Anyone who has ever taken an introductory-level sociology class has probably read the famous article “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” by Horace Miner. This article treats America as an exotic land unknown to the reader but just describes the normal morning grooming rituals that Americans go through on a daily basis (Nacirema is American backwards).
Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology, made the important point that sociologists should be culturally relativistic when they examine a particular culture. This is to say, because all cultures exist separately from one another, the observer must not judge based on their own cultural lens.
I talked with a student today who used the Nacirema piece as an example of how being culturally relativistic can help you avoid running into problems. They claimed that this external perspective of Americans presented our grooming rituals as ridiculous and self-obsessive. They concluded that we can’t view cultures from an objective standard and must look at each culture through the specific culture’s own norms.
This student, I believe, has actually gotten it backwards.
What makes the typical American grooming process look ridiculous in the Nacirema piece is not that it doesn’t view the ritual from our culture’s perspective, rather that the piece makes the process look ridiculous because it is, objectively, ridiculous. The student essentially argued that cultural relativism in the case of the Nacirema removes the observer from his or her own culture’s subjective norms and places them in another culture’s norms, giving them a new perspective.
I don’t think that the objective of cultural relativism should be to place the observer in the perspective of the people in that culture. What cultural relativism can do to benefit an observer is to remove them from their culture’s perspective and help them to view another culture objectively, not just to trade from that cultures perspective. This is made clear by the effect that the Nacirema piece has on its reader.
The body-grooming rituals seem absolutely ridiculous and self-serving and show that the Nacirema must be very vain people. Then when you realize by the end of the piece that the author is talking about the United States, you should realize that there are some serious problems with vanity in our culture, which is something that comes from a naturally objective view.
If the student arguing for subjectivity was right, then the reader should view the Nacirema from his or her own culture and not judge them for their vanity because it is just a part of their culture. This is a dangerous concept and one that is born from a new movement of not wanting to offend anyone. If this was not the case, then injustices all around the world can be justified, subjectively, from the perspective of the culture in which the injustice resides. This suggests the benefits of an innate objective morality, like that suggested by Christopher Hitchens and other philosophers. There is a difference between asserting your own culture above others and realizing problems within all cultures.