“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 ...

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.

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 

Introduction

Hard Reading ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
Tom Shippey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Unexpected Consequences

The relativity of cultural values is effectively axiomatic in modern cultural anthropology. But if cultures are relative, can they not be compared, critiqued, and evaluated? Is there any basis for the belief that modern liberal democracy is the best solution for humanity as a whole? In this chapter science fiction is seen as presenting a series of test cases. In some stories, science is portrayed as another type of superstition. In apocalyptic stories, moral values are suggested to be inappropriate for changed circumstances. Most strikingly, in many stories the possibility is raised of social engineering to effect desired cultural changes, with in most cases undesired and unexpected consequences. Science fiction offers both self-assertion and self-questioning in ways more probing and more painful than commonly realised.

The Second Interlude: Other Worlds

2016 ◽  
pp. 148-166
Author(s):  
Mike Ashley
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
English Speaking

This chapter charts to growth of the sf magazine in other English speaking countries, chiefly Canada, Australia and Eire, but also South Africa and Singapore. This brought other national identities into science fiction, with a wide range of approaches from Canada’s remote individuality to Australia’s recognition of its aboriginal influences.

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.

Saint Augustine's Doctrine of Evil

1963 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-276
Author(s):  
Robert M. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Metaphysical Question ◽  
The Will ◽  
Dynamic Link ◽  
Will Of God

This essay will attempt to make some systematic clarity out of the thought of St. Augustine in reference to his conception of evil. The problem of evil is one which confronted St. Augustine at every point of his intellectual development; it is everywhere either to be openly seen or to be perceived lurking just beneath the surface of the question at issue. This assertion, however, needs some qualification as will become evident as the essay develops. The essay will attempt to show that the problem of evil for St. Augustine resolves itself into the problem of the will. This problem is, for Augustine, clearly at the base of man's moral dilemmas. The question of the will of God is at the root of the theological-philosophical doctrines of creation and natural order. The problem of the will comes to the fore as the metaphysical question par excellence; bound up with the question of the motivation of the will (or more particularly here, the question of the ‘cause’ of the defection of the human will) is the arch-problem of the introduction of a dynamic link into the movement from an unmoved Creator to a changing creation. An attempt will be made to point out the bearing of the more overtly theological questions of grace and predestination upon the questions of the will, evil and creation. Of a piece with these concepts is that of the Augustinian epistemology.

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 SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL Y LA LITERATURA DE FICCIÓN Los cuentos de vacaciones y su valor pedagógico

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Collado-Vázquez ◽  
Jesús María Carrillo
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
Educational Purpose ◽  
Scientific Education ◽  
Ramón Y Cajal

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, father of neuroscience, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906 for his neural theory. Besides being a great histologist, researcher, and teacher, he showed interest in photography, philosophy, astronomy, chess, and hypnosis. He wrote very relevant scientific and biographical works as well as his Vacation stories. Five science fiction tales, five short stories with an educational purpose that mix scientific concepts, fiction, and some irony, and where microscopy and microbiology are always present. These stories raise difficult social or moral dilemmas that are often motivated by advances in science or an incorrect scientific education of the population. Cajal sought to improve that education and banish false beliefs and superstitions.

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