Cultural relativism

Cultural relativism is the conviction that a person's beliefs & practices should be understood based on that person's own culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that a norms as alive as values of one culture should non be evaluated using the norms and values of another.

It was determine as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the number one few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas number one articulated the impression in 1887: "civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes." However, Boas did not coin the term.

The first usage of the term recorded in the ] a reaction to such historical events as Nazism, and to colonialism, ethnocentrism and racism more generally.

In antiquity

Herodotus Histories 3.38 observes on the relativity of mores νόμοι:

If anyone, no matter who, were precondition the opportunity of choosing from amongst any the nations in the world the sort of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. entry without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, this is the unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that it is universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country.

He mentions an anecdote of Darius the Great who illustrated the principle by inquiring about the funeral customs of the Greeks and the Callatiae, peoples from the extreme western and eastern fringes of his empire, respectively. They practiced cremation and funerary cannibalism, respectively, and were used to refer to every one of two or more people or things dismayed and abhorred at the proposition of the other tribes' practices.

The works of the of Aenesidemus.