ANTH 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Cultural Relativism, Ethnocentrism, Ethnography
2 Oct 2018
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Every culture should be judged according to its own set of values / own terms. Judging everything according to your own set of values / culture. Your culture is the only valued one. What we might consider to be universal could just be ethnocentric. Some truths may just be powerful enough to be accepted as uncontestable truths, when in reality the acceptance is a result of ethnocentricism. Different interpretations of death: passage of a person from one world to another, death is an ending, final event of a life span, a never-ending cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Eating the dead out of respect and compassion for the dead person. Because of culture, we act as if ascribed meanings are real. If all people everywhere think they are right and others are wrong, they can only reach an intellectual and social dead end. Relativistic fallacy = the idea that it is impossible to make moral judgements about others" beliefs.
