Commenter Thread

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Are you saying that there are no objective morals? And no one has any grounds to criticize cultures that fall short of those morals?

I'm saying that morals arise out of, and are part of, particular cultures. Certainly you can criticize other cultures for falling short of your morals. But can you demonstrate that your morals on a particular point are superior to theirs? A demonstration which would convince someone from a culture which doesn't happen to have a position on the issue, and is therefore arguably objective.

There are some moral precepts which are, if not quite universal, are very widespread. You can probably make a decent argument that the anomalies have missed the boat somehow. But it's also possible that they got it right, and the rest of us will eventually get it right, too.

Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal. But gay marriage did not (to my knowledge) occur anywhere, was not even raised as a serious possibility, until the last few decades. There might be recognized relationships, but they were not (and nobody in their culture would have characterized them as being) marriage. Was that universal rejection of the idea a universal moral precept? Are those places which still reject it being immoral for doing what everybody in the world did a century ago?

Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn’t become a moral compass.

The point is, everybody thinks that their morals are, and should be, universal and applied to all of humanity. But nobody has found anything resembling an objective way to prove that. (Just like nobody has found an objective way to show which religion is right.) Hence "relativism."

The people who you think are behaving immorally, presuming they are from another culture, have their own ideas about what is moral behavior. And probably wish to apply that moral compass to correcting your behavior.

All that cultural relativism says is that immoral behavior should be identified as doing something that your own culture considers immoral. Which may be part of pushing your culture to change. But that doesn't change how it will be viewed initially by other members of your culture.

To return to the earlier question, cultural relativism would look at MAGAs and say: this is how those who hold their culture's old morals inevitably react when the changes to the culture are past the tipping point. It's a hysterical attempt to turn back a clock. In most cases, even if it is briefly successful, it will be seen in retrospect as a last gasp.

Boas, who argued for cultural relativism, with no culture being superior to another. (yay!) Though I wonder how they would deal with MAGA culture…

My recollection (It's been half a century since I was a Cultural Anthropology major) is that it distinguishes cultures and sub-cultures. MAGA would be a subculture of the general American culture. That is, something which shares the vast majority of features with the general culture, while having multiple features which are peculiar to itself. It can take exposure to foreign cultures to realize just how much the subculture share with the general culture. But be assured, you have an enormous number of points of cultural agreement with MAGAs.

Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members -- how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.

Look at it this way. You, in your culture, may find certain features of another culture peculiar or even abhorrent. But your opinion is irrelevant because you are not part of the culture. In short, cultural relativism rejects the concept of universality between cultures. Your views on, for example, universal human rights are just that: your views. Another culture may have other, equally valid, views of what constitute human rights which ought to be universal.

This is not to say that you shouldn't try to change features of your culture that you dislike.** Cultures change constantly. (There's an entire specialty withing Cultural Anthropology which focuses of how that change happens.) Anyone who demands that their culture never change might as well argue that the sun circles the earth or that gravity doesn't apply to people and inanimate objects equally. That just ain't the way the universe works.

Sometimes those changes are apparently adjustments to external forces. If you contact a different culture, a lot of people in your culture may find something new and attractive there and embrace it -- see the impact of Hollywood, or of K-pop, outside their culture of origin. Or economic forces force an adjustment -- think the spread of the railroads or cell phones. Nobody said: let's change our culture. But it happened anyway.

Other changes are the result of conscious effort by some group. Think of women's sufferage or gay marriage. This tends to generate more pushback, partly because pushback can work more successfully. But what is more common is change in fits and starts. Or, if you prefer, two steps forward, one step back. Which is very irritating for advocates of the change, who typically have trouble taking a long view of just how much change they have made successfully.

** You can also try to change features of other cultures that you dislike. Just don't try to convince a believer in cultural relativism that you are morally correct in any univerally vaild sense.

...because people think that the Bible is somehow historical fact (or ignore it because they don’t want to get in fights) has them fail to see how people and situations are archetypes 

What bugs me particularly is how often obvious figures of speech are translated and taken literally. A couple of examples:

• "Jonah was in a whale." But if you say of someone you know: "Jonah is in a pickle," do you really expect your listener to think a giant cucumber is involved?
• "Jesus was walking on the water." And if you say, "I have a house on the lake," does anyone assume a houseboat? Sure, it could be. But the most likely meaning is lakefront property, with the house being high and dry, albeit with a view.

And that ignores cases of simple mis-translations, due to the different ways different languages parse the world. Hebrew, like English, distinguishes conceptually between a young woman and a virgin; Latin does not. So a prophecy that "A young woman shall conceive," doesn't actually require a virgin birth.

It seems like the literalists are aware of the potential problem. Hence their insistence that the translations were all divinely inspired. Avoids numerous awkward facts.

Wj’s observation that Monkey D Luffy is an homage to Dragonball is spot on.

I'd love to take credit. But I didn't, at least not consciously.

Most of my experience with manga stems from my wife's infatuation with One Piece. Primarily the animated TV series, although we've also seen the live action adaption. Hero's name: Monkey D. Luffy. [emphasis added]

Of interest is that characters can gain (a) super power by eating a Devil Fruit. But they don't seem to have any control over, or way to predict, just what super power it will be. Those super powers all seem to take some work to master, and all seem to have some weakness which can be exploited by enemies. Other characters have extreme skills of one kind or another.

it does occur to me that Abrahamic religions could really use a trickster figure, and the absence of one is probably one reason the world is currently such a dumpster fire.

I was hoping you would elaborate on this a bit. But I realize it's a non-politics post. Maybe another time.