Relativism usually means not judging others’ ways and accepting them as equal to our own. The aim is to obtain a certain degree of “understanding” or “empathy” with the foreign norms and cultures. Relativists hold that “good” means what is socially approved or acceptable by the majority in a given culture. They view themselves as tolerant; they see other cultures not as “wrong” but as different.
When talking about cultural relativism, one thinks about the morals and values of certain cultures. This subject seems to cause conflicts. Each person’s standards of morality are different in every culture. So, I really can’t talk about cultural relativism without mentioning the morality issue.
The main attraction of cultural relativism is that there is no entirely correct value and that values are only applicable to the time, place, person, and situation. Meaning that there is no specific right in wrong—it is moral if it applies morally to that person. Has its own moral code to guide members of that society; but that these values are of worth to those who live by them, though they may differ from their own.
Cultural relativism does not imply that there is no system of moral values to guide human conduct. Rather, it suggests that every society has its own moral code to guide members of that society; but that these values are of worth to those who live by them, though they may differ from our own.
Ethnocentrism on the other hand is the opposite of cultural relativism. The usual definition of the term ethnocentrism is “thinking one’s own group’s ways are superior to others” or “judging other groups as inferior to one’s own.” Ethnocentrism leads to misunderstanding others. They distort what is meaningful and functional to other peoples through our own tinted glasses. They do not understand that other cultures have their own meanings and functions in life, just as our ways have for us. They evaluate cultures from the perspectives of their own culture. They view their own culture as morally correct and others as morally questionable. They also become so deeply engrossed in their culture that other cultures and the people in them become unimportant.
There are three levels of ethnocentrism: a positive one, a negative one, and an extreme negative one. The positive definition defines ethnocentrism as the point of view that one’s way of life is preferred to all others. There is nothing wrong with such feelings; for it characterizes the way most individuals feel about their own cultures, whether or not they verbalize their feelings. It is ethnocentrism that gives people their sense of people hood, group identity, and place in history—all of which are valuable traits to possess.
Ethnocentrism becomes negative when one’s own group becomes the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. It reaches its extreme negative form when a more powerful group not only imposes its rule on another, but actively depreciates the things others hold to be of value. Racism, Al Qaeda, the holocaust, and the genocide of the American Indian are all examples of this third level of ethnocentrism.
In conclusion, there are times when, do what we will, we are confronted with goals, values, moral preferences, that are in flat contradiction of our own culture. How we react to other people’s culture is called cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. We can choose to accept other cultures or be totally against them.
