Revision summary
Cultural relativism asks that meaning be read inside a culture, against racial ranking. Boas and Herskovits are the canonical names. As method it blocks ethnocentrism; as absolute ethics it can protect domination. Parekh and Kymlicka keep culture with exit and equality. Indian minority rights sit beside Article 17, which relativism cannot erase.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Cultural relativism holds that practices and values must be understood inside the culture that gives them meaning. It was a reply to ranking peoples on a single civilisational ladder.
Body
The claim
- Franz Boas rejected racial hierarchy and insisted that each culture is a historical whole, not a delayed copy of Europe.
- Melville Herskovits stated cultural relativism as a method and, more strongly, as a moral warning against ethnocentric reform.
- The American Anthropological Association’s 1947 statement on human rights used this warning against a premature universal code.
- In political theory the idea challenges a single list of rights taken from Locke or Mill as if it were nature.
Politics and limit
- Relativism is a research discipline: do not judge before you can describe.
- As a political doctrine it can shield caste, gender violence, or authoritarian custom from Ambedkar’s civil equality and from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- Bhikhu Parekh and Will Kymlicka keep cultural context without surrendering exit, sex equality, and a public law of the state.
- Indian Articles 25 to 30 protect culture; Article 17 and Part III still bind custom. Relativism cannot cancel that hierarchy of norms.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD CR[Cultural relativism] --> B[Boas historical cultures] CR --> H[Herskovits anti-ethnocentrism] CR --> L[Limit: rights and Article 17] U[Universal rights] --> ARG[Public argument]
Conclusion
Cultural relativism, after Boas and Herskovits, is a method against ethnocentrism. It is not a veto on human rights or on Ambedkar’s attack on caste. Description first, then a public argument about which harms a state may forbid.
Quick related
Students also ask
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"Revolution in Permanence".
Next question on this syllabus topic (2022 · Q1(c)). View answer →
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Does relativism mean that all cultures are equally just?
No. It means they are equally entitled to be understood. Justice is a further argument.
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Is it the same as multiculturalism?
Multiculturalism is a citizenship policy. Relativism is a method and a moral caution that multicultural policy may use.
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