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Cultural relativism is the ability to understand a culture on its own terms and not
to make judgments using the standards of one’s own culture. The goal of this is
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promote understanding of cultural practices that are not typically part of one’s
own culture. Using the perspective of cultural relativism leads to the view that no
one culture is superior than another culture when compared to systems of
morality, law, politics, etc. [11] It is a concept that cultural norms and values derive
their meaning within a specific social context. This is also based on the idea that
there is no absolute standard of good or evil, therefore every decision and
judgment of what is right and wrong is individually decided in each society. The
concept of cultural relativism also means that any opinion on ethics is subject to
the perspective of each person within their particular culture. Overall, there is no
right or wrong ethical system. In a holistic understanding of the term cultural
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relativism, it tries to promote the understanding of cultural practices that are
unfamiliar to other cultures such as eating insects, genocides or genital cutting.
b) Nature-Nurture Debate: Nature refers to what we are born with and includes
our biology, genetics, and similar characteristics. In contrast, nurture refers to
what is learned, through our cultural community and other individuals. For
anthropologists, this debate often centers on the influences of nature and nurture
in different cultural elements. Today, most academics—including
anthropologists—recognize that both nature and nurture influences affect the
human beings and their culture. Therefore, the nature versus nurture debate can
be considered a false dichotomy, but it still has an impact on research today.
However, now most disagreement between academics is regarding the extent of
nature or nurture influences.
Pioneers in the subject have used the anthropological methodology to fulfill the
objective of challenging certain stereotypes and assumptions. It is through this
objective that anthropologists have contributed positively towards some basic
debates in both natural and social sciences. One such debate centers around the
nature-nurture controversy. It is still being debated that which among the two is
more important.
Boas was of the opinion that human behavior is culturally determined and to
fulfill this objective and to establish this line of thinking he prepared one of his
students Margaret Mead to study the adolescent behavior among the Samoans. It
was widely held before this study that adolescent was an age of trauma and
disturbances and adolescent boys and girls tend to engage in a rebellious
behavior. Such kind of behavior was thought to be rooted in their genes and thus
was thought to be universal. Boas contended that if he can find even one example
where adolescent was not a period of trauma and disturbances then the biological
basis of such an assumption could be challenged and its cultural basis could be
established. With this objective in mind, Margaret Mead studied the adolescent
behavior among the Samoans and found that their adolescent was unlike that of

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