Emily Heckel
Official URL: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1051&context=philo
Abstract: Cultural relativism is an integral part of the field methodology for cultural anthropologists. The concept of cultural relativism grew from developments within the philosophy of language, particularly associated with figures such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Whorf, and Sapir. These philosophers all argue for some version of the concept that linguistic categories, encoded in thought, help create the shared cultural realities in which we live. This concept of linguistic relativism, famously articulated in the SapirWhorf hypothesis, led to an emphasis in anthropology on the emic, or insider’s, perspective. Ethnography is the process of eliciting the meanings by which the host culture constructs reality and translating these into the discourse of the discipline in a final written product. Steven Pinker, along with other evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists, refers to any and all versions of this view as the Standard Social Science Model allowing him to defeat cultural relativism in one fell swoop (or so he thinks). Until a few years ago, the main critique of the ethnographic method came from the postmodern critique of science, which questions objectivity in the social sciences on both ethical and epistemological grounds. Recently, the critique of cultural relativism has come from evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists. Research in cognitive science and psychology points to an evolutionary cause for what has previously been deemed cultural behavior. Some, including Steven Pinker, believe that this research should lead us to give primacy to evolutionary causes and should undermine any version of cultural relativism. Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist, presents
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