Cultural Relativism – Center for Design Fundamentals Research, Kyushu University

The central role of design is not to create something new from scratch but rather to create new economic, social, and symbolic values by combining, adjusting, and processing existing ones in various ways. If this is the case, design can create richer possibilities by considering a more diverse background of values.

In cultural anthropology, we believe that each individual culture constitutes its own value system. The “value” here refers to the criteria for judgments such as “good vs. bad” or “beautiful vs. ugly;” the “standard” for such criteria differs among cultures and there is no universal value standard. Therefore, just as SMAP sings in the song “Sekai ni Hitotsu dake no Hana” (Only One Flower in the World) that we cannot compare the beauty of different flowers, there is no superiority or inferiority among cultures and we should refrain from judging other cultures based on one value standard. This attitude is called “cultural relativism.” Cultural relativism is not a single theoretical system, but a “worldview” formed by Franz Boaz, the father of American anthropology, and his disciples such as Margaret Mead, who wrote Youth in Samoa, and Ruth Benedict, who wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. It became the basic premise of cultural anthropology in the 20th century.

In his 1859 book, The Origin of Species, Darwin explained the diversity of the entire biological world in terms of just two processes: mutation and natural selection. The beauty of this simple theory caused a boom in evolutionary theory in the European academic world. As Western colonies expanded, the cultural diversity of the non-Western world became apparent and the influence of evolutionary theory extended to the study of such cultures. Spencer proposed the theory of social evolution, in which society and culture evolve from lower to higher levels, and explained cultural differences as differences in the degree of evolution. This theory of unilinear evolution, in which Europe was regarded as the pinnacle of evolution, was readily used as the basis for racist thought and arguments for the superiority of the white race over other races, which was used to justify the management of colonies by Europe.

Boaz was a strong opponent of such social evolution and race theories. Before Boaz, anthropologists did not conduct field research on their own but conducted their research based on information obtained from colonial bureaucrats and travelers. Boaz broke away from such “armchair” anthropology and brought empirical research to anthropology by going out into the field and conducting his own research. As he talked directly with the people he was studying and observed their lives, he came to the realization that although the so-called “savages” were different from Europeans, they were not inferior or behind. He came to the view, later called “cultural relativism,” that each individual culture is a rational system based on its own history and cannot be judged by the value standards of other cultures. However, Boaz and his disciples did not use the term “cultural relativism.” Its proponents and the process by which it came to be called so are unclear, but the term was used in anthropology textbooks and overviews as early as the 1940s in the United States.

According to Melville Herskovits, one of the anthropologists who used the term “cultural relativism” and organized it conceptually, the core of cultural relativism is respect for cultural differences and the mutual recognition of the right to be different. In the formation of such an attitude, “ethnocentrism” should be criticized. Ethnocentrism is the feeling of a person belonging to one culture that his or her own culture is “normal,” “natural,” and superior to other cultures. This ethnocentrism is a feeling that exists everywhere, and it is inevitable that people feel that the place in which they are used to living is easy to live in and are proud of their own custom and living place.

However, problems arise when this ethnocentrism is directed toward the denial of other cultures rather than the generation of pride in one’s own culture. In particular, the ethnocentrism of the dominant culture and social group of the time, such as in Western modernity, leads to serious problems such as the affirmation of racism and the justification of colonialism. The essence of ethnocentrism, in a negative sense, lies in valuing one’s own culture so much that it devalues other cultures. In other words, it is an attitude that judges elements of other cultures by the value scale of one’s own culture and considers them to be inferior to one’s own.

This is also the case in the world of design, in which the values of the politically and economically powerful West are implicitly reflected in the evaluation of design. The process by which the values of one “dominant” society, backed by political and economic power, drive out other indigenous values is called “cultural imperialism.” Cultural relativism is also one important measure to criticize this.

Cultural relativism is probably the greatest contribution of cultural anthropology to the general public. It was one of the forces that supported the spread of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, and even today it is a discourse that suppresses overt racism and mono-ethnic views of social evolution. Although it is difficult to prove the direct influence of cultural relativism, it is reasonable to assume that it is reflected in the postmodern discourse from Europe, represented by postcolonialism, which “deconstructs” ethnocentrism on a large scale. Cultural relativism has its limitations and problems, such as the tendency to complicate ethical value judgments about culturally specific actions because of its emphasis on the inherent value of culture, and the danger of fixing cultural differences because of its emphasis on the autonomy of individual cultures. However, it is an indispensable attitude that supports the diversity of cultures and their values and builds a place of pluralistic values that enables richer designs.

(TANI Masakazu)

References

Benedict, Ruth (1946), The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt（ルース・ベネディクト（2005）『菊と刀』長谷川松治訳、講談社学術文庫）
Herskovits, J Melville (1948) Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology, A. A. Knopf, New York.
Mead, Margaret (1928), Coming of Age in Samoa, William Morrow Paperbacks. （マーガレット・ミード（1976）『サモアの思春期』畑中幸子・山本真鳥訳、蒼樹書房）
Spencer, Herbert (2002=1864) Principles of Biology, UP of the Pacific.
Tomlinson, John (1991), Cultural imperialism: A Critical Introduction, Pinter Publishers（ジョン・トムリンソン（1997）『文化帝国主義』片岡信訳、青土社）

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References