908 cultural relativism REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Alexander, M. J. & Mohanty, C. (1997) Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. Routledge, New York. Alhassan, A. (2005) Market Valorization in Broadcasting Policy in Ghana: Abandoning the Quest for Media Democratization. Media, Culture, and Society 27(2): 211. Antonazzo, M. (2003) Problems with Criminalizing Female Genital Cutting. Peace Review 15(4): 471. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York. Busia, A. (1993) Performance, Transcription, and the Languages of the Self: Interrogating Identity as a Post-Colonial Poet. In: James, S. & Busia, A. (Eds.), Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. Routledge, New York. Churchill, W. (1997) A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas, 1492 to Present. City Lights Books, San Francisco. Ferguson, R., Gever, M., Minh-ha, T., & West, C. (1990) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Minh-ha, T. (1989) Woman Native Other. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Ritzer, G. & Ryan, M. (2002) The Globalization of Nothing. Social Thought and Research 25(12): 51. Rothkopf, D. (1997) In Praise of Cultural Imperialism? Foreign Policy 107: 38. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. Vintage, New York. Shohat, E. (1998) Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. UNESCO (1980) Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Poole. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2005) Remote Control: The Rise of Electronic Cultural Policy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597: 122.

cultural relativism
Bernd Weiler Cultural relativism, a highly complex doctrine surrounded by various epistemological, political, and ethical controversies, can be broadly defined as the view that culture is the key

variable to explain human diversity and that an individuals behavior, thought, emotion, perception, and sensation are relative to and bound by the culture of the group he or she belongs to. Within this frame of thought, culture is usually conceptualized as a holistic, historically grown entity with distinctive features and clear-cut boundaries. The period of enculturation during early childhood is regarded as crucial. The autonomy of the individual is seen as more or less negligible, intragroup differences are usually minimized, and intergroup differences maximized. In the history of ideas, the emphasis on the cultural diversity, the cultural relativity, and boundedness of human experience has often been linked to and, at times, conflated with normative relativism, holding that all cultures are of the same worth and that an individuals ethical behavior ought to be judged in terms of the values of his or her culture (cf. Spiro 1986). Cultural relativist arguments have also often been employed to support moral skepticism and to criticize the values of ones own culture. Michel de Montaignes (153392) famous essay Of Cannibals might serve as a famous example of the argumentative intertwining of the descriptive and the moral aspect of cultural relativism. The cultural relativist stance is opposed to the universalist position according to which the cultural context is irrelevant to the concepts of truth, beauty, goodness, justice, and so on. It is also opposed to other forms of relativism, such as biological or racial relativism, which holds that differences between groups are due to differences in innate endowments. Analytically, the various forms of cultural relativist arguments can be distinguished along the two dimensions of extent and intensity. In its broadest form, cultural relativism extends to all manifestations of human existence. In this context even truth is regarded as a local and culture-bound phenomenon, a position known as epistemological or cognitive relativism. In its narrow form, cultural relativists argue that culture is relevant only to certain aspects of human life (e.g., aesthetics and ethics) and irrelevant to others (e.g., knowledge). With regard to the dimension of intensity, one can distinguish between those cultural relativists who argue that culture is the sole explanans versus those who hold that culture is a significant explanans

cultural relativism of human thought, emotion, volition, and so on. In its broadest and most intense version, radical cultural relativism, a position favored today by some postmodernist thinkers, can be seen as a form of group solipsism beset with the various methodological difficulties and inconsistencies associated by R. K. Merton with the doctrine of insiderism (cf. Merton 1972). Cultural relativist patterns of argumentation have been a constant feature of social analysis and criticism in the intellectual history of the West since the days of the founding fathers of ethnography, Hecataeus of Miletus and Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Modern-day cultural relativism, an intellectual twin of historicism, can be traced back to the eighteenth-century critical appraisal and partial rejection of the Enlightenments over-rationalistic and atomistic picture of the human being and its progressivist conception of history. Opposing the stage theories of civilizational development, the thinkers of the so-called Counter-Enlightenment, ser, and Herder, argued most notably Vico, Mo that every historical period and every culture has to be understood as an end in itself and as intrinsically valuable. The German American cultural anthropologist Franz Boas and his students (e.g., A. L. Kroeber, R. H. Lowie, E. Sapir, R. Benedict, M. Herskovits, and M. Mead), the scholars most often associated with the doctrine of cultural relativism in the twentieth century, can be seen as the heirs to this Counter-Enlightenments emphasis on the uniqueness of each culture. By criticizing simultaneously unilineal theories of social evolutionism, racial relativist explanations of cultural differences, and the axiological relativism vy-Bruhls prelogical mentality, Boas a ` la Le and his school contributed decisively to the contemporary relativistic and pluralistic concept of culture (cf. Stocking 1982 [1968]). The epistemological and moral issues associated with cultural relativism have been hotly debated within and without anthropology throughout the twentieth century. Identifying a number of human universals, critics argued that there existed a common denominator of cultures and that the diversity of cultural forms was limited by the psycho-physical constitution of humans (e.g., B. Malinowski), the external environmental constraints (e.g., M. Harris), and/or the possible number of

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functional relations and logical combinations of societys subsystems (e.g., G. P. Murdock). With regard to the moral questions, it was above all the human rights movement, arising in the aftermath of World War II, that severely challenged and undermined cultural relativist thinking. If one contextualizes the cultural relativism of the early twentieth century, however, it is important to note that to the first generation of professional anthropologists cultural relativism was not so much a codified doctrine and an epistemological position as part of the attitudinal tool kit when working in the field. As such, it amounted to a liberal-minded plea for tolerance, implying the postulate to rid oneself of ones own cultural prejudices, to suspend moral judgments, and to approach strange cultural values as objectively as possible. This legacy still deserves attention as even today a certain dose of cultural relativism might be a good, if not the best, medicine against the universal disease of ethnocentrism. SEE ALSO: Boas, Franz; Ethnocentrism; Eurocentrism; Progress, Idea of; Sumner, William G.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Benedict, R. (1989 [1934]) Patterns of Culture. Houghton-Mifflin, Boston. Boas, F. (1963 [1938]) The Mind of Primitive Man, rev. edn with a new foreword by M. J. Herskovits. Free Press, New York. Geertz, C. (1984) Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism. American Anthropologist n.s. 86: 26378. Herskovits, M. J. (1948) Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology. Knopf, New York. Herskovits, M. J. (1972) Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism. Random House, New York. Hollis, M. & Lukes, S. (Eds.) (1982) Rationality and Relativism. Blackwell, Oxford. vy-Bruhl, L. (1984 [1926]) How Natives Think. Le George Allen & Unwin, London. Merton, R. (1972) Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge. American Journal of Sociology 78(1): 947. Murdock, G. P. (1945) The Common Denominator of Cultures. In: Linton, R. (Ed.), The Science of

910 cultural reproduction

Man in the World Crisis. Columbia University Press, New York. Rudolf, W. (1968) Der kulturelle Relativismus: kritische Analyse einer Grundsatzfragen-Diskussion in der amerikanischen Ethnologie. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin. Spiro, M. E. (1986) Cultural Relativism and the Future of Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology 1 (3): 25986. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1982 [1968]) Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective. In: Stocking, G. W., Jr. (Ed.), Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 195233. Sumner, W. G. (1906) Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. Ginn, Boston. Tilley, J. J. (2000) Cultural Relativism. Human Rights Quarterly 22: 50147. Winch, P. (1988 [1958]) The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. Routledge, London.

cultural reproduction
Adrian Franklin Cultural reproduction is frequently considered to describe how cultural forms (e.g., social inequality, privilege, elite status, ethnicity) and cultures themselves are transmitted intact, from one generation to another. This idea emanates strongly from original work by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s on the role of the education process in reproducing class inequality and from such ethnographic classics as Paul Williss Learning to Labour (1977) that showed how inequality could be reproduced culturally despite the best efforts of a benevolent education system. However, subsequent work on the concept of culture suggests that a concentration on class reproduction implies a very restricted sense of the term reproduction, and that more significant dimensions of reproduction inhere in the idea of culture itself ( Jenks 1993). Indeed, Jenks shows how cultural reproduction lies at the heart of more traditions of sociology than Marxism and neo-Marxism. The word culture derives from the notion of growth and development and does not imply stasis or repetition. Williams (1981) shows how

by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the word had itself grown to mean not only husbandry but also human development, specifically the cultivation of aptitude and understanding or, in other words, cultural capital or change. Critically, it remained only a verb until the nineteenth century. Another way of looking at this is suggested by Jenks, who argues that the idea of culture emerged from the noun process, in the sense of nurture, growth, and bringing into being in fact to cultivate in an agricultural or horticultural sense. Culture as process is emergent, it is forthcoming, it is continuous in the way of reproducing and as in all social processes it provides the grounds and parallel context of social action itself ( Jenks 1993: 1). Drawing on definitions of culture from anthropologists, Jenks suggests that culture embodies the idea of accumulated resources (material and immaterial) that a community might employ, change, and pass on. Essentially it is the socially learned behavior and the shared symbolism of a community: it reveals and structures, empowers and constrains. The problem with cultural reproduction as Jenks sees it also concerns a restricted sense of the term reproduction. The tendency within Marxist traditions of sociology has been to see reproduction phenotypically. In this, reproduction is restricted negatively to repetition, to the copy or, in a weaker sense, to imitation or likeness. As replication it implies a metaphor of restraint or the restriction on choice, and here of course is where ideology, state apparatuses, and symbolic violence are deployed in Marxian terms. However, reproduction also has the genotypical sense of excitement, positivity, and vibrancy as is implied in the newness of sexual and biological reproduction. Here the image changes to one of generation rather than repetition, of change and new combinations, innovation and creativity. Jenks argues that in several traditions of sociology there is an implicit sense of a more positive form of cultural reproduction. In Durkheims work the challenge of cultural reproduction was to search for the appropriate collective credo that will ensure the reproduction of solidarity in the face of change ( Jenks 1993: 8). In other words, for Durkheim, it is a