A note on Rituals

A performance, to be socially meaningful, must have a public content. 

Even if, a person is performing a ritual individually, he/she follows a pattern that is publicly recognized and followed. For example, a Hindu woman blowing a conch shell and lighting a lamp under the Tulsi tree in the evening. Every culture prescribes a format for the performance of rituals that must be followed by everyone, whether or not the ritual is actually performed publicly. 

Photo by Naveen Kumar on Unsplash

Cultural Relativism and Ethnocentrism

Cultural relativism : 

• Cultural Relativism/ Cultural determinism approach was first formulated by Franz Boas in North America in the 19th century. He says no culture should be judged by the standards of another. Cultural relativism views people’s behavior from the perspective of their own culture. It places a priority on understanding other cultures, rather than dismissing them as “strange” or “exotic.” Any part of a culture must be viewed from within its cultural context-not that of the observer or the notion that there are no universal standards by which all cultures may be evaluated. Cultures must be analyzed with reference to their own histories and cultural traits understood in terms of the cultural whole. (IGNOU)
• J.F. Lafitau (1724) - insisted that alien ways of life should be observed and described not according to prevailing European standards of what is proper/moral, but by consideration of the conditions under which these ways of life exist.
• The anthropological practice of suspending judgment and seeking to understand another culture on its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living.  
• Examine each culture within the context of its own beliefs.
• Acknowledges that other societies are, like our own, reasonable responses to the circumstances they must deal with.
• The notion that judgments should not be made concerning the merits of one way of life over another.
• The attempt to understand and evaluate each cultural system in terms of its own internally consistent logic. (Miller et al.)
• The argument that behavior in a particular culture should not be judged by the standards of another. (Kottak)
• Resistance to 'universal' assumptions about socio-cultural processes.
• The proposition that cultural differences should not be judged by absolute standards. (A History of Anthropological theory)

(Relativism - judgments, truths, or moral values have no absolutes, and can only be understood relative to the situation/ individuals involved.)

Ethnocentrism : 

• The opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct and the only true way of being fully human.
• Creates prejudice against other ethnic groups.
• Tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to apply its own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures. (Kottak)
• Scholar's own moral system formed the basis by which other phenomena are judged. 
• The tendency to judge other cultures by the standards of one's own culture. (Miller et al.)
• The white Europeans presenting their own culture as a benchmark for civilization put all other societies on an evolutionary scale. They justified each society as being at different levels of evolution based on their technological knowledge. Thus, giving rise to ‘cultural ethnocentrism’. This concept devalued the comparative method, as it was used mainly to accentuate the scholars' own society as ‘superior’ to the societies of the people under study. (IGNOU)
• In his book “Folkways” Sociologist William Graham Sumner coined the term ethnocentrism to refer to the tendency to assume that one’s culture and way of life are superior to all others. (Sumner 1906)
• As students of Anthropology, we must shed our cultural biases or the assumption that our own culture is superior. Only when we accept our own culture as one among the many other cultures that exist in human societies across the World we will be able to conduct a proper study. 

References: Collected