ANTH 1034 Lecture Notes - Ethnocentrism
11 Mar 2014
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Document Summary
Cultural relativism: the attempt to understand the beliefs and behaviours of other cultures in terms of the culture in which they are found, no behaviour or belief can be judged to be odd or wrong simply because it is different from out own, we must try to understand or beliefs for the purpose of function, or meaning they have to people in the societies in which we find them. In contrast to the evolutionists, social anthropologists began to question why things remain the same (rather than why they change: early 20th century structural functionalists produced a series of non evolutionary classifications of human social forms, emphasis on social stability tends to downplay or ignore questions (and evidence) of change, they saw social institutions as self perpetuating in a state of "homeostatic equilibrium", a state in which all the parts acted to keep the whole in balance.
