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On the Limits of Cultural Relativism as a Debiasing Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

David Teira
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Abstract

I analyze cultural relativism as a methodological strategy to correct for ethnocentric biases in anthropological fieldwork. I discuss the format debiasing norms may adopt (rules or standards) depending on whether a discipline has a causal or interpretative outlook. Franz Boas and his school advocated for an interpretative approach to ethnographic fieldwork, in which cultural relativism was implemented as a standard (only culturally unbiased reports are admissible) to be interpreted by expert third parties. Legitimate as it may be as a debiasing method, it does not allow anthropologists to adjudicate their debates on biases in their ethnographic record.

Type
Social Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , December 2021 , pp. 1079 - 1089
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

†

Ángel Díaz de Rada, Alfredo Francesch, Ian Jarvie, Inkeri Koskinen, and Julie Zahle kindly commented on this manuscript (without endorsing its claims). The research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science grant RTI2018-097709-B-I00.

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