Westermarck’s Morocco

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Leck
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Sexual Science

This chapter examines the role played by Edward Westermarck, a Finnish/British scholar who was considered the world's leading authority on sexual “morality and marriage,” in the disciplinary transition from the ethnocentrism of Darwinian anthropology to cultural relativism. Westermarck wrote extensively on Morocco and expressed his views based on emerging conceptions of anthropology that sometimes challenged earlier imperial tenets. The chapter analyzes Westermarck's scholarship, particularly his sexual anthropology, in the context of parallel epistemic crises in the disciplines of anthropology and sexual science. It also discusses Westermarck's Moroccan anthropology of homosexuality and argues that it was contradictory. Finally, it looks at the emergence of a new relativist epistemology, first in European sexual science and later in British cultural anthropology, and shows how the integration of anthropology with sexual science gave rise to a more interdisciplinary, less medical view of sexuality.

scholarly journals Researching gender: the challenge of global diversity today

Afrika Focus ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chia Longman
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Gender Mainstreaming ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Gender Research ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Binary Model ◽  
Field Versus ◽  
And Gender

The text of this paper is based on a lecture given at the symposium of the Ghent African Platform “Researching Gender in/on Africa” at Ghent University in December 2009. It addresses some general challenges faced by ‘gender studies’ as an autonomous field versus ‘gender research’ as an integrated topic within mainstream disciplines in academia. Gender studies have sometimes superseded ‘women’s studies’ and expanded to cover the terrain of study of various forms of diversity including men’s and transgender studies. We will show that the ‘mainstreaming’ of gender in public policy at local, national and transnational levels is a development which may potentially lead to the loss of a – feminist – political edge. Secondly, while gender studies with their emphasis on socially constructed gender as opposed to biological essentialist understandings of ‘sex’ appear to face the challenge of a popular ‘new biological determinism’, it is shown that the binary model of sex/gender in fact has been criticised for some time now from within feminist theory and gender research. This is (selectively) illustrated with research from four disciplines, including the work of African gender studies scholars, i.e. feminist philosophy, social sciences (in particular socio-cultural anthropology), history and biology itself. This then shows how the accusation that gender studies would be ‘socially deterministic’ without attending to bodily matters or materiality is unfounded. Finally, it is argued that there is still a need for gender studies to become more culturally diverse, more global and transnational in its outlook, by becoming more deeply attuned to the way gender intersects with other forms of difference and taking into account postcolonial critiques of western feminist paternalism, without falling into the trap of cultural relativism. Key words: gender studies, feminism, sex/gender debate, gender mainstreaming, postcolonial critique, cultural relativism, Afrocentrism 

“People are Plastic”: Jack Vance and the Dilemma of Cultural Relativism

Hard Reading ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 106-120
Author(s):  
Tom Shippey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
English Speaking

Jack Vance is commonly regarded as one of the most distinctive stylists of science fiction, a reputation which he indeed richly deserves.1 It is the purpose of this essay, however, to argue that Vance’s work should not be treated as merely whimsical or decorative, but should be seen as centrally preoccupied with one of the most acute moral dilemmas and major intellectual developments of our age: a dilemma and a development furthermore which tend to be avoided or left unfocused, to our detriment, in literature of the mainstream. The intellectual development is that of social or cultural anthropology, as presented to a wide English-speaking public in the middle years of this century. Marvin Harris says, in his ...

Private Acts/Public Policy: Alfred Kinsey, the American Law Institute and the Privatization of American Sexual Morality

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Allyn
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Behavior ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Sexual Science ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way ◽  
Alfred Kinsey

Alfred Kinsey has long been recognized for his crucial role in the history of American sexual science. Kinsey's massive studies of American sexual behavior changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches. Scholars have noted that Kinsey's efforts paved the way for the work of Masters and Johnson and contributed to a postwar climate of “openness” about sexual behavior. In effect, Kinsey's studies signaled the final triumph of scientific candor over the nineteenth century “conspiracy of silence.” Furthermore, Kinsey's quantitative approach advanced what Paul Robinson has called the “modernization of sex,” and Kinsey's discussion of homosexuality inspired both the homophile movement of the 1950's and the anti-homosexual moral panic of the same decade. Yet for all of Kinsey's significance, his part in shaping the social policies of the 1950's and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960's has received surprisingly little historical analysis.

Against Relativism: Cultural Diversity and the Search for Ethical Universals in Medicine, by Ruth Macklin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 304 pp.

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-579
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Spike
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Medical Ethics ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Strong Argument ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Ethical System ◽  
Oxford University Press

Ruth Macklin's new book, Against Relativism, says in its subtitle that it intends to address cultural diversity and the search for ethical universals in medicine. This it does very well. Every chapter includes some discussion of cultural relativism, cultural anthropology, or postmodernism, and her analyses are acute and scathing. Macklin is unabashed in her defense of the principles of medical ethics, and she gives a strong argument that principles are essential elements of any ethical system that is to successfully survive the skeptical doubts of relativism.

Ghosts or Absence of Light? The Understanding of Shadows

Anthropos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 471-480
Author(s):  
Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Rational Explanation ◽  
Collective Representations ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Material Substances

Ethnography and historical disciplines report on different kinds of folk or premodern societies’ ideas and superstitions regarding shadows that are not to find among the collective representations of modern, industrial societies. Shadows were seen as material substances and as doubles of persons and objects, as mystical beings capable to exert all kinds of magical influences. After certain time, however, these ideas were replaced by the rational view that seems so self-evident to every modern adult person. The article shows that developmental psychology has found the same mystical ideas among children. Only older children, due to their psychological development, discover the rational explanation of the origin and nature of shadows. It is argued that the strict parallel of the ontogenetic and historical development of the understanding of shadows is by no means an exception but reflects the same parallel concerning the development of the complete understanding of nature and world, physics and cosmos. Overall, developmental psychology delivers a key to understanding the historical development of humankind, thus forming a basis for ethnology or cultural anthropology specifically, or the human disciplines in general. This in former times widely demonstrated view was replaced by the currently prevailing ideas of “cultural relativism” and “universalism of mankind” especially after 1980. However, the empirical data do not support relativism and universalism but rather the developmental approaches of the previous generations of the human disciplines.

“Ethnographies”: American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology

Prospects ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guenter H. Lenz
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Walker Evans

When henry nash smith defined American Studies in 1957 as “the study of American culture past and present, as a whole,” he summarized more than two decades of a wide-ranging and self-conscious critical analysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for the unified or holistic “method” through which American Studies would, finally, achieve maturity as an (interdisciplinary) discipline. The 1930s were the decade when, as Warren Susman pointed out years ago, the complexity of American culture as well as the culture concept were discovered and discussed in the wider public. We think of the work of cultural anthropology, of the studies in cultural relativism by Margaret Mead or of patterns of culture by Ruth Benedict that emphasized the unity of cultures and often were written with a self-critical look at American culture in mind. What was, however, even more important was the fact that during the 1930s American culture manifested itself as a multiculture, as a culture that was characterized even more by variety, heterogeneity, tensions, and alternative traditions than by the strong drive toward national identity and consensus. Cultural anthropologists, critics, and (“documentary”) writers such as “native anthropologist” Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, or James Agee (with photographer Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of cultural critique and ethnographic writing in the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association in The Cultural Approach to History, could argue in 1940 that the “total cultural approach” does by no means imply that American culture is something like an organic unity, but that “American culture” is exactly the multiplicity of regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power, not some “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.

scholarly journals Global citizenship and the challenge from cultural relativism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 1141
Author(s):  
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Universals ◽  
The World ◽  
Anthropological Research

Do human beings live in a shared world or in several? The traditional answer from social and cultural anthropology has been that although the physical world is uniform, the world as it is perceived by humans is fundamentally and irreducibly diverse, since human worlds are culturally constructed and cultures are unique and particular in character.As a result of this perspective, there has always been a tense relationship between anthropology and universalist claims, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. This chapter charts the dialogue and tension between the cultural relativism of classic anthropology and human rights universalism, but the main focus is on the consequences of globalisation for anthropological thinking about diversity and human universals. It is argued that as a direct result of the increased interconnectedness of human societies, classic cultural relativism has become both epistemologically obsolete and normatively objectionable. Although the moral worlds inhabited by humans are still diverse, they are now connected in ways which have implications for the ethics of anthropological research. By discussing a handful of examples, the analytical and moral dilemmas are exposed, and the contrast with mid-20th century anthropology, when the world was still widely seen as ‘an archipelago of cultures’, is made abundantly clear.

What Is Religion?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude Calame
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Evolutionary Explanation ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Contemporary Study ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter examines two major trends in the contemporary study of religion—cognitive science and cultural anthropology. While the former seeks a universal, naturalist, evolutionary explanation for religion, the latter emphasizes cultural relativism, variability, and local context. After interrogating the weakness of both, the chapter suggests that Bruce Lincoln’s more critical, reflexive, and ideologically sensitive approach offers one of the best ways to move forward in the study of religion today. While recognizing the limitations and provisional nature of any definition of religion, Lincoln’s approach offers for a broad comparative method while also paying close attention to history, politics, and social change.

scholarly journals Culturalism: From idea to unconscious presupposition

Sociologija ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens-Martin Eriksen ◽  
Frederik Stjernfelt
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
The Political

The authors argue that the ideas found in the harder versions of multiculturalism have already been supported by the mid-20th century social-cultural anthropology - both in the scholarly works and in the political activism of its proponents. This form of cultural relativism, making the leap from anthropological method to ontological claims about the organic essence of cultures, is hereby named ?culturalism?. By this notion the authors understand a theory of culture that includes central anthropological ideas: a culture precedes and determines individuals belonging to it; cultures have unlimited freedom to generate differences, uninhibited by any human nature; cultures form closed, organic units where all their different articulations, from gastronomy to theology, form an unbreakable whole which implies that these value systems are unique and in no way may be compared with, or judged against, other value systems. Cultural relativism formulated in the American anthropology of the 1940?s and onwards is far from being a simple doctrine. It consists of a whole cluster of loosely connected facts, axioms, propositions, ranging from the completely unproblematic, to strongly problematic and even hardly understandable ideas. All those statements have been critically scrutinized in this paper.

scholarly journals Researching gender: the challenge of global diversity today

Afrika Focus ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Chia Longman
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Transgender Studies ◽  
Gender Research ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Binary Model ◽  
Field Versus ◽  
And Gender

The text of this paper is based on a lecture given at the symposium of the Ghent African Platform “Researching Gender in/on Africa” at Ghent University in December 2009. It addresses some general challenges faced by 'gender studies' as an autonomous field versus ‘gender research’ as an integrated topic within mainstream disciplines in academia. Gender studies have sometimes superseded ‘women’s studies’ and expanded to cover the terrain of study of various forms of diversity including men’s and transgender studies. We will show that the ‘mainstreaming’ of gender in public policy at local, national and transnational levels is a development which may potentially lead to the loss of a – feminist – political edge. Secondly, while gender studies with their emphasis on socially constructed gender as opposed to biological essentialist understandings of ‘sex’ appear to face the challenge of a popular ‘new biological determinism’, it is shown that the binary model of sex/gender in fact has been criticised for some time now from within feminist theory and gender research. This is (selectively) illustrated with research from four disciplines, including the work of African gender studies scholars, i.e. feminist philosophy, social sciences (in particular socio-cultural anthropology), history and biology itself. This then shows how the accusation that gender studies would be ‘socially deterministic’ without attending to bodily matters or materiality is unfounded. Finally, it is argued that there is still a need for gender studies to become more culturally diverse, more global and transnational in its outlook, by becoming more deeply attuned to the way gender intersects with other forms of difference and taking into account postcolonial critiques of western feminist paternalism, without falling into the trap of cultural relativism.

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