Battening down the hatches for the possibly two typhoons on their way, I've gotten quite confused about what we are arguing about. Looking back, my problem is that wj's first comment seemed to take in the common conservative trope of cultural relativism = fuzzy liberal thinking of anything goes. nous pointed out that for undergraduates, you often have to pound into their heads the fact that _everyone_ carries a lot of prejudices and it is hard work separating oneself from them. Getting them over that hurdle is job 1, but some people take it (or possibly more accurately lampoon it) as all there is.
As Russell notes, humans have a long history of doing shitty stuff, so making anyone doing that the villain is probably going to preserve, and possibly enlarge blind spots. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what people in the future are going to make of the things that I do and think 'wtf were they thinking?'
Been thinking about this and I'm hard pressed to come up with a horrible behavior that hasn't at some point been acceptable to some community somewhere.
It seems that if you can categorize some identifiable group as "those other people who aren't like us", you can find a way to do whatever your imgination can summon up.
And if Brexit achieved anything it was that the idea of leaving the EU is not even contemplated anymore in any member state.
I don't know if the EU should want the UK back anytime soon though. Because, as has been mentioned, there will always be some populist hay to be made by agitating against it in the England; for we are only talking about England here really.
Not that one shouldn't agitate against e.g. the EU's shameful immigration or agricultural policies - but that's another matter which doesn't concern the likes of Farage etc.
The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We’ve got to the point where that’s not unimaginable.
I can see calling it imaginable. But possible any time soon? It seems like that would require some significant portion of the population to accept that they were conned by the pro-Brexit campaign into thinking that the economy would benefit, rather than suffer. (They were told there would be negative consequences, but chose not to believe it.). Oops.
Getting people to accept that they made a mistake, is really difficult. Nobody likes to admit, even to themselves, that they were played for fools. I'd guess that it will take a bunch of Brexit believers dying off, and being replaced by younger voters who have no personal history in voting for it I'd live, for Britain's sake, to be wrong about that. But....
Pro Bono's comment pretty much tells the whole story.
I only wish we could rejoin the EU, especially since Michel Barnier has proposed that we might still be able to have some of our originally negotiated special terms etc. But although it seems that public opinion has moved, I am afraid that if definite moves were made in this direction, it might reinvigorate the loathsome Farage, and Restore, and all that they represent. That might have some seriously undesirable consequences; the (re)election of Trump has proved that nothing, no matter how terrible, is impossible.
For example, a culture which enables slavery is worse than one which forbids it. A proof would require some axiomatic statements about what is desirable. In the end, one has to make a moral judgment about those axioms. I’m entirely willing to do that.
I agree wholeheartedly. Once, when I was young and foolish, I was prepared to take the other line, but the issue which changed it was FGM (female genital mutilation). The fact that many older women in the relevant societies supported it became irrelevant to me when I heard the horrifying testimonies of women who had suffered appalling (fully intended) effects, and from girls and women who had either suffered terribly (you don't hear from the ones who die), or only just got away/out of the relevant countries in time.
For the avoidance of all doubt, I am also against male circumcision unless absolutely medically neccessary.
Gandhi's famous first campaign in South Africa resulted from the asinine idea of the authorities to only recognize Anglican ministered marriages, effectively declaring any other invalid and the children thereof as illegitimate. Muslims in particular were not happy.
Reminds me of US religious Right's ideas to make church attendance and religious education in their narrow interpretation of Christianity mandatory for everyone, in particular non-Christians while claiming that no one's freedom was infringed by that since everyone was free to leave the country.
Or the idea of Austrian ethno-nationalists to require yearly public consumption of national dishes (that by pure chance included pork).
Not in front of the emperor's statue though, afaik.
For some "cultures", meddling in and infringing on other cultures is a core tenet.
Btw, the traditional pork ban in Judaism and Islam was simply common sense, as were several other food-related taboos
I’m not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don’t know, argues against cultural relativism?
I'm having a really bad day thread for explaining myself. :-(
I would say that marriage is an example of cultural relativism. While, at least in my view, every culture has an institution of marriage, the forms it takes, the ceremonies involved (if any), etc. vary widely. Cultural relativism says that those forms are equally valid.
Suppose your culture, like American culture, includes civil marriage. Another culture requires a religious ceremony for a marriage. Does the second culture get to say that anyone with a civil marriage in the first culture is immoral because they are "living in sin"? After all, they didn't get the reqiured-by-the-second-culture religious stamp of approval. Cultural relativism says no.
I took wj to be describing his understanding of a rather specific academic approach to a subject rather than telling everyone how to think about it. There are, I would imagine, reasons why that particular approach is preferred - guardrails that don't necessarily apply outside the discipline because the goals are often different. At least that's my distillation of some of the comments.
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official
but they tell their friends and family, right?
because even without the big party thing or the religious aspect, simply announcing to other people that you are a couple is a big part of the event.
I think the main problem is the lack of education of the voting public. Most voters make decisions based on impulsivity, obsolete class identity and nostalgia. I have no idea how anyone can deal with this. And even the educated ones you hear on e.g. 'Any Qestions' seem to be mostly overinformed cranks.
I'm not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don't know, argues against cultural relativism? There are a lot of things to pick at, like the oscillation between legal terms and social naming (shacking up, friends with benefits), but the fact that you name it suggests that there is some public recognition of the fact.There is not a 'who is shacking up with whom' column in the NYTimes, but within that person's social sphere, there must be something that had to be named.
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official and over half of the people do what is called a nashi-kon (no wedding marriage). So your definition seems a bit ethnocentric, at least where Japanese are concerned.
To understand 'marriage', you have to look at the totality of the culture, which seems to require some sort of cultural relativism in order to not fall into false comparisons.
I understand that it's desirable to describe a culture without judging it. But I reject any suggestion that no culture is inferior to another.
For example, a culture which enables slavery is worse than one which forbids it.
A proof would require some axiomatic statements about what is desirable. In the end, one has to make a moral judgment about those axioms. I'm entirely willing to do that.
It's instructive to read letters of resignation from ministers who've resigned recently over policy differences - Jess Phillips on 12th May, and John Healey on 11th June. The common message is that Keir Starmer talks a good game but fails to deliver.
A British Prime Minister is unlike a US President in that, by construction, he has the votes in the Commons to get legislation enacted. But also, by construction, he needs to retain those votes to keep his job. Most MPs are anxious to win their seats again at the next General Election, and they want the party leader most likely to facilitate that. Before Theresa May, MPs were highly reluctant to depose a Prime Minister, but that guideline has been destroyed by Brexit and its consequences - if a PM's MPs perceive an electorally more attractive alternative, he's gone.
The British government operates under budgetary constraints which do not (yet) apply in the US - they can borrow only so much money, as Liz Truss discovered. Meanwhile, voters want more government spending, especially from Labour governments, and lower taxes, especially from Conservative governments. In the absence of economic growth, which has been crushed by Brexit, these things cannot be delivered. (I'm looking at these numbers per capita.)
Furthermore, the main categories of UK government spending are on benefits (especially the state pension), health, and education. In all of these things, static spending, in real terms, looks inadequate - see Baumol's cost disease. Debt interest and the armed forces are two more rising costs - Healey's resignation was because defence spending wasn't, in his view, increasing fast enough.
Any Prime Minister would have had a difficult time in the last two years - Rishi Sunak called the last General Election five months before he had to because he didn't want to be responsible for impending decisions on spending. Burnham will have the same challenges. In the short term the hope is that he will do a better job of presentation: he could hardly do worse.
In the medium term, the country won't get stable governments unless economic growth is restored. The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We've got to the point where that's not unimaginable.
(I've used "he" because the context is Starmer's resignation. But two of the four short-term Prime Ministers who preceded him were women.)
Until the Council of Trent cohabitation did a legal marriage make (marriage by consent). Even the private consent (He: "you are my wife" She: "Yes"), the matrimonium clandestinum, was valid as far as the Church was concerned. The Council changed that and required the priest and the witnesses. Protestants did not follow necessarily (Luther thought the fathers had veto power). State and Church depending on location insist to this day on either mutual non-recognition or one requires one to precede the other. And let's not even go to what is or was considered a divorce even limited to European cultures.
We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I’d avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.
OK, I can take a shot at that.
Marriage: a term signifying that two (or more**) individuals have taken a legal and/or ceremonial step to form a new, publicly acknnowledged, social unit that includes both of them. That is, they did not just start cohabitating. They are not just "friends with benefits". There was some public action to establish the new unit. And, generally, some kind of legal and/or ceremonial action is required to later dissolve the joint unit -- stipulating that dissolution is, in some cultures, not an option.
What kind of legal action or ceremony is used varies widely, of course. But there is some kind of public acknowledgement that a new social unit now exists.
Hope that helps.
** Until very recently, either one man and one or more women, or one woman and one or more men. With everyone assumed, at least for social purposes, to be having sex primarily if not exclusively with those of the opposite sex.
But even if a particular culture doesn’t do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
They have norms about how people partner or group up. Those generally flow to specific examples, like male/female couples, who comprise the majority, and those norms are kept those in place with social enforcement. But as soon as you say 'marriage', you kind of lose me in making some sort of universal argument.
I mean, you have the word kekkon（結婚）in Japan, which roughly corresponds to marriage and is what you say to explain to your friends. Marriage, right? But if you fill out a government document, it is kon'in (婚姻) which is more meaning affiliation, especially between two houses. In fact, in the Heian era, marriage was matrilocal, with the man _visiting_ the wife at her mother's house, which gives interesting thoughts what 'meeting the family' means. And if the husband didn't visit within 3 months, the couple was considered divorced. As Mr Spock might say, it is marriage, but not as we know it.
That system took 500 years to disappear, in part because it made more sense to move the wife to the samurai husband's (fortified) estate and primogeniture was necessary to prevent a family's lands from being divided, weakening military power. This is when Neo-confucianism got into it and eventually, it was codified that the eldest male of the family had total control over everyone in the household and a marriage could only take place if he approved it. But you still have traces of that matrilocal system, like muko-iri, 婿入り where the husband is adopted by the wife's family.
We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I'd avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.
You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can’t be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
Or you can consider that the purpose behind cultural relativism is to provide a way for the ethnographer to describe a foreign (to him) culture and describe how it works. From the viewpoint of the members of that culture, without injecting into the description a lot of discussion about the way a member of his own culture would react if living in that culture (rather than just visiting).
Ideally, ethnographers from the US or China or Japan or India, describing the culture of a native group in the Amazon, would produce very similar descriptions. In reality, it's impossible to successfully set aside all of your cultural baggage, no matter how hard you try. If nothing else, your attention tends to be drawn to the parts of the culture which are most different from your own. But it is possible, and useful, to reduce the impact of the observer's culture on the description you produce.
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought.
Across time? I'll forgo a deep dive, but the Asian words are all about creating family ties rather than any kind of intimacy or family unit implication, which may be why for Japanese, you have this strange combination of citizenship being represented as an individual passport and having/being listed on a koseki (family register) Just cause it gets translated as 'marriage' doesn't mean that it is.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up.
Actually, no. That's exactly what I don't mean. Because, as you say, partnering up has been going on forever.
What I mean is a socially recognized partnering, one which confers various rights and obligations which the culture recognizes and will enforce. Sometimes there are legal processes involved. But even if a particular culture doesn't do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
If it will help (and the terms are still in use), consider the difference, in American culture, between "getting married" and "shacking up." The obvious difference being that, if you're married, you can't just walk away and it's over. Not only are there legal consequences, those around you will expect you to provide for the other party appropriately. Whereas, if you're shacked up, you can pack and move out, and nobody will expect you to do anything else.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought. It seemed obvious to me that wj meant marriage in the legal sense, ie conferring the same rights and responsibilities as with any other legally married couple. wj, what did you mean?
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I'm pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not 'marriage'?
But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can't simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it's just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can't be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
I think part of wj’s framing comes from it being an undergraduate major.
Doubtless where I picked it up initially. On the other hand, that particular framing didn't change when I was in grad school. It seemed to be a solid feature of the subculture which was Anthropology at UC Berkeley in the late 60s (undergraduate) and early 70s (grad school).
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Monkey business”
Battening down the hatches for the possibly two typhoons on their way, I've gotten quite confused about what we are arguing about. Looking back, my problem is that wj's first comment seemed to take in the common conservative trope of cultural relativism = fuzzy liberal thinking of anything goes. nous pointed out that for undergraduates, you often have to pound into their heads the fact that _everyone_ carries a lot of prejudices and it is hard work separating oneself from them. Getting them over that hurdle is job 1, but some people take it (or possibly more accurately lampoon it) as all there is.
As Russell notes, humans have a long history of doing shitty stuff, so making anyone doing that the villain is probably going to preserve, and possibly enlarge blind spots. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what people in the future are going to make of the things that I do and think 'wtf were they thinking?'
"
Been thinking about this and I'm hard pressed to come up with a horrible behavior that hasn't at some point been acceptable to some community somewhere.
It seems that if you can categorize some identifiable group as "those other people who aren't like us", you can find a way to do whatever your imgination can summon up.
It's depressing
On “Feel the Burnham!”
The numbers are quite encouraging:
https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54925-what-do-britons-think-of-brexit-10-years-since-the-referendum
And if Brexit achieved anything it was that the idea of leaving the EU is not even contemplated anymore in any member state.
I don't know if the EU should want the UK back anytime soon though. Because, as has been mentioned, there will always be some populist hay to be made by agitating against it in the England; for we are only talking about England here really.
Not that one shouldn't agitate against e.g. the EU's shameful immigration or agricultural policies - but that's another matter which doesn't concern the likes of Farage etc.
"
The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We’ve got to the point where that’s not unimaginable.
I can see calling it imaginable. But possible any time soon? It seems like that would require some significant portion of the population to accept that they were conned by the pro-Brexit campaign into thinking that the economy would benefit, rather than suffer. (They were told there would be negative consequences, but chose not to believe it.). Oops.
Getting people to accept that they made a mistake, is really difficult. Nobody likes to admit, even to themselves, that they were played for fools. I'd guess that it will take a bunch of Brexit believers dying off, and being replaced by younger voters who have no personal history in voting for it I'd live, for Britain's sake, to be wrong about that. But....
"
Pro Bono's comment pretty much tells the whole story.
I only wish we could rejoin the EU, especially since Michel Barnier has proposed that we might still be able to have some of our originally negotiated special terms etc. But although it seems that public opinion has moved, I am afraid that if definite moves were made in this direction, it might reinvigorate the loathsome Farage, and Restore, and all that they represent. That might have some seriously undesirable consequences; the (re)election of Trump has proved that nothing, no matter how terrible, is impossible.
On “Monkey business”
For example, a culture which enables slavery is worse than one which forbids it.
A proof would require some axiomatic statements about what is desirable. In the end, one has to make a moral judgment about those axioms. I’m entirely willing to do that.
I agree wholeheartedly. Once, when I was young and foolish, I was prepared to take the other line, but the issue which changed it was FGM (female genital mutilation). The fact that many older women in the relevant societies supported it became irrelevant to me when I heard the horrifying testimonies of women who had suffered appalling (fully intended) effects, and from girls and women who had either suffered terribly (you don't hear from the ones who die), or only just got away/out of the relevant countries in time.
For the avoidance of all doubt, I am also against male circumcision unless absolutely medically neccessary.
"
Gandhi's famous first campaign in South Africa resulted from the asinine idea of the authorities to only recognize Anglican ministered marriages, effectively declaring any other invalid and the children thereof as illegitimate. Muslims in particular were not happy.
Reminds me of US religious Right's ideas to make church attendance and religious education in their narrow interpretation of Christianity mandatory for everyone, in particular non-Christians while claiming that no one's freedom was infringed by that since everyone was free to leave the country.
Or the idea of Austrian ethno-nationalists to require yearly public consumption of national dishes (that by pure chance included pork).
Not in front of the emperor's statue though, afaik.
For some "cultures", meddling in and infringing on other cultures is a core tenet.
Btw, the traditional pork ban in Judaism and Islam was simply common sense, as were several other food-related taboos
"
I'm having a really bad
daythread for explaining myself. :-(I would say that marriage is an example of cultural relativism. While, at least in my view, every culture has an institution of marriage, the forms it takes, the ceremonies involved (if any), etc. vary widely. Cultural relativism says that those forms are equally valid.
Suppose your culture, like American culture, includes civil marriage. Another culture requires a religious ceremony for a marriage. Does the second culture get to say that anyone with a civil marriage in the first culture is immoral because they are "living in sin"? After all, they didn't get the reqiured-by-the-second-culture religious stamp of approval. Cultural relativism says no.
"
I took wj to be describing his understanding of a rather specific academic approach to a subject rather than telling everyone how to think about it. There are, I would imagine, reasons why that particular approach is preferred - guardrails that don't necessarily apply outside the discipline because the goals are often different. At least that's my distillation of some of the comments.
"
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official
but they tell their friends and family, right?
because even without the big party thing or the religious aspect, simply announcing to other people that you are a couple is a big part of the event.
On “Feel the Burnham!”
I think the main problem is the lack of education of the voting public. Most voters make decisions based on impulsivity, obsolete class identity and nostalgia. I have no idea how anyone can deal with this. And even the educated ones you hear on e.g. 'Any Qestions' seem to be mostly overinformed cranks.
On “Monkey business”
I'm not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don't know, argues against cultural relativism? There are a lot of things to pick at, like the oscillation between legal terms and social naming (shacking up, friends with benefits), but the fact that you name it suggests that there is some public recognition of the fact.There is not a 'who is shacking up with whom' column in the NYTimes, but within that person's social sphere, there must be something that had to be named.
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official and over half of the people do what is called a nashi-kon (no wedding marriage). So your definition seems a bit ethnocentric, at least where Japanese are concerned.
To understand 'marriage', you have to look at the totality of the culture, which seems to require some sort of cultural relativism in order to not fall into false comparisons.
"
I understand that it's desirable to describe a culture without judging it. But I reject any suggestion that no culture is inferior to another.
For example, a culture which enables slavery is worse than one which forbids it.
A proof would require some axiomatic statements about what is desirable. In the end, one has to make a moral judgment about those axioms. I'm entirely willing to do that.
On “Feel the Burnham!”
It's instructive to read letters of resignation from ministers who've resigned recently over policy differences - Jess Phillips on 12th May, and John Healey on 11th June. The common message is that Keir Starmer talks a good game but fails to deliver.
A British Prime Minister is unlike a US President in that, by construction, he has the votes in the Commons to get legislation enacted. But also, by construction, he needs to retain those votes to keep his job. Most MPs are anxious to win their seats again at the next General Election, and they want the party leader most likely to facilitate that. Before Theresa May, MPs were highly reluctant to depose a Prime Minister, but that guideline has been destroyed by Brexit and its consequences - if a PM's MPs perceive an electorally more attractive alternative, he's gone.
The British government operates under budgetary constraints which do not (yet) apply in the US - they can borrow only so much money, as Liz Truss discovered. Meanwhile, voters want more government spending, especially from Labour governments, and lower taxes, especially from Conservative governments. In the absence of economic growth, which has been crushed by Brexit, these things cannot be delivered. (I'm looking at these numbers per capita.)
Furthermore, the main categories of UK government spending are on benefits (especially the state pension), health, and education. In all of these things, static spending, in real terms, looks inadequate - see Baumol's cost disease. Debt interest and the armed forces are two more rising costs - Healey's resignation was because defence spending wasn't, in his view, increasing fast enough.
Any Prime Minister would have had a difficult time in the last two years - Rishi Sunak called the last General Election five months before he had to because he didn't want to be responsible for impending decisions on spending. Burnham will have the same challenges. In the short term the hope is that he will do a better job of presentation: he could hardly do worse.
In the medium term, the country won't get stable governments unless economic growth is restored. The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We've got to the point where that's not unimaginable.
(I've used "he" because the context is Starmer's resignation. But two of the four short-term Prime Ministers who preceded him were women.)
On “Monkey business”
Until the Council of Trent cohabitation did a legal marriage make (marriage by consent). Even the private consent (He: "you are my wife" She: "Yes"), the matrimonium clandestinum, was valid as far as the Church was concerned. The Council changed that and required the priest and the witnesses. Protestants did not follow necessarily (Luther thought the fathers had veto power). State and Church depending on location insist to this day on either mutual non-recognition or one requires one to precede the other. And let's not even go to what is or was considered a divorce even limited to European cultures.
"
OK, I can take a shot at that.
Marriage: a term signifying that two (or more**) individuals have taken a legal and/or ceremonial step to form a new, publicly acknnowledged, social unit that includes both of them. That is, they did not just start cohabitating. They are not just "friends with benefits". There was some public action to establish the new unit. And, generally, some kind of legal and/or ceremonial action is required to later dissolve the joint unit -- stipulating that dissolution is, in some cultures, not an option.
What kind of legal action or ceremony is used varies widely, of course. But there is some kind of public acknowledgement that a new social unit now exists.
Hope that helps.
** Until very recently, either one man and one or more women, or one woman and one or more men. With everyone assumed, at least for social purposes, to be having sex primarily if not exclusively with those of the opposite sex.
"
But even if a particular culture doesn’t do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
They have norms about how people partner or group up. Those generally flow to specific examples, like male/female couples, who comprise the majority, and those norms are kept those in place with social enforcement. But as soon as you say 'marriage', you kind of lose me in making some sort of universal argument.
I mean, you have the word kekkon（結婚）in Japan, which roughly corresponds to marriage and is what you say to explain to your friends. Marriage, right? But if you fill out a government document, it is kon'in (婚姻) which is more meaning affiliation, especially between two houses. In fact, in the Heian era, marriage was matrilocal, with the man _visiting_ the wife at her mother's house, which gives interesting thoughts what 'meeting the family' means. And if the husband didn't visit within 3 months, the couple was considered divorced. As Mr Spock might say, it is marriage, but not as we know it.
That system took 500 years to disappear, in part because it made more sense to move the wife to the samurai husband's (fortified) estate and primogeniture was necessary to prevent a family's lands from being divided, weakening military power. This is when Neo-confucianism got into it and eventually, it was codified that the eldest male of the family had total control over everyone in the household and a marriage could only take place if he approved it. But you still have traces of that matrilocal system, like muko-iri, 婿入り where the husband is adopted by the wife's family.
We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I'd avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.
"
Or you can consider that the purpose behind cultural relativism is to provide a way for the ethnographer to describe a foreign (to him) culture and describe how it works. From the viewpoint of the members of that culture, without injecting into the description a lot of discussion about the way a member of his own culture would react if living in that culture (rather than just visiting).
Ideally, ethnographers from the US or China or Japan or India, describing the culture of a native group in the Amazon, would produce very similar descriptions. In reality, it's impossible to successfully set aside all of your cultural baggage, no matter how hard you try. If nothing else, your attention tends to be drawn to the parts of the culture which are most different from your own. But it is possible, and useful, to reduce the impact of the observer's culture on the description you produce.
"
Invite him over! I'm sure he's got a story to tell!
"
I guy I know is on Facebook under the name Hanuman Sun Wukong. That’s all I got.
"
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought.
Across time? I'll forgo a deep dive, but the Asian words are all about creating family ties rather than any kind of intimacy or family unit implication, which may be why for Japanese, you have this strange combination of citizenship being represented as an individual passport and having/being listed on a koseki (family register) Just cause it gets translated as 'marriage' doesn't mean that it is.
"
Actually, no. That's exactly what I don't mean. Because, as you say, partnering up has been going on forever.
What I mean is a socially recognized partnering, one which confers various rights and obligations which the culture recognizes and will enforce. Sometimes there are legal processes involved. But even if a particular culture doesn't do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
If it will help (and the terms are still in use), consider the difference, in American culture, between "getting married" and "shacking up." The obvious difference being that, if you're married, you can't just walk away and it's over. Not only are there legal consequences, those around you will expect you to provide for the other party appropriately. Whereas, if you're shacked up, you can pack and move out, and nobody will expect you to do anything else.
"
"I assume you mean partnering up"
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought. It seemed obvious to me that wj meant marriage in the legal sense, ie conferring the same rights and responsibilities as with any other legally married couple. wj, what did you mean?
"
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I'm pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not 'marriage'?
But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can't simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it's just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can't be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
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Doubtless where I picked it up initially. On the other hand, that particular framing didn't change when I was in grad school. It seemed to be a solid feature of the subculture which was Anthropology at UC Berkeley in the late 60s (undergraduate) and early 70s (grad school).
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