Culture and Truth: Validity versus Correctness and Cultural Relativism

                I would like to apologize in advance: this post is going to jump around a little bit, but hopefully it will come together in the end for the determined reader. In class on Wednesday Lincoln brought up the idea of validity as opposed to correctness. I can’t recall exactly how he put it, but he used the contrast of the classic art hanging in the Louvre and more ‘mundane’ art hanging in another museum. This brought to mind a very similar critique of the state of ethnography by Cora Du Bois, a professor of anthropology. Du Bois, as cited by Renato Rosaldo in Culture and Truth, described the “distance she felt from the ‘complexity and disarray of what [she had] once found a justifiable and challenging discipline… It has been like moving from a distinguished art museum into a garage sale.’” [1] Du Bois’ critique arose as a result of the diversification of the field of anthropology. The classic ways of writing ethnographies are being reevaluated as more individuals from different walks of life take on the role of ethnographer. For Du Bois it seems as though this reworking of anthropology through the inclusion of minority authors is leading to a degradation of the integrity of the field. In the past, names like Geertz, Boas, Malinowski, and Levi-Strauss were treated with veneration and their works treated as the standard upon which all subsequent works were to be judged; now they are as open to critique as is an ethnography written by a chemical engineer with no background in anthropology.

                In class we also briefly discussed the interesting fact that there are surprisingly few individuals like Alan Lightman who have a multidisciplinary background in both the humanities and the hard sciences. We noted that many of the great discoveries of recent times were made by individuals with their feet in two worlds. Additionally, we discussed the effect of perception on the world. Why does some art end up in the Louvre while some art gets set out at a garage sale? I believe that it has to do with perspective. Someone decided that one artist’s work was more valuable than another’s, so one artist becomes more famous while the other is left out. When one artist becomes famous, they are featured in museums and suddenly their techniques and critiques become more valid than those of the garage sale artist. Because people see the museum artist as valid, he becomes correct about everything related to art while the garage sale artist knows nothing, his work is not as valid a contribution to the artistic world, and he is not valued as highly. In reality, there is no universal scale against which to measure the works of the two artists, no grand art judge who can definitively say which is superior. Van Gogh was not famous during his lifetime; people did not view his work as valid, correct, or valued. But now he is a household name. 

                This same process applies to anthropology: graduates from certain schools have more academic prestige, thus their work is granted more validity, and then suddenly their analysis of a culture is the only correct analysis. Contributions made by “native ethnographers” who may or may not have received training in anthropology and who may or may not be biased in their reports are disregarded because they are not as correct as papers filled with anthropological parlance and terminology. In a field that focuses on humanity, culture, and the human condition, isn’t every viewpoint valid, even if not necessarily ‘correct’? 

In his book, Rosaldo argues that anthropology needs to be more open to the contributions of minority groups. He calls for a change in the way that ethnographies are written and for an inclusion of the human element in case studies and reports. He also points out the seeming impossibility of remaining objective in anthropology. Ruth Benedict describes the issue eloquently in Patterns of Culture: “No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs.” [2] In this case, isn’t it extremely important to have multidisciplinary individuals involved in anthropology? Is the same true for engineering and the hard-sciences?

The following questions that occurred to me while writing this post. Since I can’t come up with answers, I thought I would share them and see what you all thought:

Cultural relativism is a tool used by anthropologists in an attempt to avoid making ethnocentric judgments upon first contact with a bizarre cultural practice. It is a way of lending validity to other ways of life without necessarily deeming them to be ‘correct’. Does cultural relativism fit into the harmony or the unity paradigm better?

How would Aristotle, using his four causes, explain something like mortuary cannibalism or headhunting?

Sources:

[1] Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Renato Rosaldo, 1989.

[2] Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict, 1934