Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

This lesson contains the hardest genuine dilemma in Part 2. Most of the concepts so far have been instruments. This one is a fork in the road, and both paths have a cliff.

Read it slowly. And notice that it does not end with a comfortable resolution, because there is not one available.

Three encounters.

One. A British administrator in nineteenth-century India records in his report that the local people are "fatalistic," that they lack ambition, that they eat with their hands and squat rather than sit, and that their religion is a mass of superstition. He is not lying about the observations. He has understood almost nothing, and he is writing the document on which policy will be based.

Two. An Indian graduate student in Europe, at a dinner, watches her hosts leave an elderly relative in a residential home and visit him twice a year. She is polite. Privately she is appalled: a society rich enough to do anything has decided that this is what one does with a father. Her hosts, if asked, would explain that he receives professional care, that he has his independence, and that they visit as often as they can. Both parties think the other has failed at something basic.

Three. An anthropologist studying a community discovers a practice that harms a specific category of people within it — a form of violence, or a bodily practice performed on children, or a rule that condemns some members to a life of servitude. The community's members, including some who suffer under it, defend it as their tradition. She has spent three years learning to see the world their way, and has argued in print against outsiders who judge them.

What should she write?

The first encounter is easy to name: the administrator judged everything by his own standards, and got the world wrong as a result. There is a word for that error and it is the first half of this lesson.

The second is harder, because it runs in both directions. Neither party is powerful over the other, and each is applying a genuine value — care through presence, or care through professional provision and independence — as though it were the only form care could take.

The third has no clean answer, and anyone who gives you one quickly is not thinking. If she condemns the practice, she risks becoming the administrator: an outsider applying her own yardstick to a life she does not live. If she withholds judgement, she is declining to name a harm that is falling on people who cannot escape it, and she is treating "the community's view" as though communities were unanimous, which 2.1.7 told you they never are.

That third case is the dilemma. Everything below is an attempt to think about it honestly.

The idea, in plain words

Note carefully what cultural relativism was originally: a research method, not a moral doctrine. It says: understand before judging. Whether it also says never judge is precisely the argument, and the two claims must be kept apart. We will call them methodological relativism and moral relativism, and the entire second half of this lesson depends on that distinction.

Ethnocentrism: not merely rudeness, but bad data

William Graham Sumner — the same 1906 book that gave us folkways (2.1.3) — coined the term. His account: each group takes itself as the centre, regards its own folkways as the only right ones, and looks with contempt on outsiders.

The reason this matters for sociology is not politeness. It is that ethnocentrism produces systematically wrong descriptions, and wrong descriptions produce wrong explanations and disastrous policy.

Four characteristic distortions:

Misreading function. A practice is described as irrational because the observer does not know what it accomplishes. Elaborate food rules look arbitrary until you know what they regulate. The village patron–client exchange of services — the jajmani system (6.2.9) — looks like inefficiency to someone who has not noticed it is an insurance arrangement.

Reading absence as deficiency. A society without a written constitution is described as having no law; a society without a market in land as having no property. It has different law and different property.

Inferring inferiority from difference. The whole nineteenth-century apparatus of "stages of civilisation" (3.3, 1.2.3, 1.4.3) rested on this move, and it produced a century of confident, wrong social science with real political consequences.

The double standard. Our violence is order; theirs is savagery. Our arranged introductions are networking; theirs are backward. Our inherited advantage is family; theirs is nepotism.

And the sharpest version of the critique is Edward Said's Orientalism (6.7): not merely that Western scholarship misdescribed the East, but that it produced an image of "the Orient" — sensual, despotic, static, irrational — that functioned as the West's flattering mirror and as a justification for ruling it. Ethnocentrism, in Said's account, is not a personal failing but an organised body of knowledge with institutions, careers and archives.

Note also that ethnocentrism is not a Western monopoly. Every group is prone to it, and the sociologically interesting cases are internal: caste contempt, regional chauvinism, urban descriptions of rural life, elite descriptions of the poor. Sumner's insight was general.

Cultural relativism: what it actually gets you

Relativism as a method is one of the great achievements of the human sciences, and it delivers three things.

Accurate description. You cannot describe a practice correctly until you know what it means to those doing it. This is Weber's verstehen (1.3.3, 4.3) applied to whole ways of life.

The denaturalising effect. Understanding another arrangement is the fastest available route to seeing your own as arbitrary (1.1.2). Relativism is therefore not merely generosity towards others; it is the instrument for studying yourself.

Protection against the double standard. Once you insist on symmetry — describing your own practices in the same vocabulary you use for others — a great deal of confident nonsense becomes visible. Miner's Nacirema (1.1.2) is this insistence turned into a joke.

Franz Boas and the tradition he founded in American anthropology made this central, in direct opposition to the ranked "stages" model then dominant. It is one of the clearest cases in intellectual history of a methodological rule improving both the science and the ethics of a field at once.

Consider three questions in ascending difficulty.

Is eating with the hands unhygienic? Easy. This is a folkway, the hygiene claim is empirically weak, and the disgust is entirely learned (1.1.3). Ethnocentrism is the only error available.

Is an arranged marriage a violation of individual freedom? Harder, and instructive. Notice first that the question smuggles in the theory of the person from 1.3.5. Notice second that "arranged marriage" covers an enormous range — from a family introduction with a veto, to a negotiated match with consent, to a marriage imposed on a fourteen-year-old. The relativist move that is correct here is to stop treating the category as one thing and to ask what varies: consent, age, exit, and who bears the cost of refusal (1.5.1's constraint analysis). The relativist move that is incorrect is to answer the question at the level of "their culture."

Is a practice that mutilates children defensible because it is traditional? Here relativism as a moral doctrine runs out, and it should. And notice what has actually happened when such practices have changed: the most effective challenges have generally come from within — from women's organisations, from members of the community, from people who could not be dismissed as outsiders. Which suggests that the choice between "condemn from outside" and "say nothing" was a false one all along.

Go deeper

The three problems with moral relativism

Methodological relativism is nearly unarguable. Moral relativism — the claim that no cross-cultural evaluation is legitimate because standards are internal to cultures — has three serious problems, and you should be able to state them.

One: cultures are not unanimous, so "their values" is a claim, not a fact. This is the most important objection and it follows directly from 2.1.7. Every society contains dissenters, reformers, and people who bear the cost of a practice and say so. When an outsider defers to "the culture's view," which view are they deferring to? Almost always the view of those with the authority to speak for the whole — which means moral relativism, applied naively, functions as a defence of internal power. Phule and Ambedkar were not outsiders to Indian society. Nor were the women's movements in any country.

Two: it is self-undermining. If all standards are culturally internal, then so is the standard of tolerance being urged, and it has no claim on anyone outside the culture that holds it. Consistent moral relativism cannot recommend tolerance; it can only report that some people value it.

Three: it makes solidarity unintelligible. It implies that no one can legitimately object to anything happening to anyone in a group other than their own — which would delegitimise most of the moral progress of the last two centuries, including abolition and the international human rights framework, and which sits very oddly with the fact that appeals across cultures have been how the oppressed have often found allies.

And the three problems with universalism

Fairness requires the other column, because the universalist position has failure modes just as serious.

One: universal standards have a habit of being local standards in a good suit. The historical record here is bad. "Civilisation," "development," "modernisation," "human rights" have each been used at some point to justify conquest, dispossession or coercion — the "civilising mission" and the "white man's burden" were universalist arguments (3.2, 6.7).

Two: it is selectively applied. Objections to another society's treatment of women, minorities or workers are frequently raised by states with poor records on the same, and against adversaries rather than allies. Selective universalism is a political instrument, and everyone on the receiving end can see it.

Three: it disables understanding. If you already know the practice is wrong, you will not do the work of finding out what it is, and you will therefore be ineffective at changing it. The reformer who understands least intervenes worst.

A workable position

Here is a defensible way to hold both, and it is roughly where most careful sociologists end up.

Separate the two operations, and always do them in this order. First, understand the practice as thoroughly as possible on its own terms — its meaning, its history, its function, who defends it and why. This is methodological relativism and it is not optional. Second, evaluate if you are going to, and do so explicitly, with your criteria stated, so they can be argued with.

Take internal dissent as your guide. Instead of asking "what does their culture say?", ask "who inside this arrangement bears its costs, and what do they say?" This single reframing dissolves most of the apparent dilemma, because it stops treating culture as a unanimous subject and starts treating it as a field of positions (2.1.7). It is also, incidentally, what standpoint theory recommends (7.1) and what participatory research does in practice (7.6).

Prefer criteria that travel. Some evaluative standards are less parochial than others because they concern conditions people in very different arrangements can recognise: whether a person can leave; whether they consented and could have refused without ruin; whether they have information; whether the harm is reversible; whether the burden falls on those with least power. Sen's capabilities framework (8.8) is one attempt to formalise this, and note the point of his approach — it asks what people are able to do and be, rather than prescribing what they should choose.

Be symmetrical. Apply the same criteria to your own society, and expect to find failures. A reformer who has never turned the lens homeward is not a universalist; they are an ethnocentrist with a vocabulary.

And distinguish describing, judging and intervening. They are three different acts with three different burdens of proof. You can accurately describe a practice, privately judge it, and still have no standing or competence to intervene in it. Collapsing the three is where most of the bad behaviour in this area comes from.

"Cultural relativism means anything goes." It means understand first. The moral version is a further, contestable claim, and 1.5.2's discipline applies: say which one you are asserting.

"Ethnocentrism is just rudeness." It is a source of systematically wrong data, and it has underwritten policy that ruined lives.

"Only Westerners are ethnocentric." Every group is. The internal cases — caste contempt, regional chauvinism, elite descriptions of the poor — are as important as the colonial ones.

"Their culture believes X." Cultures do not believe things; people do, and they disagree. Ask which people, with what authority to speak, and who is dissenting.

"Judging another society is always imperialism." Then no cross-border solidarity was ever legitimate. The real questions are: on what criteria, applied symmetrically, in alliance with whom, and by what means?

"Understanding a practice means approving of it." Explaining is not endorsing — 1.1.2 said this about denaturalisation and it holds here too. The best accounts of atrocities have been written by people who understood them thoroughly and condemned them precisely.

Why it matters

It is the discipline's central methodological commitment. Everything you will read in Part 6 — Indian, Latin American, African, Chinese and Islamic sociologies — exists because the discipline eventually took this lesson seriously about itself. Relativism as a method is what made a global sociology possible.

It is a live problem in every applied field. Public health, development, education, law, social work and journalism all require someone to decide when to defer to local practice and when not to. The programmes that fail are usually the ones that skipped the first operation.

And it is a personal tool. Applied inwards, this lesson is what makes 1.1.2's habit possible: you can only see your own arrangements as arbitrary by taking someone else's seriously. Ethnocentrism is not only unjust to others; it is the main thing standing between you and understanding yourself.

Ethnocentrism judges other cultures by one's own standards, producing systematically wrong descriptions — misread function, absence read as deficiency, difference read as inferiority, and the double standard. Said's Orientalism is the organised, institutional version. No group is exempt.

Cultural relativism began as a method: understand a practice in its own context before evaluating. It delivers accurate description, denaturalisation of your own arrangements, and protection against double standards (Boas; Weber's verstehen).

Distinguish methodological relativism (understand first — nearly unarguable) from moral relativism (never evaluate across cultures — contestable).

Moral relativism has three problems: cultures are not unanimous, so it defers to whoever speaks for the whole; it is self-undermining; and it makes cross-cultural solidarity unintelligible.

Universalism has three problems: local standards disguised as universal ones; selective application; and disabled understanding.

A workable position: understand first, then evaluate explicitly; take internal dissent as your guide; prefer criteria that travel (consent, exit, information, reversibility, who bears the cost — cf. Sen's capabilities); be symmetrical; and keep describing, judging and intervening apart.

Ethnocentrism — judging other cultures by the standards of one's own, treating it as the natural norm.

Cultural relativism — the principle that practices must be understood within their own cultural context.

Methodological relativism — the research rule of understanding before evaluating.

Moral relativism — the claim that evaluative standards are internal to cultures and cannot legitimately be applied across them.

Xenocentrism — the assumption that foreign practices are superior to one's own (2.1.9).

Verstehen — Weber's interpretive understanding of the meaning of action.

Orientalism — Said's analysis of Western scholarly production of "the East" as an inferior, exotic counterpart.

Double standard — describing the same practice favourably in one's own group and unfavourably in another.

Internal dissent — disagreement from within a community, especially by those bearing a practice's costs.

Capabilities approach — Sen's evaluative framework based on what people are actually able to do and be (8.8).

Standpoint — the position from which knowledge is produced, and which shapes what is visible (7.1).

One — the symmetry exercise. Write one paragraph criticising a practice in another society. Then write the same criticism, using the same criteria, about a practice in your own. If the second is harder to write, ask why.

Two — find the internal dissenters. Choose a practice in your own community that you have doubts about. Find out who inside the community has objected to it, and what happened to them. That research will teach you more than any position you could take from outside.

Three — the misread function. Identify one practice you have privately thought irrational. Try to work out what it accomplishes for the people doing it — what problem it solves, what risk it insures against, what relationship it maintains. You may still object to it; you will object to something real.

Four — the administrator's report. Write half a page describing your own household in the voice of encounter one: an outsider with no understanding and complete confidence. Then note which of the sentences a real observer might write about you.