A medical anthropologist studying traditional healing practices in a rural community carefully describes the healing ceremonies, the social roles they reinforce, and the meaning they carry for practitioners — before making any judgment about their biomedical efficacy. What principle is she applying?
AMoral relativism — the view that no external standards can evaluate the practice
BEthnocentrism — applying her own cultural standards to an outside practice
CMethodological relativism — temporarily suspending external standards in order to understand the practice on its own terms
DCultural universalism — the view that all cultures share common standards of evaluation
Methodological relativism is a research stance: you bracket your own evaluative standards temporarily to understand what a practice is doing from the inside — its internal logic, the problems it solves, the meanings it carries. The anthropologist has not concluded that the practice is medically equivalent to biomedicine (that would be moral relativism if immune from evaluation); she has deferred the evaluative question until she has enough information to answer it well. This is precisely Boas's corrective to ethnocentrism, which would involve applying biomedical standards before understanding the practice on its own terms.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
Why did Franz Boas develop the principle of cultural relativism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
ATo argue that Western culture was superior and should be used as the universal benchmark
BTo reject all moral standards as culturally relative and therefore inapplicable across societies
CAs a corrective to evolutionary rankings of cultures that placed Western society at the top and served colonial ideology
DTo establish that fieldwork was unnecessary since all cultures could be understood from available written records
Boas formulated cultural relativism in explicit opposition to 19th-century evolutionary anthropology, which ranked cultures from 'savage' to 'civilized' with Western European society conveniently at the top. This ranking naturalized colonial domination — framing conquest as progress and 'civilizing' as a moral duty. Boas showed the evidence did not support it: cultural variation was too complex and historically contingent to be ordered on a single linear scale. Cultural relativism was a methodological and political corrective, not a claim that no moral evaluation was ever possible.
Question 3 True / False
Cultural relativism, as practiced by professional anthropologists, means that moral criticism of practices in other cultures is rarely justified.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
This confuses methodological relativism with moral relativism. Cultural relativism as a methodological principle requires temporarily suspending evaluation to understand a practice within its own context — but it does not foreclose all moral judgment. Most anthropologists maintain that describing and understanding a practice before evaluating it is good methodology, not a permanent ethical commitment to non-judgment. The discipline actively debates where the limits of relativism lie, particularly regarding genocide, torture, and other potential human rights violations.
Question 4 True / False
Methodological relativism requires temporarily suspending your own cultural standards when studying another culture's practices in order to understand them accurately, not as a permanent endorsement of those practices.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is the core of methodological relativism as Boas formulated it: it is a research stance, not a final ethical verdict. The goal is to reconstruct the internal logic of a practice — what problems it solves, what meanings it carries, how it functions within its cultural system — before applying evaluative standards from outside. This sequencing (describe/understand, then evaluate) produces better analysis than premature judgment, which forecloses understanding by stopping inquiry. The evaluative question is deferred, not abandoned.
Question 5 Short Answer
What is the difference between methodological relativism and moral relativism, and why does the distinction matter for anthropology?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Methodological relativism is a research stance: suspend external standards temporarily to understand a practice from the inside. Moral relativism is the philosophical claim that no standards apply across cultures. Anthropologists practice the former without endorsing the latter.
The distinction matters because conflating them leads to two opposite errors. Treating methodological relativism as moral relativism produces the false conclusion that anthropology forbids all moral evaluation — that a researcher who suspends judgment to study female genital cutting has thereby endorsed it. This is wrong; suspension of judgment is an analytical tool. Conversely, abandoning methodological relativism in favor of premature evaluation produces the ethnocentrism Boas was correcting — imposing outside standards before understanding the practice on its own terms, which forecloses accurate description. The practical discipline is sequencing: understand fully, then evaluate with good information.