How did cultural relativism challenge universal judgments about other cultures?

In the context of cultural anthropology, cultural relativism emerged as a direct challenge to the ethnocentric and hierarchical frameworks that dominated 19th-century scholarship.123

Challenging Universal Judgments

During the 19th century, many scholars utilized cultural evolutionism to rank societies on a unilinear scale, ranging from "savagery" to "civilization". These models often conflated cultural complexity with biological evolution, frequently using racist assumptions to label non-Western peoples as inferior or biologically incapable of innovation.32

Franz Boas and his students dismantled these universal judgments through several key arguments:

• Rejection of Hierarchy: Boas argued that there were no objective, scientific criteria to rank cultures as "higher" or "lower." Instead, he maintained that all cultures are equally capable of fulfilling the needs of their members.12
• Historical Particularism: Rather than fitting cultures into a predetermined evolutionary ladder, Boas proposed that each culture is the product of unique, historically particular events and environmental adaptations.123
• Separation of Race and Culture: A central achievement of this school was demonstrating that there is no necessary connection between race and cultural capacity, effectively refuting the idea that cultural differences were determined by biology.13

By asserting that cultures should be understood on their own terms rather than through the lens of a dominant society, cultural relativism shifted the focus of anthropology toward holistic, descriptive study, challenging the morality of colonial conquest and the validity of ethnocentric comparisons.243