Culture

Introduction1

Discussion1

Cultural Background1

Cultural Relativism3

Ethnic Identity and culture4

Cultural Violence6

Effect of cultural relativism7

Critics for cultural relativism9

Conclusion12

References13

Culture

Introduction

Culture is defined as the collection of experience, knowledge, attitudes, ideas, values, hierarchies, roles, material objects and possessions, meanings, concepts of the universe, experience, possessions and spatial relations which are acquired by a group of people through generations by group and individual striving. The paper will be based on providing research about this subject. In addition, the paper will also emphasize that being familiar with ones ancestors will enhance the contextual relationship between culture and identity.

Discussion

Cultural Background

Cultural background is the compilation of the arts, music, social habits, cuisine, religion, language, traditions, beliefs, norms, values and ideas that give identity to the people belonging to the particular culture (Castells, 2011). People belonging to a one culture can believe that cannibalism is acceptable, and others can consider it unacceptable. Both beliefs are equally valid in a relativist world. As beliefs of one culture is not expected to hold other culture beliefs, and vice versa, the relativist who predicates both cultures is expected to allow each worldview to coexist as equally valid. Theoretically, the relativist is expected to promote neutrality concerning the acceptance of the coexistence of all cultures. In practice, however, the relativist is not neutral concerning either cultures, unless, by neutrality one means that the relativist has no particular interest in certain issues.

Many anthropologists since World War II would probably find themselves agreeing with a conventional cultural relativism and disagreeing with its being called a form of relativism. In its weakest, most popular version, conventional cultural relativism is uncertain about whether or not some universals, like death, eating, reproduction or even class conflict and pan-psychological desires, might exist to define the limits of human diversity (Spierenburg, 2006). Some anthropologists would make this list of universals large many more would keep it small, and a few would argue against any but any anthropologist not supposing all human action as the result of in-built universal forces would still qualify, in this sense, as a relativist. As applied in practice, this kind of relativism has also generally held most Western epistemological presumptions constant, and has often avoided troubling ethical issues altogether by reducing them to matters of local causation or design. This is because not questioning the first allows one to avoid debating epistemological relativism and keeping the second issue from ever surfacing neatly side-steps the challenges of ethical relativism.

This sort of conventional cultural relativism remains a kind of relativism, since, as per disciplinary convention it assumes that the behavioural variations which interest anthropologists must be understood within the cultural or social frameworks which contain them.However, lack of concern and failure to see the interrelationship among cannibalism and a cluster of other issues such as human dignity and equality, the value of human life, definitions of murder and the use of public monies to support certain policies are not properly called neutrality, but intellectual and social irresponsibility (Gensler, 2012). Neutrality is not defensible intellectually, unless it is a stage in intellectual ...