SOC 201 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Cultural Relativism, Bilingual Education, Culture Shock
Document Summary
Sociologists work to overcome their ethnocentrism by practicing something called cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the belief that other people and their ways of doing things can be understood only in terms of the cultural context of those people. This is based on the assumption that if our goal is to truly understand people"s behavior, we have to look for clues in their culture. Some people have misunderstood this notion of cultural relativity. They suspect that it implies that any one way of doing things is as good as any other way. As far as sociologists are concerned, however, cultural relativity has nothing to do with assessing which ways of doing things are better or worse. Remember, which way is better or worse? is not a legitimate sociological question. For sociologists, cultural relativity means being objective enough to understand people"s behaviors in terms of their culture and social situation.
