Cultural Anthropology, Ethnocentrism, and Cultural Relativism

Cultural Anthropology
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Cultural Anthropology
Part 1: Cultural Anthropology, Ethnocentrism, and Cultural Relativism
The two distinctive features of cultural anthropology are: 1) it focuses on the culture of a society, and 2) it interprets subjective meanings in an objective and scientific manner using anthropological approaches. In the first feature, cultural anthropology differs from social anthropology in the sense that the latter focuses on society and its institutions, which means a deeper analysis of the structures and relationships. Cultural anthropology is interested in the cultural aspects. In the second feature, the position taken is that cultures are subjective in terms of their meanings and that anthropologists have used objective and scientific mechanisms to interpret these meanings. For example, such cultural aspects as language or religion could be subjected to a scientific study to determine unique rituals and their meaning for the culture being investigated.
In ethnocentrism, the first feature is that anthropologists tend to look at culture from their own culture. In other words, the culture of the anthropologist is used as the standard upon which to examine other cultures. The second feature is that ethnocentrism is based on the notion that one's culture is better (Yoshida, 2019). For example, an American studying a Samoan culture could perceive the American culture to be the standard and better than the Samoan culture, which could be a source of bias.
Cultural relativism is a competing idea to ethnocentrism and has two major features. First, relativism states that culture can be looked at in terms of the world people inhabit. For example, an anthropologist has to examine a culture from the perspectives of the individuals forming part of that culture. The second feature is that one has to suspend own judgment to prevent contamination of the information collected. This means undoing the perception that one's culture is better than the one under investigation and placing the study culture on a clean slate. In other words, one has to become a member of the culture to study it from within the culture itself (Yoshida, 2019). Criticisms of relativism based on this feature include the inconsistencies it makes regarding exiting one’s culture and joining another or the challenges with cross-cultural societies.
Part 2: Balanced and Unbalanced Modes of Exchange
The cross-cultural overview of balanced and unbalanced modes of exchange is that all cultures experience both of these modes of exchange since the distribution of goods and services takes place across all cultures globall...