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:''Compare cross cultural sensitivity, moral relativism, aesthetic relativism, social constructionism, and cognitive relativism.'' Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. It was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: "...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."〔Franz Boas 1887 "Museums of Ethnology and their classification" ''Science'' 9: 589〕 However, Boas did not coin the term. The first use of the term recorded in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' was by philosopher and social theorist Alain Locke in 1924 to describe Robert Lowie's "extreme cultural relativism", found in the latter's 1917 book ''(Culture and Ethnology )''.〔"cultural, ''adj.'' and ''n.''", ''OED Online'', Sept 2009, Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50055630 , citing Locke's article "The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture", ''Howard Review'' 1 (1924): pp. 290-299.〕 The term became common among anthropologists after Boas' death in 1942, to express their synthesis of a number of ideas Boas had developed. Boas believed that the sweep of cultures, to be found in connection with any sub species, is so vast and pervasive that there cannot be a relationship between cultures and races. Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or not these claims necessitate a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate. This principle should not be confused with moral relativism. ==Epistemological origins== Herodotus (Histories 3.38) observes on the relativity of mores (νόμοι): :"If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country." (tr. Aubrey de Selincourt) He mentions an anecdote of Darius the Great who illustrated the principle by inquiring about the funeral customs of the Greeks and the Callatiae, peoples from the extreme western and eastern fringes of his empire, respectively. They practiced cremation and funerary cannibalism, respectively, and were each dismayed and abhorred at the proposition of the other tribe's practices. The epistemological claims that led to the development of cultural relativism have their origins in the German Enlightenment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that human beings are not capable of direct, unmediated knowledge of the world. All of our experiences of the world are mediated through the human mind, which universally structures perceptions according to ''a priori'' concepts of time and space. Although Kant considered these mediating structures universal, his student Johann Gottfried Herder argued that human creativity, evidenced by the great variety in national cultures, revealed that human experience was mediated not only by universal structures, but by particular cultural structures as well. The philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant and Herder's ideas. Although Herder focused on the positive value of cultural variety, the sociologist William Graham Sumner called attention to the fact that one's culture can limit one's perceptions. He called this principle ethnocentrism, the viewpoint that "one’s own group is the center of everything," against which all other groups are judged. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cultural relativism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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