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There are so many things that I wish I had understood before heading North. My experiences as a graduate student working with communities in the Canadian Arctic have helped to shape my approach to preparing new graduate students for arctic research. We travel North with the best of intentions but be prepared (to be wrong). In this chapter, I discuss some of the lessons that I have learned working with Inuit communities and offer insights to new researchers.

This chapter describes the concept of resilience and its relevance for global mental health in humanitarian settings and beyond. It focuses on resilience among people affected by complex humanitarian disasters, gender-based violence and conflict-related sexual violence, and historical trauma. We look at resilience in the context of Rwanda following the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. Case material is drawn from an ethnographic study of resilience among Rwandan genocide-rape survivors and a qualitative study of the experience of Rwandan youth descending from women survivors of genocide rape whose mothers participated in a resilience promotion intervention. In addition, the intergenerational effects of women’s resilience on their children’s lives are also discussed. The qualitative and narrative data we present illuminates ethical issues of universal vs. culturally specific conceptions of resilience; consideration of speakability vs. unspeakability for collective resilience; and strengthening resilience as a humanitarian action vs. also as a development and peace-building activity. These issues are analyzed through the ethical lenses of humanitarian standards and principles, cultural relativism, moral experience, social acknowledgment, and the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. Recommendations for ethically engaged resilience promotion practice in complex humanitarian and recovery settings are provided.

This chapter shows that the development of global media ethics follows the path of monism (biased towards the global and Western-centered), ethical relativism (biased to the local), and pluralism (between the global and the local). This chapter argues that the first two have been eliminated, and the solution of pluralism seems to be caught in the irreconcilable contradiction between the global and the local. Then, global media ethics loses its meaning and even falls into ethical nihilism. This chapter claims that interculturality, developed from intersubjectivity, provides a solution, that is, the construction of media ethics based on dynamic and global dialogue can lead to a global media ethics of interaction and integration.

Describing the view on possible cyborgean ethics and politics, I call for revision of Kant’s idea of separation of the world of causes and the world of ends, as proposed by Margolis. This revision is neither a trial to Darwinize Kant, nor is it flat Darwinism, but it is the perspective of cultural realism recognizing the intentional existence of cultural entities.

I expose that the General Theory of Signs of Ch. S. Peirce and the cultural realism of Joseph Margolis allow for recognition of cyborg persons. This is because of the cultural and social modes of existence of personal identity, which does not have any specific materiality, but is necessarily embodied.

Chapter 5, “Melville Herskovits: The Negro Past and Present” explores the wartime contributions of Melville Herskovits, founder and Chair of the first African Studies program in the country, at Northwestern University. Herskovits’s two decades of research in the field of what could now be called black diaspora studies, preceding World War II, is reflected in his wartime publication The Myth of the Negro Past (1941). While Herskovits proffered historicized critiques of American racism and European colonialism in his scholarly publications and other work during the war, he also deployed in his government duties the insights of cultural relativism to buttress policy suggestions that served the interests of Euro-American colonial projects in Africa in particular.

Lauren Griffith integrates ethnographic performance in her classroom in an effort to combat a climate of fear in today’s society, especially for Latinx members of US society. This experiential pedagogy helps students understand the complexities of the global system and view the world through cultural relativism. In this ethnographic performance, groups of students are assigned a character, an Ixil Maya who lived through Guatemala’s Civil War. The characters are composites based on David Stoll’s (2018) El Norte or Bust! Students work together in teams to make decisions as if they were that character. Based upon that character’s position, must make decisions about whether and how they want to migrate to the United States. Griffith conducted pre-/post-surveys to understand students’ experiences and perspectives of the simulation as a teaching method. The performance of Maya “characters” assists all students in cultivating empathy for immigrants currently being dehumanized in official discourse.

E-communication offers considerable potential for learning about one’s own and others’ cultures and enhancing intercultural understanding. However, an in-depth analysis of variables related to openness to others, critical self-awareness and self-analysis, which are central to developing intercultural communicative competence (Byram 1997), cannot be easily tested (Dervin and Vlad 2010; Martin 2015; Zarate 2003). With this challenge in mind, our project engages language learners in three universities in Australia, Germany and Mexico in cross-cultural exchanges via Skype. Discourse analytical tools are used to document how learners talk about culture and for what purposes, with the aim to explore: (1) participants’ willingness to engage in collaborative processing of cultural information; and (2) participants’ online “intercultural dynamics” (Ogay 2000, p. 53). Arguments are made in support of a “developmental paradigm” (Hammer 2015) that shifts the intercultural lens beyond the individual’s skills and traits to the process through which interculturality is constructed between interlocutors. By examining exchanges with a focus on features of dialogic interaction whereby students recontextualize their own knowledge with their interlocutor, this study illustrates how students mediate their own learning (Kohler 2015) and develop an awareness of their own attitudes.

Chapter 6, “Ruth Benedict: the ‘Darker Side of America’ and Scientific Absurdities,” examines the wartime work of Ruth Fulton Benedict. This chapter chronicles the production and response to Benedict’s controversial pamphlet coauthored with Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (1943). Prior to going to work for the Office of War Information and the publication of that pamphlet, she had published Race: Science and Politics (1940). In this work Benedict sought to explain the development of biological differences between human populations by challenging the notion of the fixity of human genotypes and phenotypes, while also promoting cultural relativism. This chapter reveals Benedict’s commitment to disseminating accurate historical information on the foundations of white supremacy in the global context, along with her commitment to exploring whiteness and blackness as historically constructed relational identities.

This essay focuses on the predominantly negative receptions of Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy in the philosophy of social science, argues how these involve a general misreading of the book and concludes with how the book can continue to be relevant for contemporary philosophy of social science and critical social inquiry. Resisting the canonical reception in the philosophy of social science, it follows the strands in the book that emphasize the inseparability of good social inquiry from philosophy as sharing in a specific type of ethical orientation. After a brief summarizing commentary of the book, the essay characterizes the various negative appropriations of ISS as either epistemological or ontological readings that read it as offering a general foundation of social inquiry that implies a general cultural relativism and conservatism about social change. The essay argues against these readings by following the strands in the book that focus on the irreducibly ethical character of philosophical and social inquiry, further supported by external sources. The essay then concludes with opening the work up to current debates in the philosophy of social science and critical social theory, thus arguing for the book’s continued relevance.

The experience of people with disabilities living in different countries varies significantly from place to place. Why do some countries excel in ensuring rights for people with disabilities, while others struggle? The answers are linked not only to laws, governance, and accountability but also to salience and the participation of people with disabilities in the issues that most affect them. Successful outcomes for disability-related policies have been inspired by the influential work of authors including Peter Evans, Amartya Sen, Sophie Mitra, and Kay Nagata. This chapter first explores dominant paradigms in social justice and development in planning theory and examines the conceptual pitfalls and failures to address disability-related justice. It then expands on theories proposed by Evans, Sen, Mitra, and Nagata to elaborate on the urban-focused Capability Model of Disability (CMD). The integrative CMD framework effectively addresses a range of nuanced challenges found when cities work to implement inclusive urban policies and programs. The concept of salience is also explored as a novel, more inclusive, and culturally relative development-based framework.

This chapter examines the notion of ‘value’ in arts and cultural management. Drawing upon methodological and theoretical tools from anthropology, it examines the culturally relative and inherently subjective nature of value, arguing that this is contra prevailing perspectives that view value as set and quantifiable. The chapter introduces the term ‘cracked art world’, which is proffered as an analytical tool for making sense of value’s inherent subjectivity, and the conflicts in art worlds that arise from value divergences among arts and culture stakeholders. It further argues that, without critical examination, cracked art worlds can serve to reify inequalities and thus reinforce dominant values while ignoring or silencing marginal ones. The chapter closes by suggesting ways in which these concepts might be usefully incorporated by arts and cultural managers engaged in intercultural dialogue and exchange.

Resnick’s Kirinyaga is a novel set in a twenty-second-century terraformed planetoid within Earth’s solar system. Its inhabitants are Kenyans who left an ecologically devastated Earth to pursue the pre-colonial way of life of the Kikuyu people as an intentional community in outer space. Koriba, Kirinyaga’s narrator, is an elderly storyteller who was exiled back to earth after his people accepted modern technology, despite his insistence they maintain traditional customs. As a white American writing about native Africans, Resnick has generated controversy by potentially asserting an uncritical form of cultural relativism. This essay demonstrates how philosophical stances regarding utopianism factor in the novel and demonstrate the relevance of Kirinyaga to debates about the pursuit of the ideal societies.

In political contexts, equality is both a superlative value and a hotly contested one. Even as just a multicultural value, equality is ambiguous. It has two relevant meanings (cultural relativism and equity egalitarianism) that differ substantially from the classic liberal (economic and political opportunities) and socialist (economic outcomes) conceptions of equality. Brian Barry's well-known attack on multiculturalism in the name of modern liberal egalitarianism (his Rawlsian synthesis of equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes) is explained in order to clarify, by contrast, the distinctive meaning that equality has acquired in connection with multiculturalism. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the rival contemporary conceptions of equality may be rooted in different ways of understanding another superlative modern value, namely, freedom.

Metaphysical realism holds that the structure, properties and laws of nature exist independently of consciousness. Relativism holds the opposite: that they are contingent upon human consciousness. Neither alternative allows for an adequate epistemology for ecology. Cartesian realism, for example, depends upon a metaphysical distinction between mind and matter as two distinct substances that share no properties, and hence cannot be conceived as capable of causal interaction. How can a mind, which lacks size, shape, location and movement act on or be acted upon by a physical body that has all these properties? Cultural Relativism is the view that the truths of nature are culturally constructed and are therefore unavoidably subjective and relative to the minds of researchers. What counts as true and known, and as possessing value, may vary from culture to culture and from one historical period to another. Such “truths” are therefore not objective facts of nature—they tell us nothing about what mind and culture-independent nature is really like. Consequently, it is not possible to ground an ethical prescription regarding treatment of nature in objective facts of nature. Nor is it possible to adequately explain how the structure and function of ecological systems can be established as objective. The phenomenology of intentionality solves these problems by positing the ontological unity of mind and matter, and welding the subjectivity of socially constructed knowledge and the objectivity of empirical data together.

Throughout his oeuvre, Hountondji develops a prescriptive notion of culture that is marked by internal difference and constant change. This notion stands in opposition to a static and essentialist understanding of culture, that is prevalent in many contemporary nationalist and identitarian movements and that leads to a society’s stagnation and enclosure. Hountondji develops the analytic category of “culturalism”, designating the strategy by politicians of using cultural topics to divert attention from important economic and political issues. This chapter further highlights the implications of Hountondji’s call for cultural pluralism on a political, normative, and theoretical level. In addition, it elucidates his critique of culturalism by discussing practical examples in the African context and delineates contemporary trajectories of this critique.

Ian C. Jarvie is widely known for his contribution to the “rationality debate” in philosophy of the social sciences. In this chapter, I shall critically examine his view of rationality and rebuttal of cultural relativism. First, I shall discuss his view of rationality while paying attention to its relation to Karl Popper’s critical rationalism. Second, I shall scrutinize Jarvie’s criticism of cultural relativism, after his debate with Peter Winch. Jarvie proposes a middle way to avoid ethnocentrism and cultural relativism by examining Melville Herskovits’s cultural relativism and its relation to the American Anthropological Association’s “Statement on Human Rights.” Third, I shall examine Jarvie’s social and institutional view of rationality by discussing his ideas of weak absolutism, workshop rationality, and social institution.

The New Atheism movement has generally been understood as a reaction to fundamentalism, but LeDrew argues that it is just as importantly a reaction to two other features of late modern culture: multiculturalism or cultural relativism (in the realm of social policy) and ‘postmodernism’ or epistemic relativism (in the intellectual sphere), which are both perceived as challenges to scientific authority. This chapter focuses on the atheist reaction to relativism specifically in its relation to the social sciences, which it sees as shaped by the influence of postmodernism and thus an illegitimate source of knowledge. The rejection of social science in the atheist movement is a response to the fear that the historical and comparative methods of the social sciences are capable of relativizing not only the social world but the production of scientific knowledge by demonstrating their historically contingent and socially constructed nature. The chapter explores two strategies the atheist movement has adopted: undermining the social sciences as a whole by advancing evolutionary psychology as an alternative and superior form of social science and a sacralization of science.

After a brief discussion of the way critique of cultural relativism today often is part of anti-liberal and ultranationalist stances in public debates, Mattias Gardell goes on to trace the concept’s historical roots in cultural anthropology. He points out that whereas in contemporary society, cultural relativism is often understood as a normative doctrine that allegedly legitimates multiculturalism, for cultural anthropologists, it typically served as an analytical perspective where customs, beliefs and institutions must always be analyzed in their proper contexts to be fully understood. The anthropological concepts of truth and knowing are, then, necessarily different from philosophical ditto, and the failure (and unwillingness) to grasp this fact has made it easy to create various relativistic strawmen in academic as well as political discussions. The problem with these strawmen is that they have become ideal opponents for various ultranationalist and/or monoculturalist political movements in their opposition against tolerance and diversity.

In UX research, people with idiosyncratic or stigmatized conditions may go unrecognized, be dismissed as outliers, or be lumped within the larger normative group. This most directly affects persons with disabilities, medical conditions, or differing lifestyle or belief systems. This tendency may over represent the homogenous group while under representing other idiosyncratic groups based on complex factors such as stigma or perceived risk associated with revealing more accurate aspects of conditions, beliefs or lifestyle. This research bias negatively impacts the outcomes of the UX data and impacts the quality of designed products or services. Therefore, there is a critical need to identify the roles of ethnographic research, cultural programming, and cultural relativism with regard to stigmatized and idiosyncratic populations. The Divergency Model is a UX research and design methodology to identify and measure proximal distances in stigma/conformity and apathy/motivation between individual or target groups.

Largely taboo in ‘Westernized’ nations, spitting in public remains common in many parts of the world. Public health campaigns ‘beyond the West’ tend to stress that spitting in public spreads diseases and is also, in essence, disgusting, uncivilized and deviant. After considering the evidence for such public health concerns, we draw on research carried out in China and India to argue that public spitting is experienced by many in those countries as unproblematic and that anti-spitting campaigns often represent misguided ideas of the ‘civilizing process’ transposed from the global North. This chapter frames opposition to spitting through ‘disruptive cosmopolitanism’ and ‘inverted cultural relativism’ where indigenous elites, in Eliasian fashion, look beyond their own cultural mores to contrasting Western sensibilities and seek to impose them on their own people.

This case study about research in an emergency setting depicts how unexpected findings created conflicts of conscience for non-governmental organization (NGO) workers and exposed research participants and their community to retribution and compromised the local social structure. The community felt betrayed when unexpected findings from research about health seeking behaviours revealing illegal female genital mutilation were shared publicly and contributed to stigmatizing their culture. In addition, the NGO involved performed a dual role – that of assistance provider as well as researcher – which endangered the neutrality of the data collection and, in the end, the acceptability of the NGO as assistance provider.

This chapter examines obsolete cultural relativist claims against the compatibility of universal human rights with Middle Eastern, Muslim-majority societies. It seeks to redress widely held misconceptions of the Middle East’s capacity for freedom and rights recognition by suggesting that it is a function of historical circumstances including the Western colonial legacy and ongoing foreign presence in the region. It is also a function of a state’s given liberal or illiberal impulse, not fixed cultural or religious attitudes. Specific examples, such as an exploration of historical human rights precedents in the region starting from the Cyrus Cylinder, through to role of moderate Muslim networks, are discussed and contextualized.

As considered in the previous chapter, by the 2010s, there had been a shift towards critical understandings of international peacebuilding approaches which argued that local culture held the key to the impasse of peacebuilding interventions. In this ‘bottom-up’ approach, peace, reconciliation, and a ‘culture of law’ were understood to be secondary effects of sociocultural norms and values. However, these critiques of peacebuilding (the ‘turn to the local’) remained trapped in the impasse of international peacebuilding-as-statebuilding: the inability to go beyond the binaries of liberal universalism (the liberal telos of building ‘peace’) and cultural relativism (the understanding of the barriers to ‘peace’ as an essentialised product of ‘difference’). This understanding will be contrasted in this chapter with an analysis of the rise of ‘resilience’ approaches to intervention – which built on this attention to the particular context of application but moved beyond this impasse through philosophical pragmatism and the positive focus on concrete social practices. This chapter clarifies the nature of this shift through the focus on the shifting understanding of peacebuilding in addressing community conflicts and stresses caused by the failure of ‘war on drugs’ peacebuilding interventions in the Americas.

The conceptual link between anthropocentrism and ethnocentrism is only one way in which the latter idea has become connected with moral discourses around non-human animals. The idea of ethnocentrism has, in relation to animals, become associated with two strikingly different trends, with cultural relativism on the one hand and with cultural hegemony on the other. This chapter aims to expose the shortcomings not only of ethnocentrism in both its forms but also of the arguments that gave rise to this differential association, in relation to other-than-human animals. Against both so-called folkways and an ecological multiculturalism, I propose a culturally sensitive ethical individualism. What is at stake here is nothing less than the very basis of morality.

In this final chapter Ryall summarises the salient factors which place Kant’s transcendental philosophy at odds with the Copernican world-view, at the same time as he mounts a defence of enlightenment thinking against the pseudo-intellectual movements of post-modernism and cultural relativism and their assaults on those norms of rationality which have been the bedrock of Western science and civilisation through the ages. These movements, beholden as they are to that “immanentized” mode of thinking the origin of which can be traced back to Kant, have dangerously undermined these once solid foundations, although it is in Kant’s own example, in his alternative incarnation as a champion of the Enlightenment, that the defence of an unfettered and fearless exercise of our rational faculty is to be modelled.