Cultural Relativism: Definition & Examples

Cultural relativism is the principle of regarding the beliefs, values, and practices of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself.

It states that there are no universal beliefs, and each culture must be understood in its own terms because cultures cannot be translated into terms that are accessible everywhere.

The principle is sometimes practiced to avoid cultural bias in research and to avoid judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture. For this reason, cultural relativism has been considered an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism.

Cultural Relativism refers to the ability to understand a culture on its own terms and consequently not make judgments based on the standards of one’s own culture.

Implications

From the cultural relativist perspective, no culture is superior to another when comparing their systems of morality, law, politics, etc.

This is because cultural norms and values, according to cultural relativism, derive their meaning within a specific social context.

Cultural relativism is also based on the idea that there is no absolute standard of good or evil. Thus, every decision and judgment of what is right or wrong is individually decided in each society.

As a result, any opinion on ethics is subject to the perspective of each person within their particular culture.

In practice, cultural relativists try to promote the understanding of cultural practices that are unfamiliar to other cultures, such as eating insects and sacrificial killing.

Types

There are two different categories of cultural relativism: absolute and critical. Absolute cultural relativists believe that outsiders must and should not question everything that happens within a culture.

Meanwhile, critical cultural relativism questions cultural practices regarding who is accepting them and why, as well as recognizing power relationships.

Cultural relativism challenges beliefs about the objectivity and universality of moral truth.

In effect, cultural relativism says that there is no such thing as universal truth and ethics; there are only various cultural codes. Moreover, the code of one culture has no special status but is merely one among many.

Assumptions

Cultural relativism has several different elements, and there is some disagreement as to what claims are true and pertinent to cultural relativism and which are not. Some claims include that:

1. Different societies have different moral codes;

2. There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one societal code as better than another;

3. The moral code of one’s own society has no special status but is merely one among many;

4. There is no “universal truth” in ethics, meaning that there are no moral truths that hold for all people at all times;

5. The moral code of a society determines what is right and wrong within that society; that is, if the moral code of a society says that a certain action is right, then that action is right, at least within that society and;

6. It is arrogant for people to attempt to judge the conduct of other people. Instead, researchers should adopt an attitude of tolerance toward the practices of other cultures.

Illustrative Examples

Food Choices

Cultural relativism does not merely relate to morality and ethics. Cultural relativism, for example, explains why certain cultures eat different foods at different meals.

For example, breakfast in the United States traditionally looks very different from breakfast in Japan or Colombia. One might involve scrambled eggs and pancakes, while another involves rice and soup, or white cheese on a corn arepa.

The dishes could not be more different.

Cultural relativists want to understand these differences, not to rank them. The goal is description, not judging one meal as better than another (Bian & Markman, 2020).

Mental Illness

One of the biggest controversies concerning classification and diagnosis is that the ICD (the manuals of mental disorders) is culturally biased. It was drawn up and is used mainly by white, middle-class men, so it tends to apply definitions of abnormality that are irrelevant to other cultures.

The bias runs deep.

For example, Davison & Neale (1994) explain that in Asian cultures, a person experiencing emotional turmoil is praised and rewarded for showing no expression of their emotions.

In certain Arabic cultures, however, the outpouring of public emotion is understood and often encouraged. An individual displaying overt emotional behavior in the West may be labelled abnormal. It is not, in that context.

Cross-cultural misunderstandings are common. They can contribute to unfair and discriminatory treatment of minorities, such as the high diagnosis rate of schizophrenia among non-white British people.

Cochrane (1977) reported that just 1% of people in the West Indies and the UK are diagnosed with schizophrenia. Afro-Caribbean people living in the UK, however, are seven times more likely to receive that diagnosis.

Hygienic Rituals

Another phenomenon explained by cultural relativism is hygienic rituals. Different cultures may use different modes or methods of disposing of waste and cleaning up afterward.

Ritualized ablution, or washing, also differs across cultures. Catholics may dip their fingers into blessed water and anoint themselves at church, and Jewish people may pour water over their hands in a specific way during Shabbat.

Although toilet and washing practices vary drastically across cultures, cultural relativists seek to describe these differences, noting that what is customary to culture is not necessarily “right” or “wrong.”

Cultural vs. Moral Relativism

How They Differ

Cultural relativism is a claim anthropologists make about how ethical practices differ across cultures. It can be tested by studying how different societies actually behave.

Many sociologists and anthropologists have done this work. Their studies have led to widespread agreement among social scientists that cultural relativism is a real phenomenon (Bowie, 2015).

Moral relativism goes further. It claims that what is really right or wrong is simply whatever a culture says is right or wrong.

If a culture sincerely and reflectively adopts a moral principle, moral relativists believe its members are obligated to act on it (Bowie, 2015). Someone must follow the norms of wherever they live.

Both positions start from the same observation: moral codes vary by culture. They disagree only on how far that variation should count as a decisive argument.

Example: Is Bribery Wrong?

Take the question of bribing government officials. A moral relativist looks for the answer in local norms around bureaucracy.

If bribery is common practice, a moral relativist would call it acceptable there. Where it is not the norm, offering a bribe would count as morally wrong.

A cultural relativist takes a lighter position. Bribery may be an ethical norm within the cultures that practice it, without being right or wrong in any deeper sense (Bowie, 2015).

The two positions can reach the same real-world verdict for different reasons. A moral relativist calls bribery acceptable because the local norm makes it so; a cultural relativist simply declines to judge it by any outside standard at all.

Neither position tells the official what to do next.

Cultural Relativism vs. Ethnocentrism

What Is Ethnocentrism?

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world largely from the perspective of one’s own culture.

Triandis (1990) defines it as the tendency to use one’s own ethnic or cultural group’s norms to decide what is “natural” and “correct” for everyone.

This may be motivated by the belief that one’s own race, ethnic, or cultural group is the most important, or that its culture is superior to others.

Ethnocentrism can lead to incorrect assumptions about other people’s behavior, based only on one’s own norms and beliefs (Worthy, Lavigne, & Romero, 2020).

Cultural relativism takes the opposite stance. It values a culture’s practices from that culture’s own point of view, rather than judging them by outside assumptions.

Both concepts describe the same underlying tendency: treating one’s own culture as the default against which every other culture gets measured.

Example: Hand-Holding Across Cultures

Cultural relativism counters ethnocentrism by promoting understanding of unfamiliar practices. In India, for example, it is common for friends of the same sex to hold hands while walking in public.

In the United Kingdom, by contrast, hand-holding is largely limited to romantic couples and often implies a sexual relationship.

An ethnocentric view might read this foreign practice as immoral, simply because it looks unfamiliar (Worthy, Lavigne, & Romero, 2020). A relativist view asks what it means locally instead.

Neither gesture is inherently right or wrong. What differs is the shared meaning a community has built around it, which is exactly the kind of local meaning cultural relativism asks researchers to take seriously.

Context, not the act itself, decides what it means.

Critical Evaluation

Cultural relativism has been criticized for both theoretical and practical reasons, but it also has real defenders. The sections below weigh the main arguments on each side.

Theoretical Criticisms

Kanarek (2013) raises two objections. First, the premise that all cultures are valid in their own customs is vague: it never says how “valid” should actually be judged.

Second, Kanarek argues cultural relativism has contradictory logic. It treats social facts as both true and untrue, depending only on which culture is doing the judging.

Despite its advantages below, relativism can also fuel personal bias. People tend to prefer others who think like them, pulling society into separate neighborhoods, communities, and groups who rarely question their own outlook.

When people are free to define their own moral code, they can act on that bias at other people’s expense (Kanarek, 2013).

Neither objection denies that cultural relativism is real. Both just question how far its logic can be pushed.

Practical Strengths

Despite these objections, cultural relativism has real advantages. Each rests on treating a culture’s own standards as legitimate, rather than measuring it against an outside norm.

• Cooperation: embracing different upbringings and perspectives, instead of ranking them, lets people pursue stronger bonds and achieve more without a ceiling imposed from outside (Kanarek, 2013).
• Equality: letting each person define their own moral code, without defining anyone else’s, creates equality across cultures (Kanarek, 2013).
• Preserving culture: people can build a personal moral code from their own society’s standards, without checking it against an outside idea of right and wrong.
• Less conformity pressure: relativism is credited with reducing the pull to match one’s attitudes and beliefs to those around oneself (Kanarek, 2013).

Taken together, these strengths help people understand a culture on its own terms and build relationships that respect other ways of life (Worthy, Lavigne, & Romero, 2020).

Ethical Limits

Relativism has real limits, though. Treating every practice as valid simply because it is customary can excuse serious, measurable harm.

Infibulation is the sharpest test case. Understood from inside the culture that practises it, it can function as a valued rite of passage into adult womanhood.

From a human-rights and health standpoint, though, it causes severe and lasting physical and psychological harm. A relativism strict enough to withhold judgment here starts to look less like caution and more like an excuse.

Most researchers scope relativism instead of abandoning it. Understanding why a practice exists is one question; whether it should be defended or changed is a separate one.

This is where relativism does its most damage, if the two questions get collapsed into one.

Does Relativism Undermine Science?

A purely relativistic view, stressing the uniqueness of every culture, makes cross-cultural comparison difficult. Pushed far enough, it threatens the very possibility of a general psychological science.

One finding keeps recurring across cross-cultural research: secure attachment is the most common pattern in every culture studied (van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988). A strict relativist has no room for that.

Cross-cultural psychologists have not abandoned the search for universals, however.

Most now work from a middle position: basic psychological processes are treated as common to the species, while their expression is shaped by culture.

That approach keeps comparison possible without pretending every culture is identical. It also explains why researchers keep testing the same question in new populations, rather than concluding it is unanswerable.

Contemporary Research

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan (2010) argued that psychology draws sweeping conclusions about “human” behavior from samples that are among the least representative populations available for generalizing about the species.

Rad, Martingano and Ginges (2018) tested how far the field had actually changed.

They coded every empirical article in Psychological Science from 2014 (223 articles, 450 samples) for where participants came from.

The results were stark.

Roughly 94% of the samples were Western, and 51% were American alone. Most abstracts gave no population information at all.

Most studies never discussed culture as a possible limit on their findings.

A partial follow-up brings some good news. Thalmayer, Toscanelli and Arnett (2021) found the US share of samples and authors in leading journals had fallen from over 70% to just over 60% within a decade.

Even so, 89% of the world’s population remained effectively unstudied.

This is the imposed-etic problem cultural relativism responds to, playing out at the scale of an entire discipline.

References

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Cochrane, R. (1977). Mental illness in immigrants to England and Wales: an analysis of mental hospital admissions, 1971. Social psychiatry, 12 (1), 25-35.

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