Cultural relativism is a phrase that can be ambiguous; a few different meanings have been attributed to it. The more moderate meaning of the phrase, and the primary one used in this essay, is that people's values ​​and practices must be understood in the context of those people's culture, rather than that of the culture of an outside observer. Cultural relativism also refers to the related idea of ​​the “urgency to study and learn from other cultures,” as well as the idea that a culture is not “unbalanced or evil” because it is different from the culture of the observer (Rosaldo 2000, 3) . In the sense of some, cultural relativism also refers to the stronger idea that nothing is bad as long as it is part of someone's culture. This form of cultural relativism has been criticized as leading to ethical relativism, the idea that there is no universal morality. The argument is that if one cannot judge whether a practice in another culture is good or bad, this implies that there is no objective standard of good or bad. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In his article “Headhunters and Soldiers: Separating Cultural and Ethical Relativism,” Renato Rosaldo states that cultural relativism is valuable, but that it should be separated from ethical relativism, which he does not believe in. However, the end of his article seems to express a somewhat ethically relativist point of view. Janice Boddy's article “Womb as Oasis: The Symbolic Context of Pharaonic Circumcision in Rural Northern Sudan” does not mention cultural relativism by name, but deals with similar ideas. In the article, Boddy discusses the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in a village in northern Sudan, as well as other aspects of village culture. The article takes a relativist approach as it sympathetically explains the FGC and how it makes sense in the context of the culture of the Sudanese group; however, he recognizes that some people have legitimate moral concerns about this practice. Comparing these two articles leads to some interesting connections. Boddy's article, more than Rosaldo's, effectively exemplifies a combination of cultural relativism and non-relativist ethics. In much of his article, Rosaldo simply describes the history of anthropologists' views on cultural relativism. Next, he notes that current anthropologists argue that cultural and ethical relativism are different, even though some earlier anthropologists associated them with each other. He says, “I… would consider myself a cultural relativist; I would not consider myself an ethical relativist” (2000, 3), and later elaborates by saying that “to understand is not to forgive” (2000, 5). Next, Rosaldo talks about his life experience with a Filipino tribe called the Ilongot. They practiced headhunting, of which Rosaldo says he "was" horrified (2000, 5). However, the Ilongots later told him that they had seen American soldiers in World War II and were horrified that “a commanding officer could order his subordinates to move to the line of fire” (2000, 6). Rosaldo realized that the Ilongot's feelings about this American practice were similar to his feelings about their headhunting, which "really knocked him off [his] pedestal of moral horror" (2000, 6). He makes it clear that he still “doesn't think headhunting is a good idea” (2000, 6), although this sounds more like a casual personal opinion than a serious moral statement. He concludes the article with a poem he wrote about a fellow Ilongot, who had no problems with theheadhunting but could not accept that soldiers were told to risk their lives. This is a "dead end" for the article, so to speak; Rosaldo does not further explore the morality of either practice. His final statements are simply about the fact that the two cultures have different moral views. This could be a strong ending if the only basis for morality was what people think of actions. However, there are moral theories that allow people to evaluate actions more objectively. If Rosaldo were truly a non-relativist ethicist, he should find value in this type of theory. For example, a common moral theory is consequentialism, in which actions are judged based on their consequences. Consequentialism is concerned with “all that action entails” and often includes the idea that “the whole point of morality is… to spread happiness and alleviate suffering” (Haines 2015). This involves preventing “premature deaths, which reduce the amount of life and therefore reduce the amount of happiness there will be” (Haines 2015). Under consequentialism, both headhunting and ordering soldiers to risk their lives seem immoral, at least to some extent, because both cause the deaths of people who would have preferred to remain alive. (However, one could also argue that the American soldiers' goal of defeating Imperial Japan was important enough to outweigh the wickedness of sending some soldiers to die.) Thus it is clearly not impossible to analyze the morality of these practices in their own terms, but Rosaldo doesn't show much interest in trying. He apparently concluded that since both practices seem wrong to the other culture but acceptable in his own culture, nothing impartial can be said about the morality of either. In essence, Rosaldo's interpretation of cultural relativism seems to prevent him from considering ethical questions in a non-relativist way. He may not consider himself an ethical relativist, but by concluding with the implication that some practices cannot be evaluated by any universal moral standard, he displays an attitude similar to ethical relativism. Boddy's article exemplifies cultural relativism; it's entirely about understanding how female genital cutting fits into the broader context of Sudanese village culture. Specifically, it examines how the practice is linked to the villagers' lifestyle and beliefs about topics such as female fertility and the womb. Boddy's finding that villagers use “a group of interconnected idioms and metaphors” to conceptualize their life and community (1982, 689), and that FGC is linked to these metaphors, is very much in the spirit of cultural relativism. His explanation goes a long way toward “making the strange familiar,” a goal of cultural relativism. Although FGC naturally seems strange and perhaps “barbaric” to Westerners who try to imagine it in the context of their own culture, the practice begins to make sense once the reader becomes more familiar with the villagers' belief system. The very fact that Boddy wrote the article demonstrates that he believes culture should be studied, one of the “central notions” of cultural relativism according to Rosaldo (2000, 3). Boddy never implies that village culture is bad, and he certainly doesn't imply that its difference from Western culture makes it bad, although he doesn't seem to agree with FGC. At the beginning of Boddy's article, she states that “those currently engaged in the eradication [of FGC]” can only “approach the problem with the sensitivity it requires” by understanding the practice and its significance for Sudanese women (1982 , 682)..