Cultural Relativity

"Cultural relativity" can best be understood by defining the terms.  "Cultural" refers to the social and political practices of a group of people.  "Relativity" means a comparison between two or more things. 

The cultures may be African-American, Lakota, German, Hawaiian, Japanese, Tanzanian, Latvian, or any other.  In our case, since we are studying Native American culture, we will be concerned with the indigenous cultures of the Native American peoples in particular and modern world culture in general.

At least three kinds of comparisons may be drawn. 

First, the same group of people, for example the Cherokee, may be examined at different times in their history - the Historic Period (1492 - 1890 CE) and the Modern Era (1890 CE - today). 

A second method of comparison is to examine aspects of two or more different cultures at the same moment in time.  Here the comparative choices are:

Third, comparison can be made between subgroups of the Cherokee, for example youth/elders, men/women, Eastern/Oklahoma, reservation/non-reservation, and many more subgroups, either in the same or different eras.

Cultural relativity is an understanding that human culture and practices change from time to time and place to place.  What is acceptable in one circumstance may not be acceptable in another.  In other words, everything is relative, including right and wrong.

Time and place affect how we think about things.  A group of pioneers in covered wagons, stranded by an early blizzard in the high Sierra Nevada Mountains in the late 1850s shared the fate of a group of Uruguayan rugby players from Stella Maris College whose jet aircraft crashed in the Andes Mountains 130 years later.  They all ate human flesh, something few of us can think about doing, even if we can accept that it was the only way they had to survive.   Compare this idea to the fact that some historians believe that the Aztec people regularly ate human flesh, as they believe did many of the tribes of the Woodlands and the Carribeans.  Some archaeologists claim that evidence of cannibalism also exists in the ruins of the Southwestern cliff dwellings.  Criminologists tell us that there are serial murderer/cannibals living among us now.

For most of us, these facts create a deep unsettling feeling of horror.  Still, we are more generous in our attitudes about survival-forced cannibals, like the poor souls from Stella Maris, than we are about cannibalistic serial killers, like Jeffrey Dahmer.   We recognize those who kill so they can eat their victims as infinitely more reprehensible, some would say "evil," than survival-forced cannibals.  We have different opinions about the moral character of these two groups of human-flesh eaters or anthropophagues.   We evaluate different anthropophagues differently, based on our relative judgment of their behaviors and motivations.   Why do we judge an anthropophague who kills someone and then eats them differently than we judge someone who eats a person (they did not kill) in order to survive?  The answer lies in cultural relativity.

Until some years ago, in a practice called suttee (literal translation = "the good or chaste wife"), Hindu widows were asked to climb upon their husband's cremation fire or kill themselves soon after his death by some other method.  They did, by the millions.  Girls trained for this from childhood; so they would not flinch at the pain of the burning, they dipped their fingers in boiling water while cooking rice.  They also watched as the women in their community burned to death, making the outcome for the girls very real. We think this is unbelievably cruel and heartless, but it was done because after the death of her husband a woman's life would become intolerable.  She would be left to fend for herself, eventually starving to death or dying of exposure.  While most of us could not stand to think of our mothers burning to death or slowly dying of exposure and hunger, this was the reality of the time during which this practice, now mercifully disappearing, developed.

Not every example is as blatant as those given above and some are more blatant.  The value system of a culture determines the relative permissibility of any action.  In archaic Native California, the social system demanded that when a crop became ripe, before everyone could go and gather for their family, a group would harvest enough to feed some of the crop to the entire community in a First Fruit ceremony.  Then, after everyone had shared equally, folks were free to gather for themselves.  Anyone who harvested before the First Fruit ceremony, was ostracized and soundly criticized as weak and selfish.  They also had rules about the order in which people received their food, so that the elders and the most vulnerable were served before the more able-bodied community members.  Most Americans are shocked at such a system; our standard is elbows out wide, "I'm getting my share, and part of yours if I can." This lack of consideration for the less-able is demonstrated by the rule at most schools, "no cutting in the lunch line," so that smaller children are not pushed to the back of the line by the bigger kids.  This American cultural standard is also witnessed at the fiascos where stores offer a few units of an item that hundreds want.  People are crushed in the stampede for consumer goods.  While morality will not shut these injurious stampedes down, the fear of losses from law suits might.

One of the areas that students have trouble applying the ideas of cultural relativity is around sexual issues.  Some students seem not to be able to step out of their own perspective in this area particularly, so I would like to address the issue in a bit of depth.  It was not uncommon for Native men and women to have children before they were married.  They used the proof of their parenting abilities as evidence of their suitability for marriage.  By contrast, we encourage children to marry and then hope for the best for any offspring the marriage produces or a woman becomes pregnant and the father disappears.  Native children always had a safety net, which modern American children are mostly lacking. 

In addition, Native American women and men, enjoyed a greater degree of sexual freedom than modern Americans are allowed and the genders were allowed an equal degree of freedom.  Women could divorce in many locations by simply putting the man's things outside the door.  He would never cross the doorway again.  A man could divorce by packing his things and leaving.  A widow might choose to go and live with her deceased husband's brother and be his wife, even if the brother was already married.  Another example can be drawn from the cultures of the Northwest Coast where there was an interval between the changes of seasons that lasted four days.  During that time, people cast off their identities and were encouraged to do what they could not do during the rest of the year.  They were free to have sex with whomever they desired for that short period, with no social stigma being attached.  It is common for students to respond as if the cultures being examined should be judged by the same, often sexist and patriarchal, standards of Americans.  The typical comments slut-shame the women and maintain that multiple partners are normal for men in general.  My hope would be that rather than take the easy way out, students think of the cultural benefit of such a practice, since Native people generally had specific reasons for doing specific things.

In Native communities, rape happened, but it happened very rarely.  Women not only had greater upper-body strength than modern American women, but because sexuality was more open and women and men were not shamed for having sex, rape was kept to a minimum.  A Native American man who was know to try to rape a woman would be soundly humiliated with taunts about their lack of charm and attractiveness, as humor was often used to help men recognize their shortcomings. 

By contrast, in America, one-third of all American women can expect to be raped at least once in their lifetime and if they are Native American, living on a reservation, enter the military, or choose a domestic abuser as a partner, the rate is much higher.  Those figures are unacceptable, but Americans don't seem too worried about it as the rate has remained stable as the population has grown which means the number of men who are rapists is growing.  What is it about American culture that accepts rape as normal when we have evidence from other cultures that men can be raised not to rape women?  There was a sustained fight to keep the Violence Against Women Act of 2015 from protecting Native American women based on whether or not they and/or the perpetrator lived on a reservation.

So, to relate this to your writing assignment, think about the time and place the authors were born and how they were influenced by the morals and politics of their day.  Think about how they wrote about the relative differences in American Indian culture and American or Western culture.  Here are a few questions to get you going. 1) How objective is the author's view of Native American culture? 2) What was the cultural context from which they approach their thesis - are they insiders or outsiders?  3) What do they take as granted?  4) To what extent do they examine their own point(s) of view and cultural bias?

Now ask the same four questions of your own work.