Study Questions for Brown 2008
Brown, Michael F.
2008Cultural Relativism 2.0. Current Anthropology 49(3):363-384.
What has anthropology been studying in recent decades instead of cultural relativism?
How is cultural relativism perceived outside anthropology?
How does cultural relativism fit with consumerism?
What changes in human societies of the last 50 years has required adjustments to cultural relativism?
How has the particularist view of cultural relativism interfered with anthropological understanding?
What did Boas argue against when he argued for cultural relativism?
According to Boas, why are cultural practices “uniquely satisfying” to the members of a society?
Why are all people ethnocentric?
How does Herskovits justify criticizing his own society when he does not accept a universal scale for judging society?
What kind of relativity did Kluckhohn criticize in 1955?
What feature of American society made cultural relativism more important in American than in Britain?
How did the American Anthropological Association react to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? What was the effect?
How are Universal Human Rights a reflection of the specifics of Western culture?
How did feminist scholarship affect the view of human rights in anthropology?
How did Rubin’s writing the concept of culture?
What is similar between Abu Lughod’s writing concerning Muslim women and Shweder’s argument about female genital mutilation?
How is tolerance connected to politics.
What are the three main parts of relativism?
What kind of universals is found by the position that human societies share deep moral principles that are applied in different ways depending on the circumstance?
What have anthropologists proposed as general principles of morality?
What does Brown mean by the term “Dialogic morality”?
How does globalization present new moral problems?
How do anthropologists view the evolution of morality in the West? Why?
What is the basic problem for the biological approach to human morality (e.g., evolutionary psychologists?
Why haven’t anthropologists been more prominent in debates about multiculturalism?
What is the anthropological consensus on cultural relativism?
What is Cultural Relativism 2.0?