Cultural Relativism, Human Rights, and the AAA

Wilcomb E. Washburn

American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 89, No. 4. (Dec., 1987), pp. 939-943.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294%28198712%292%3A89%3A4%3C939%3ACRHRAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

American Anthropologist is currently published by American Anthropological Association.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/anthro.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For
more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org
Tue Apr 17 11:48:46 2007
 1983 Local Knowledge. New York: Basic
Books.
1984 Anti Anti-Relativism. American An-
thropologist 86:263-278.
Herskovits, Melville J.
1938 Dahomey, An Ancient African
Kingdom. Two volumes. New York: J. J.
Augustin.
1948 Man and His Works. New York:
Knopf.
Kolakowski, Leszek
1986 Kolakowski Reflects on World Poli-
tics. Chicago Chronicle. P. 1. May 15.
Mead, Margaret
1928 Coming of Age in Samoa. A Psycho-
logical Study of Primitive Youth for
Western Civilization. New York: William
Morrow.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de
1962[1588] Essais, Tome I. Maurice Rat,
ed. Paris: Editions Garnier. (Author's
translation.)
Cultural Relativism, Human
Rights, and the AAA
WILCOMB E. WASHBURN
Smithsonian Institution
The embarrassment with which anthro~ol-
ogists treat cultural relativism and their re-
luctance to repudiate the concept require ex-
planation. Once argued confidently and ag-
gressively by anthropologists, cultural relativ-
ism is now dealt with ambiguously a n d
humorously, even by the few willing to grap-
ple directly with the subject. Paul Rabinow
has wryly remarked that "cultural relativism
marks a major stage in the reduction of the
Other to the Same. All differences are pre-
served a n d denied a t t h e s a m e time"
(1983:59). Even Melville Herskovits, whose
crude formulation of cultural relativism ex-
pressed the naive belief of an earlier genera-
tion of anthropologists in the doctrine, recog-
nized the humor inherent in the concept by
noting that "One friendly critic of our disci-
pline, more witty than wise in his assertion,
has defined an anthropologist as a person who
respects every culture-pattern but his own.
Like any other bon mot, it is true and not true
. . ." (Herskovits 1951:23, reprinted in
1973:37). I would assert that cultural relativ-
ism derives its continuing power from cultural
anthropologists' hostility to the values of their
own society rather than from any inherent the-
oretical rigor.
The apogee of acceptance of cultural rela-
tivism (in its various diverse forms) as a ra-
tional doctrine of anthropology occurred in
the 1930s. Its foremost exponents were Mel-
ville Herskovits and Margaret Mead (Hatch
1983). But cultural relativism was inherent, in
one way or another, throughout the Boasian
approach to culture as well as in the functional
approach of British anthropology (Hatch
1983; Rabinow 1983). The trauma of World
War 11, the optimism of the immediate post-
war period, and the pessimism of the 1960s
and the Vietnam War period all buffeted an-
thropological belief in cultural relativism but,
I would argue, merely changed the form in
which anthropologists' commitment to those
who were perceived as the victims of Western
civilization was expressed.
If the motivation behind anthropological
theory is sometimes concealed or masked,
then it is important to look at efforts by an-
thropologists to explain their theories to non-
anthropologists in order to clarify their intent
and meaning. Such an attempt, drafted by
Melville Herskovits, was the Statement on
Human Rights submitted to the United Na-
tions in 1947 by the Executive Board of the
American Anthropological Association. The
Statement was published in American Anthro-
pologist in the same year (Executive Board,
AAA 1947:539-543). In a world in which the
Executive Board asserted that "In the main,
people are willing to live and let live, exhibit-
ing a tolerance for behavior of another group
different from their own, especially where
there is no conflict in the subsistence field,"
there came a "point of view" whose "conse-
quences" "have been disastrous for man-
kind." That point of view, the Statement as-
serted, emerged from "the history of Western
Europe and America," where "economic ex-
pansion, control of armaments, and an evan-
gelical religious tradition have translated the
recognition of cultural differences into a sum-
mons to action." This summons to action has
been "emphasized by philosophical systems
that have stressed absolutes in the realm of
values and ends. Definitions of freedom, con-
cepts of the nature of human rights, and the
like, have thus been narrowly drawn." "The
history of the expansion of the western world,"
the Statement went on, "has been marked by
demoralization of human personality and the
disintegration of human rights among the peo-
ples over whom hegemony has been estab-
lished" (Executive Board, AAA 1947:540-
541).
In its recommendations regarding human
rights, the Executive Board rejected the idea
of a declaration on the Western democratic in-
dividualistic model, such as the American
Declaration of Independence or the American
Bill of Rights, noting that such documents
were written by men some of whom were
themselves slave-owners. Rather, the State-
ment asserted, the rights of "Man in the
Twentieth Century cannot be circumscribed
by the standards of any single culture" and
must be incorporated in "the only right and
proper way of life that can be known to them,
the institutions, sanctions and goals that make
up the culture of their particular society." The
Executive Board went on to assert that "Even
where political systems exist that deny citizens
the right of participation in their government,
or seek to conquer weaker peoples, underlying
cultural values may be called on to bring the
peoples of such states to a realization of the
consequences of the acts of their governments,
and thus enforce a brake upon discrimination
and conquest" (Executive Board, AAA
1947:542-543). This sentence was not in the
draft of the Statement written by Herskovits.'
Although phrased ambiguously, the sentence
seems to have been an attempt to mollify crit-
ics of another assertion in the Statement that
"man is free only when he lives as his society
defines freedom," which Herskovits had ear-
lier more honestly, if less elegantly, stated in
the following form: "There is, indeed, some
reason to feel that the concept of freedom
should be realistically redefined as the right to
be exploited in terms of the patterns of one's
own culture" (Herskovits 1942:560).
A few anthropologists at the time reacted in
dismay when the Statement appeared in Amer-
ican Anthropologist. Julian Steward (1948:351-
352) of C o l u m b i a a n d H . G . B a r n e t t
(1948:352-355) of the University of Oregon
both published critiques of the Statement in a
subseauent issue. Steward noted that the
added sentence seemed to be "a loophole to
exclude Germany from the advocated toler-
ance, but it looks to me," Steward noted, "like
the fatal breach in the dyke." "Either we tol-
erate everything, and keep hands off, or we
fight intolerance and conquest. . . . As human
beings, we unanimously opposed the brutal
treatment of Jews in Hitler Germany, but
what stand shall be taken on the thousands of
other kinds of racial and cultural discrimina-
tion, unfair practices, and inconsiderate atti-
t u d e s f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t t h e world?"
(1949:351). Barnett noted that "It is an ines-
capable fact that we cannot at the same time
be moralists (or policymakers) and scientists.
We all know this; we teach it and practice it-
except in the pinches when our private o r
group interests and prejudices become in-
volved. Then, unhappily, we behave like any
undisciplined layman . . ." (1948:353).
In the 20 years subsequent to the issuance
of the Statement on Human Rights, anthro-
pology moved from optimism to pessimism,
and from a naive faith in cultural relativism to
an embarrassed and ske~ticalunease concern-
ing the doctrine. I would assert that in the pro-
cess of turning their backs on cultural relativ-
ism as a formal theory, cultural anthropolo-
gists nevertheless retained their moral and
emotional commitment to those perceived as
the victims of Western civilization.
Such a commitment found a logical expres-
sion in what Sol Tax named "action anthro-
pology." While inconsistent with the nonin-
terventionist theoretical premise of cultural
relativism, Tax's theory of advocacy reflected
the reality of the personal commitment of the
anthropologist to the society he was studying
and antagonism toward the society of which
he was a member. Tax substituted one form of
~owerfulintervention from the outside for an-
other, ostensibly in the interests of the weaker
society. Too often, in my opinion, he mis-
judged his target (Washburn 1984).
In the 1960s, with the trauma of racial con-
flict in the United States and American inter-
vention in Vietnam, a great number of anthro-
pologists became even more alienated from
the society in which they found their material
support, and more sympathetic toward those
societies-internal and external-that were
perceived as victims of the values of the dom-
inant society. The movement was marked by
the manifesto entitled Reinventing Anthropology
(Hymes 1972). This collection not only em-
phasized the need for anthropology to d o
something for the "oppressed" of mankind
against their "oppressors" (the United States
in particular) but, as Kaplan pointed out in a
review essay (Kaplan 1974),attacked the con-
cept of objectivity and value-free inquiry in
the process.
Having questioned the legitimacy and good
will of the former colonial rulers of the newly
emerging countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, anthropologists were eager to accept
the legitimacy and good will of the new rep-
resentatives of the societies for whose cultural
values they had fought so hard. But when
these new societies defined freedom in such a
way as to cause millions of their members to
flee if they could, or, if they could not, to be
slaughtered in situ (as in Cambodia, Uganda,
or Ethiopia), anthropologists faced a theoret-
ical and practical dilemma. Many new states
asserted their claim to cultural legitimacy by
appropriating labels such as "People's Repub-
lic" or "Democratic" to describe their new
states. A hollow process of formal "elections"
.
served to "validate" one-~artv , and one-man
rule. Millions of people were soon fleeing these
"people's republics," much to the embarrass-
ment of their presumptive leaders. It was even
more embarrassing t o Western anthropolo-
gists that they fled to the West and particu-
larly to the United States. Armed resistance
struggles have broken out against Marxist-
Leninist regimes in Afghanistan, Cambodia,
Laos, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and
Ethiopia. How does the anthropologist today
apply the 1947 injunction that "individuals
are free only when they live as their societies
define freedom"? Who speaks for the citizenry
of Cuba, Angola, East Germany, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, or, indeed, the Soviet Union?
The questioning of cultural relativism from
the theoretical side of philosophy and logic has
been as damaging as that from the practical
side (cf. .Jarvie 1984). But the skepticism of
philosophers has, a s Jarvie has noted
(1975a:343), failed to "lure the relativists out
for a joust." Clifford Geertz, even while pro-
claiming that it was not his intention to do so
(Geertz 1984:263), is one of the few who has
risen to the theoretical defense of cultural rel-
ativism, albeit in a backhanded, double neg-
ative fashion as indicated by the title ("Anti
Anti-Relativism") of his Distinguished Lec-
ture at the annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in 1983 (Geertz
1984). In his quixotic defense of the concept,
Geertz sets up numerous straw men to knock
down rather than dealing directly with the
real issue resented bv the anti-relativists.
who do in fact recognize the diversity of cul-
tural viewpoints but seek to encourage debate
between and among these diverse views (Jar-
vie 1975a:348). Instead of dealing with their
arguments, Geertz attributes an absolutist
philosophy to the anti-relativists, mockingly
disparaging, through the use of capital letters
and quotation marks, the concepts of "Human
Nature" and "The Human Mind," although
the quotation marks are not attributed to any
particular anti-relativist zealot and would
seem to be part of the straw with which he has
set up his easily disposable target.
Outside the walls of anthropology, critics-
ignored and unchallenged-are saying that by
committing themselves to the interests of the
objects of their study and by confusing the
question of knowledge with the question of be-
lief, anthropologists are losing their claim to
scientific status (Jarvie 1975a:347).Jarvie has
even supplied an epitaph for anthropologists,
having discovered that his "epistle" to the an-
thropologists (Jarvie 1975b:253-266) has
gone unheeded. The attempts of anthropolo-
gists and sociologists to become scientific, he
has asserted. have failed. "So. either soldier
on; or slip helplessly back into generalism; or
become social activists, planners, social engi-
neers, propagandists, and the like" (Jarvie
1976:521).
Other attacks have come from within the
profession, particularly as to whether the the-
oretical formulations of anthropology can
claim the dignity of scientific laws. Stanley R.
Barrett, professor of anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Guelph in Canada, has questioned
anthropology's claim to paradigmatic status
for its theories, even for its celebrated formu-
lations of structural functionalism and cul-
tural materialism. Barrett concludes that an-
thropology has never enjoyed paradigmatic
status (1984:69). It is not even pre-paradig-
matic (1984:61). Rather, Barrett asserts, it is
"pseudo-paradigmatic," or, more respect-
fully, "non-paradigmatic" (198459). That
national boundaries have shaped the disci-
pline of anthropology so emphatically, pro-
ducing various schools depending upon
whether the anthropologist is British, French,
Dutch, German, ~ u s s i a nor, American, is, as
Barrett points out, embarrassing, since "few
criticisms disturb anthropologists more than
the claim that their interpretations are cul-
ture-bound" (198459).
Conclusion
As the faith of anthropologists that the doc-
trine of cultural relativism would solve the
world's ~ractical~roblemshas faded so have
the claims for anthropology's scientific status
(Spiro 1986). One rarely hears references to-
day to what Radcliffe-Brown called "A Natu-
ral Science of Society" (1957),what Bronislaw
Malinowski called "A Scientific Theory of
Culture" (1944), what Ralph Linton called
"the Emergent Science of Man" (1945: 18),
what Melville Herskovits called "The Science
of Man" (1948:3), and what Laura Thompson
looked forward to in her Toward A Science of
Mankind (1961). Thompson, the most optimis-
tic of all, confidently asserted that she counted
herself "among those students of man who be-
lieve that the development of such a science is
not only possible, but imminent" (196 1:vii;
1976:346).
Anthropology, as a theoretical science,
must face u p to external criticisms of its
claims. Anthropology, as a policy science, can
no longer merely urge policymakers to accept
the general idea that different cultures have
different values. Everyone knows that and
knows that our Western values are not univer-
sal values. Policymakers have no need for an-
thropological generalities, not because they
may not be true, but because they are usually
not relevant to the problems policymakers
face. To invoke the mantra of "cultural rela-
tivism" and how a "society defines freedom"
does not help the policymaker to determine
whether to aid or oppose one side or the other.
Anthropologists may long for the good old
days when Western colonialism was in place
and when one could easily identify with the
good guys (natives) struggling for freedom
against the bad guys (the West) preventing
their emergence as independent and self-reg-
ulating states. It was that attitude that under-
lay the AAA Executive Board's statement on
Human Rights in 1947. But in the intervening
40 years, the simple picture of the postwar pe-
riod has dissolved into the complex picture of
1987. It has become impossible to apply the
Executive Board's policy recommendations of
1947 to the specific situations of today.
While absolutist thinkers will always be
with us and anthro~olo~ists
1 " like Geertz are
justified in warning against being deluded by
new universals, we can no longer rely on the
concept of cultural relativism even in the dis-
torted and concealed form in which it cur-
rently exists, as an explanation of, or solution
to, cultural conflict. Cultural relativism itself
may not need to be buried, but our willingness
to misuse the concept to express a distaste for
our own society andrationalize our preference
for other societies does need to be abandoned.
Note
'I cannot find in the National Archives of
Anthropology (NAA) at the Smithsonian In-
stitution, where the records of the AAA are
kept, that it was supplied by any particular
member of the Executive Board to whom the
statement was circulated for comment (AAA
Records). ( I have examined the records of all
members of the 1947 Executive Board in the
M A records and corresponded with some
whose records are not in the NAA. In addition
to Herskovits, the members of the Executive
Board included Clyde Kluckhohn, Charles F.
Voegelin, Cora Du Bois, William W. Howells,
Ralph L. Beals, and W. W. Hill. Erminie W.
Voegelin served as Executive Secretary to the
Executive Board. Frederick R. Eggan served
as Vice President of the Association.) Hers-
kovits may have made the addition following
receipt of comments from some members of
the Board who. like William Howells. recom-
mended that
It might be made clear that, in insisting on
the freedom of individual cultures, as well
as individual men, our sense of "culture" is
not synonymous with "political system,"
and is not to be confused with it. Otherwise
perverse people can say we are stating that
Franco is just as good as anybody else, etc.,
and similar red herrings not really germane.
[Howells 19471
References Cited
American Anthropological Association Rec-
- -
ords
1947-1948 President's Correspondence;
Executive Secretary to Executive Board
memos; President to Executive Board
memos; President to Executive Board;
Executive Board Member folders (Beals,
Howells). National Archives of Anthro-
pology, Smithsonian Institution, Wash-
ington.
Barnett, H. G.
1948 Comment on the Statement on Hu-
man Rights. American Anthropologist
50:352-355.
Barrett, Stanley R.
1984 Rebirth of Anthropological Theory.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Executive Board, American Anthropological
Association
1947 Statement on Human Rights Sub-
mitted to the commission on Human
Rights, United Nations. American An-
thropologist 49:539-543.
Herskovits, Melville
1942 On the Values in Culture. Scientific
Monthly 54:557-560. Reprinted in Hers-
skovits 1973:3-10.
1948 Man and His Works: The Science of
Cultural Anthropology. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
1951 Tender- and Tough-minded An-
thropology and the Study of Values in
Culture. Southwestern Journal of An-
thropology 7:22-3 1. Reprinted in Hers-
kovits 1973:35-47.
1973 Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in
Cultural Pluralism. Frances Herskovits,
ed. New York: Random House.
Howells, William W.
1947 Letter of June 14, 1947, American
Anthropological Association Records,
Box 30, Folder "Howells, W. W." Na-
tional Archives of Anthropology, Smith-
sonian Institution, Washington.
Hymes, Dell, ed.
1972 Reinventing Anthropology. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Jarvie, I. C.
1975a Cultural Relativism Again. Philos-
ophy of the Social Sciences 5:343-353.
1975b Epistle to the Anthropologists.
American Anthropologist 77:253-266.
 1976 Nationalism and the Social Sciences.
Canadian Journal of Sociology 1(4):5 15-
528.
1984 Rationality and Relativism: I n
Search of a Philosophy and History of
Anthropology. London: Routledge & Ke-
gan Paul.
Kaplan, David
1974 Review Article: The Anthropology
of Authenticity: Everyman His Own An-
thropologist. American Anthropologist
76(4):824-839.
Linton, Ralph, ed.
1945 The Science of Man in the World
Crisis. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw
1944 A Scientific Theory of Culture and
Other Essays. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Rabinow, Paul
1983 Humanism as Nihilism: The Brack-
eting of Truth and Seriousness in Amer-
ican Cultural Anthropology. In Social
Science as Moral Inquiry. Norma Haan,
Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and
William M. Sullivan, eds. Pp. 52-75.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.
1957 A Natural Science of Society. Fore-
word by Fred Eggan [based on discussion
before faculty seminar in 19371. Glencoe,
IL: Free Press.
Spiro, Melford E.
1986 Cultural Relativism and the Future
of Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology
1(3):259-286.
Steward, Julian
1948 O n Science and Human Rights.
American Anthropologist 50:352-355.
Thompson, Laura
1961 Toward a Science of Mankind. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
1976 Comment on Jamie's Epistle to the
Anthropologists. American Anthropolo-
gist 78:34>347.
Washburn, Wilcomb E.
1984 Ethical Perspectives in North Amer-
ican Ethnology. In Social Contexts of
American Ethnology, 1840-1984. June
Helm, ed. In 1984 Proceedings of the
American Ethnological Society. Stuart
Plattner, ed. Pp. 55-64.
Can an Anthropologist Go
Home Again?
CHOONGSOONKIM
The University of Tennessee at Martin
Recently, a growing number of anthropol-
ogists have engaged in their work at home. Al-
though methodological discussions on this
subject have flourished (Messerschmidt
1981:9-13; Ohnuki-Tierney 1984a:584), my
field experiences offer an additional dimen-
sion. Unlike most native anthropologists who
previously had done their work in an alien cul-
ture and returned home, my fieldwork began
at home, then continued in alien cultures,
after which I returned home.
My first fieldwork was in Korea from 1963
to 1964. As a research associate in the Social
Science Research Institute at Yonsei Univer-
sity, I participated in a project supported by
an Asian Foundations uerant
to studv the com-
patibility of traditional Korean customs and
the current legal system. Since I was the sole
unmarried member of a four-man research
team, I was able to stay in the field longer than
the others. I spent almost a year in rural Ko-
rean villages. I felt confident and comfortable
workine with Koreans. Fieldwork in one's
w
own society has the advantage of allowing one
to develop more insight into the culture be-
cause of familiarity and to arrive at abstrac-
tions from the native's ~ o i nof
t view.'
The major critics of anthropological work at
home "have characterized such knowledge as
mere subjective involvement, a deterrent to
objective perception and analysis" (Aguilar
1981: 15). Nonetheless, the inherent bias of
being a native anthropologist doing work
amone w
one's natives has been reduced. if not
eliminated, by studying other cultures before
studying one's own culture, and by "distanc-
ing" from the natives both physically and psy-
chologically (Ohnuki-Tierney 1984b:13). To
"distance" herself physically and psychologi-
cally from the natives being studied and to
prevent too much immersion in her native cul-
ture, and to regain a sense of reflective per-
spective as an anthropologist, Ohnuki-Tier-
ney ( 1984b:12-1 3), a native Japanese who has
conducted fieldwork in an alien culture, re-
duced her fieldwork in Japan from six months
to four.
Since leaving Korea, I have done my field-
work in an alien society with alien cultures
(Kim 1977): Blacks and poor White pulpwood
workers in south Georgia in 1969-70 (Bailey
and Kim 1971; Kim 1972); a Choctaw Indian
tribe in east central Mississippi in 1974 (Pe-