Ethical Relativism: Is There a Defensible Version?

Spirited accusations and counteraccusations of romanticism, ethnocentrism, and banality have long been conventionalized features of debate in anthropological forums. While the spirit of the debate is not always understood or appreciated outside the discipline, those stylized allegations do give natural expression to a problematic inherent in anthropological interpretation: the tension, both creative and destructive, between relativism, developmentalism, and universalism in the representation of the native, the primitive, the alien, or the "other." The problematic arises in the first place because of the apparent strangeness of many of the ideas and practices of the "other." Confronted by the apparent strangeness of such ideas and practices as witchctaft, pollution and original sin, menstrual seclusion, infanticide, and ritualized homosexuality, anthropologists have reacted interpretively and imaginatively in one of three ways. Some, the universalists, have tried to look through what is alien in search of deeper similarities, as though the strangeness was an illusion.