At the abstract level it seems reasonable, if currently unfashionable, to posit the existence of universal features of humanness and thus of culture. This in turn opens up the possibility, at least as far as logic is concerned, of universal principles of justice, equity, or reciprocity as constituents of all cultures. There is, after all, no logical incompatibility between a pragmatic cultural relativism, understood as a method of understanding how the specific content of social practices or cultural forms has been conditioned by their relations to their cultural, social, and historical context, and universal or transcultural principles considered as constituents of the human capacity for culture.
What does this even mean?!?
It's from an article for the anthropology part of my global development course. How am I supposed to learn it if I can't even get a little bit of meaning out of it?
Editor's nightmare!
ReplyDeleteThat article is an exercise to why verbosity should never be allowed outside of intellectual masturbation.
But basically what it's saying is that all cultures should, in theory, share a common sense of justice, equity, or reciprocity, and the only reason they don't is because of their historical contexts (ie. their pasts), and because of their relationships with other cultures.