On Michael Brown: “Cultural Relativism 2.0”

Abstract

With his usual incisive intelligence, Michael Brown (2008) has stated very well the current plight of cultural relativism as an idea. Indeed, anthropologists are rather widely tarred with the idea that they have no morals—that they hold (along with Herodotus’s rather apocryphal King of Persia) that anything goes if it is “custom,” even cannibalism. Brown differentiates moral relativism from methodological relativism, or what I have always called analytic relativism: looking as objectively as possible at different institutions, with a desire to understand them in context rather than to grade them on a scale or judge them. This is opposed to the tradition of evaluating other societies by how close they are to one’s own, as in old-fashioned cultural evolutionism, or the various definitions of “science” that go to considerable lengths in an attempt to include all western science while excluding all the rest (e.g., Wolpert 1993). One thinks also of the various attempts to define “humanity” by listing things that humans do not share with chimpanzees. Moral relativism is a different thing. Possibly in need of more attention is the fact that moral relativism is itself a moral position. More accurately, it is two moral positions. First is ordinary tolerance. This is basically what the Boasians usually meant. (Boas, and probably most of his students, added a more self-consciously Kantian dedication to respect for the individual and for human rights in the Enlightenment sense.) Specifically, they meant that “we” (whoever “we” are) should not condemn “them” just for being different from us, nor should we condemn others’ customs simply because they are different or unfamiliar. That this was not meant as “anything goes” is shown by Boas’s own intensely moral leadership in attacking racism, defending local traditions and minority groups, and criticizing anthropologists who served as spies in World War I. Most of the Boasians were actively involved in politics, especially to defend indigenous peoples. (They did not do this perfectly, as many indigenous people now point out cogently, but at least they tried.) As I understand it, their hope was usually to construct a universal human ethic—not to impose western ethics on everyone. Whether they were successful in this is another question. Second is the postcolonial version that now seems to have taken over much of the semantic space of “moral relativism.” This version holds that national and ethnic rules are not to