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Cultural Relativism/Cultural Difference 311 CULTURAL RELATIVISm/CULTURAL DIFFERENcE 311 to the dispositions of thought and action learnt by indi- is created and regulated by formal institutions, often as viduals. This occurs through processes of enculturation condition of access to otherwise exclusive positions of or socialization that an individual goes through as they privilege. Examples include degrees, awards, titles, or grow up within a social context. Some of the charac- qualifications, which may afford entry into professional- teristics of transmitting embodied capital are that its ized practices such as teaching, architecture, law, and learning cannot be delegated (I cannot outsource, for medicine; access to clubs and associations; or simply instance, the process of learning dinner table etiquette provide honorary symbols of one’s social position. in the same way that I can for the making of my clothes), Institutionalized cultural capital acts as a social marker its learning is time intensive and cannot be transmit- in the same way as other form of objective capital; ted instantaneously like a gift or commodity, and can however, it has added effect of conferring lasting mark- involve the same deliberation over opportunity costs ers of difference beyond one embodied state. A person that comes with any kind of investment. This last point can still hold a Bachelors qualification, for instance, relates not only to choices made between different even if the knowledge and skills used to acquire it have cultural activities (watching television vs attending an art long been forgotten. gallery), but also the length of time and economic capital that an individual or family can devote to “accumulating” References and further reading cultural capital. As Bourdieu puts it, embodied cultural capital represents “external wealth converted into an Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In J. Richardson integral part of the person.” (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Objective cultural capital refers to material objects Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood, 1986, such as books, artworks, musical instruments, etc., the pp. 241–58. consumption of which presupposes an already existing Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction level of cultural capital. The possession of a book, for in Education, Society and Culture. Trans. Richard Nice. instance, presupposes an ability to read, just as display- London: Sage Publications, 1977. ing an artwork presupposes some degree of artistic Matt Kiem appreciation. Finer social distinctions are possible in each case. A celebrity magazine, for instance, is appre- See also Aesthetics; Class. ciated by its readers on terms that are different to that of a novel or a travel guide. What is perhaps even more significant, however, is that different modes of cultural consumption are relationally constituted and not neces- CULTURaL RELaTIVISm/CULTURaL sarily fixed or inherent to the objects themselves. Thus DIFFERENcE the same celebrity magazine may be read more or less ironically depending upon how conscious the reader is Cultural relativism, like cultural absolutism or cultural of it being “trashy,” and at the same time an artwork pluralism, refers to a theoretical system for classifying may be derided for being out of touch with the tastes of and understanding human variation. The concept of a particular social group. In each case the social position cultural relativism emerged as a set of descriptive and of the consumer, meaning where their relative degree of epistemological precepts within American anthropology cultural or economic capital places them within the social in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, field (rich philistine, poor bohemian, conservative work- more broadly, in the course of the decline of polygenetic ing class, etc.), becomes a key factor in how an object and biological-racial explanations for human variation. is encountered, interpreted, and used. In this sense, More recently, it has become central to debates over depending on the social context, the disposition of the legal and political norms, particularly around multicultur- group or person, and their relative social position, the alism, the politics of race and racism, and international same object may be appropriated as a marker of social human rights law. As a taxonomic system, cultural rela- privilege and domination, empowerment and resistance, tivism involves a culturalist iteration of some key tenets or an object of embarrassment and social domination of earlier, biological accounts of race, such as essen- (what Bourdieu would call symbolic violence). tialism, fixity, comparability, and ranking. Because of As Bourdieu describes it, institutional capital can be this, while cultural relativism is often associated with thought of as a form of objectified cultural capital that valuing cultural differences, it does not necessarily draw THE BLOOMSbURY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DESIGN 9781472521545_txt_prf_C.indd 311 21/09/15 2:39 PM 312 CULTURAL RELATIVISm/CULTURAL DIFFERENcE Advertisement for Benetton’s new advertising campaign entitled “Unhate” in Paris, November 17, 2011 showing US President Barack Obama and the Chinese leader Hu Jintao. © IAN LANGSDON/epa/Corbis. antithetical prescriptive or organizational inferences is retained in contemporary biology (as in “tissue from those of cultural absolutism or genetic-racial theo- culture”), and in its figurative association with civilization ries of human difference. or improvement, as in “cultured.” There are immense and ongoing debates in a range of scholarly fields about what culture means (Bottomore, 1962; Harris, Cultural difference 1968; Nelson and Grossberg, 1988; Taylor, 1989; To understand how cultural relativism emerged and Keesing, 1990; Donald and Rattansi, 1992; Young, works as a system of classification, it is important to 1995; Malik, 1996; Fowler, 1997; Castro-Gomez and understand what is distinctive about the basic unit into Johnson, 2000; Muller, 2005). Across the twentieth which it groups and through which it comprehends century, culture has been used to refer to anything from human variation. It often pertains to debates regarding the extrasomatic, environmental influences, beliefs, and the ascription and arrangement of particular and univer- customs, through to art, literature, emotions, or ideas. sal cultural traits within a larger classification system. The argument that culture is determinative is neces- Yet the use of “culture” as a way of grouping and sary but not sufficient to establish an argument for either then comparing, ranking, or relating human variations cultural relativism or cultural absolutism. To be able to both is historically recent and has particular implica- posit a relative (absolute, or other kind of) ordering tions. Among other things, it posits that cultures—as between singular and discrete cultures it is necessary to with races—can be attributed with unique, preexist- assume the factual existence of indivisible, transmissi- ing properties, and that the question to be answered ble, or heritable, nonbiological human variations. In this (through relativism, absolutism, pluralism, etc.) is that sense, cultural relativism is, as with cultural absolutism, of the organizational or evaluative rules of a subsequent premised on the anthropological concept of kinship as encounter with external differences. a key causal mechanism of cultural transmission, in The word “culture” is derived from the Latin contrast to that of genetic theories of racial inheritance. “cultura,” meaning “cultivation.” This agricultural sense For the American cultural anthropologist Margaret THE BLOOMSbURY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DESIGN 9781472521545_txt_prf_C.indd 312 21/09/15 2:40 PM CULTURAL RELATIVISm/CULTURAL DIFFERENcE 313 Mead (1901–78), culture is “the systematic body of methods that would serve as the template for subse- learned behavior which is transmitted from parents to quent debates about cultural relativism in the field of children” (Benedict, 1934, p. vii). The European anthro- international and national law. pologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) similarly Prior to and beyond Benedict’s contribution to defined culture as “the organisation of human beings the formalization of a theory of culture, it was the into permanent groups,” involving “inherited artifacts, confluence of European Enlightenment ideas about goods, technical process, ideas, habits and values” universal human progress, the decline of polygenetic (1944, pp. 621–46). As with cultural absolutism and and biological explanations of human variation across cultural pluralism, theories of cultural relativism are the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the search predicated on the historical emergence of a distinctively for alternative accounts for the persistence of inequality cultural understanding of the following: theories of the that “culture” began to assume a central explanatory causal mechanisms and origins of human variation; importance (Young, 1995; Lentin, 2005). It is these explanations of the persistence of those variations as historical shifts that gave rise to debates around the a set of unique habits or customs over time (as herita- normative or prescriptive dimensions of cultural rela- ble or transmissible); and operating principles or rules tivism (and cultural absolutism), specifically around the regarding the trans- or intracultural ranking and ordering formulation of legal principles or rules regarding the of anthropic diversity. trans- or intracultural ranking, ordering,
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