessors not only told the world but also showed the world that all peoples are equal — equally human, equal in what they are, equal in what they have done for humankind. Nobody else at that time had said it and demonstrated it; anthropologists did. It does not befit us children of that enlightenment to turn our backs on the method that was used to make those ideas accessible to all of us” (p. 189).
Yes, equally human. But “equal in what they are?” What does that even mean? And “equal in what they have done for humankind?” Utter rubbish!
I can hardly think of a more corrupt view of the traditional anthropological notion of "cultural relativism" — to accurately capture the content and meaning of lifeways other than one's own requires describing and analyzing them from the perspective of those who uphold and cherish them — than its debased transformation into moral and cultural equivalence in 2000, as this rubbish from Mintz suggests.
Traditional, non-woke cultural relativism was born and most fully developed in my own discipline, cultural anthropology, in the early 20th century, its most benign and fully objective form — one I always tried to practice — being trying to understand and describe aliens lifeways from the viewpoint of its members, not an easy task, but not an impossible one, as countless ethnographies have shown.
This can and should be contrasted from a totally outsider description and explanation of the same culture, no contradiction of insider view even if it uses different knowledge tools and has a different set of goals.
The simplest example I can think of comes from Western culture: most ordinary “insiders” would classify tomatoes as a vegetable even though they are fruit from a botanical taxonomic perspective. Neither classification can be called right or wrong or better or worse because they are based on very different belief and knowledge systems having different goals.
Still, discovering both systems and their differences and making sure not to conflate the one with the other — a cardinal logical sin — is based on Western Enlightenment science, hence modernization’s overall superiority as a system of knowing compared to post-modernism, a distinction Maria Krylova correctly avoided discussing in the piece on the other side of the paywall but one still implicit in her analysis.
Cultural relativism’s traditional meaning, stemming from the ethnographic work of Franz Boas, founder of American cultural anthropology, and elaborated on by the late Marvin Harris, who borrowed the linguistic distinction between phonetics and phonemics to do so, carried no moral implications, only Western scientific ones. But it slowly became politically corrupted and logically absurd over the decades, as Krylova’s excellent essay suggests.
Leftist anthropologists like Sidney Mintz began throwing in the objective, scientific towel decades ago.Today this disdain for the search for objective truth based on the scientific method has corrupted the entire edifice of higher education.
This new version of moral and cultural relativism — now dominant in discussion of indigenous people across the world, but particularly in Canada— is nicely discussed by Krylova.
As Krylova shows, moral and cultural relativism have rejected objective truth, denigrated accomplishment and knowledge, and debased common sense. That doctrine now is ascendant throughout the West.
As she argues, attempts to counter it usually founder as agnostic or atheistic audiences scoff at the typically religious foundation of appeals to restore objectivity and truth. Can the issue be addressed in some other way? With the West’s descent from the “live and let live” tolerant relativism of the 60s and 70s, through 80s-90s political correctness, to the zealous and even violent imposed moralism of wokism, the matter is an urgent one.
Maria Krylova charts the evolution and interplay of the key ideas that got Western society where it is today, and advances a secular case for truth and objectivity.
Don’t miss reading this piece on the other side of my $5.00 a month paywall.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to REAL Indigenous Report to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.