Editing Cultural relativism (section)

==As a critical device==
Marcus and Fischer's attention to anthropology's refusal to accept Western culture's claims to universality implies that cultural relativism is a tool not only in cultural understanding, but in cultural critique. This points to the second front on which they believe anthropology offers people enlightenment:

{{quote|The other promise of anthropology, one less fully distinguished and attended to than the first, has been to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves.  In using portraits of other cultural patterns to reflect self-critically on our own ways, anthropology disrupts common sense and makes us reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions.<ref name="Michael M.J page 1"/>}}

The critical function of cultural relativism is widely understood; philosopher John Cook observed that "It is aimed at getting people to admit that although it may ''seem'' to them that their moral principles are self-evidently true, and hence ''seem'' to be grounds for passing judgement on other [[ethnic group|peoples]], in fact, the [[self-evidence]] of these principles is a kind of illusion."<ref>Cook, John. 1978. "Cultural Relativism as an Ethnocentric Notion." In ''The Philosophy of Society''.</ref> Cook recognizes the middle ground in between [[moral relativism]] and [[moral absolutism]] that cultural relativism straddles, remarking that the ensuing battlegrounds that arise tend to be in the domain of claims of self-evidence made on behalf of a people.

The critical function was indeed one of the ends to which [[Ruth Benedict|Benedict]] hoped her own work would meet. The most famous use of cultural relativism as a means of cultural critique is [[Margaret Mead]]'s research of adolescent female sexuality in [[Samoa]]. By contrasting the ease and freedom enjoyed by Samoan teenagers, Mead called into question claims that the stress and rebelliousness that characterize American adolescence is natural and inevitable.

As Marcus and Fischer point out, however, this use of relativism can be sustained only if there is ethnographic research in the United States comparable to the research conducted in Samoa. Although every decade has witnessed anthropologists conducting research in the United States, the very principles of relativism have led most anthropologists to conduct research in foreign countries.