
The pioneers of cultural anthropology who created “cultural relativism” - huihuiilly
https://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/gili-kliger-critical-bite-cultural-relativism
======
decasia
I always wish HN was more interested in anthropology as a field of relevant
inquiry. I have an anthropology PhD and it's not just something that's useful
for observing end users — a lot of it is thinking about how to organize
concepts in a humanly meaningful fashion, with a more or less coherent inner
logic in the abstractions. In other words, the exact problems you usually face
if you sit down to write code.

~~~
tempguy9999
> coherent inner logic in the abstractions

Umm, I recall in The Innocen Anthropologist the author said that grain
threshing areas are closely associated with fertility of women. Doesn't really
fit.

I do agree anthroplogy matters because so much of tech is about people not
tech.

~~~
Nasrudith
That could fit as a cultural symbolic concept if grain threshing was
considered work for women. If that was something actually believed the
anthropologist would have done their job properly regardless if the
superstition is complete bunk or not.

Unless it was meant as "actually makes women more fertile".

~~~
tempguy9999
IIRC grain is the reproduction of the plant. Women do the obvious work of
giving birth, hence the link.

There's your "coherent inner logic in the abstractions" right there, it just
isn't useful to HN readers except as a curiosity. We can't do anything with
it.

------
deogeo
> As a group, King tells us, the Boas circle championed positions that many of
> us now take for granted: that categories of race and gender are a product of
> culture, rather than biology

This can be proven by applying PCA to the human genome. If races were a
product of biology, you would expect to see clusters approximately
corresponding to them. But as can be seen from [1], and especially from [2],
no such clusters exist.

[1]
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_component_analysis_of_human_genetic_diversity)

[2] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-
level_hum...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-
level_human_population_structure2.png)

~~~
Hitton
I don't follow. When I look at [2] I clearly see clusters and they look like
they correspond with race.

~~~
twic
There's a fun paper where the authors plot a rough map of Europe based on PCA
of genetic variation:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/)

Slovakia ends up in the wrong place, but other than that it's not bad!

~~~
mjfisher
What a great example of the power of PCA! I absolutely love that you can give
it nothing but a set of raw dimensional data, and it will give you back a set
of axes that are (often) human interpretable.

I remember the first time I did that for a set of children's ratings data, and
got to see games/movies/books spontaneously spread themselves out along fairly
clear age and gender lines. I often wonder what other novel applications it
can have.

------
raxxorrax
Not very elegantly drawn parallels to current cultural discussions. You can
measure it by the prevalence of the name "Trump".

It should rather be an indignation of the current norm to actually do attach
privileges to race/sex/believes.

It was actually brought back 5-10 years ago, or at least was most noticeable
at the time, which doesn't really seem be the next renaissance of social
sciences or anthropology in my opinion. On the contrary. And I very much
believe new anthropologist knowledge would mostly be framed to confirm current
dogma. Not that this would be a historical exception.

I think it is worth thinking about how a relativisation done wrong can quickly
become absolutist again, something that might just have happened.

> banal observation that the people who studied other cultures taught us to
> appreciate diversity

The word diversity is currently nearly synonymous with categorical moral
imperatives, it is even prevalent in the subtext of this very sentence, which
is nearly the opposite of the classical meaning and pretty much a primary
target of what these anthropologist criticized.

------
barry-cotter
People would take anthropology more seriously if it at least aspired to be a
science, instead of having explicitly disavowed that aim. From 2010.

[https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/anthropology-
ass...](https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/anthropology-association-
rejecting-science/27936)

> The weekend before Thanksgiving, at the closing of the annual convention
> held this year in New Orleans, the Executive Board of the AAA discussed a
> new long-range plan that alters the AAA’s mission statement. The new mission
> statement deletes the idea that anthropology is a science. It also blurs the
> intellectual boundaries of the discipline and, ironically, inserts a
> stronger warrant for using anthropology to engage in public advocacy.

> The proposal has already prompted a strong dissent by, so far, at least one
> section of the AAA, i.e. the Society for Anthropological Sciences, which is
> objecting on several grounds. The Society’s listserve, SASci, reflects the
> widespread distress. One prominent anthropologist observed that the proposal
> makes the “mission exclusively educational rather than [focusing] on the
> discovery of knowledge.” Another sees the move as the latest attempt of
> cultural anthropologists “to rid” the profession of archaeologists,
> biological anthropologists, and perhaps even linguists. Another complains,
> “Those of us in applied anthropology are hired because of the scientific
> nature of our work,” a status that the proposed mission statement would
> undermine. Another anthropologist wonders what will happen to the flow of
> federal research funds predicated on anthropology’s contributions to
> science.

~~~
ebiester
In biological anthropology, there is a fair bit more science.

However, in cultural anthropology, its methods are purely qualitative. You
can't make a hypothesis, breed 100 people and have them interact for a
lifetime with your variable (with another 100 for control) to prove a
hypothesis.

The questions that cultural anthropologists are asking cannot ethically be
answered with science because there are too many variables to separate out a
dependent and independent variable.

It's the difference between running a/b testing and going out and talking with
your customers. Going out to talk with your customers is essentially applied
anthropology - the methods are the same.

(source: my husband is a cultural anthropologist and I've been in countless
conversations regarding Anthropology and science.)

~~~
barry-cotter
Having purely qualitative variables does not render science impossible, it
just means you’re dealing with probabilistic inference, so you need more data
points or a more powerful theory. Macroeconomics has a relatively tiny data
set, only one world and ~200 economies with at most 2,000 years of data and
they know plenty, scientifically.

Either anthropologists are making theories about the world which are in
principle testable, in which case they’re doing science, though it can’t
possibly measure up to the standards of proof of physics or they’re just story
telling.

~~~
ebiester
Consider this argument:

"political secularism is the modern state's sovereign power to reorganize
substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought
to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant
subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices." -Saba Mahmood

So, that's a lot of jargon, but let's simplify it. As Americans, we all
understand secularism as "the separation of church and state." However,
Mahmood is saying that doesn't quite cover it. We can look at different
countries that all call themselves secular and that there are interesting
interrelations with religion. Instead, she argued, that secularism is the
government saying where religion can (and cannot) interact with the public
sphere. (This is super simplified, mind you.)

Well, that's a testable hypothesis, but how? Well, Mahmood had an original
question: when she was doing fieldwork with Coptic Christians in Egypt, she
was wondering why it was not cast in terms of minority rights. In Egypt;
Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all were proponents of secularism yet questions of
Copts and Muslims were considered attacks to nationalist unity. Well, is that
a violation of the purity of secularism, or is it that secularism isn't quite
what it seemed? We can look at Turkey and secularism as well - They are
secular under the French consideration of Laïcité (Laiklik in Turkish) and yet
they had a ministry in the government that certified Imams and provided for
the upkeep of the mosques.

So they're not Secularist. But then, what of France, which may be considered
one of the most strict adherents. but even then, schools follow the Christian
liturgical year, including breaks for Christmas and Easter. Yet the government
owns most old church buildings in France and pays for its maintenance, and
there are clear governmental preferences of Christianity over Islam.

And how about the United states, where it opens with a prayer, most often by a
Christian?

So, then, we have a lot of data, but it is data that is talking about the
definition of a word. Who cares about a definition? Well, that definition
tells us a lot about the cultures of the US, France, Turkey, and Egypt (among
others - see India) but it's not exactly a testable hypothesis. It's closer to
what a philosopher does than a Sociologist. ____

But even then, what if it was "just story telling?" Anthropologists have
helped to elucidate cultures not our own and referencing what makes them
common and different. I argue that that is inherently valuable.

