"Respect other cultures" is so mild today that it carries almost no content, like a slogan on a wall. A century ago it was an aggressive scientific claim: the orthodoxy of the day held that human societies stood in a queue, some ahead and some behind, and that the ranking could be measured off the body. The people who overturned it did not do so by calling for equality. They did it by measuring.
The trouble arrives immediately after. If every set of practices can only be understood by its own standards, then "respect" is itself just one more standard, and the language for criticising anything from outside is gone. This page takes apart three things: how the claim was established, which single sentence its boundary turns on, and why "see it from their side" is much harder than it sounds.
In 1883 a twenty-five-year-old German boarded a ship and spent about a year on Baffin Island, in what is now northern Canada. His name was Franz Boas, he had trained as a physicist, and his doctorate was on the colour of seawater — why, looking at the same water, you see one colour and I see another. He would later move that question wholesale onto people.
What he set out to overturn was the orthodoxy: the nineteenth-century mainstream put human societies on a single line, from savagery through barbarism to civilisation, and museums were arranged to match — the world's fishhooks in one case, ordered crude to refined, so a visitor could see "evolution" at a glance. In an 1887 exchange in the journal Science, Boas fought this out with Otis Mason of the Smithsonian: things of the same shape can arise in different places for completely different reasons — unlike causes can produce like effects. So an object is first of all part of the way of life it belongs to, not a specimen of a type, and should be arranged by tribe and region. The position is called historical particularism.
This is the foundation of the whole of cultural relativism, and it is a plain mechanism: what a practice means is set by its position in the whole arrangement. The same act is not the same thing in two arrangements, because what it is attached to differs in each.
What punctured the orthodoxy was a measurement. Between 1908 and 1910, commissioned by the US Immigration Commission, Boas took body measurements of more than ten thousand immigrants and their American-born children. The result: in the American-born generation the cephalic index — the skull length-to-width ratio then used to sort "racial types" — had shifted measurably. An index that moves within a single generation does not qualify as a fixed racial marker. On evidence strength, honestly: the data have since been reanalysed twice with opposite conclusions and the matter is unsettled; but the stronger claim, that head form does not change, never got back up.
One episode has to be stated plainly, because it is part of this discipline's record. In 1897 Boas wanted one Inuk from northern Greenland brought to the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked, to be studied; the explorer Robert Peary brought back six people, four of whom died of tuberculosis and other illnesses. Among them was Qisuk, whose seven-year-old son Minik was deceived by the museum with a staged burial while his father's skeleton entered the collection; his demands for the remains went unmet, and the four were only returned to Greenland for burial in 1993. A person can oppose ranking humanity in theory while treating humans as specimens in practice.
In 1934 Ruth Benedict, a student of Boas, published Patterns of Culture with an image that sticks: the practices humanity could adopt lie along one great arc, each society selects only a short stretch of it, and then integrates that stretch into a style. She contrasted the Zuni of the American Southwest with the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast — restraint and not standing out on one side, competition and display on the other, with ceremonies contesting who could give away the most property.
The book turned "different" into something intelligible rather than defective; the criticism it earned is that integration was overstated, with a whole society written as a single personality. Work like this is interpretive pattern-finding, not testable measurement — and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), from the same circle, which Derek Freeman half a century later claimed had been misled by its informants' joking, is the same kind of fragility: single-site fieldwork against single-site fieldwork, with no third-party data on either side.
Now the cut that matters most on this page. Two things have to be kept apart. Methodological relativism: while describing, set your own standards aside, or you will not see the other logic — that is a tool. Moral relativism: no practice may be judged from outside — that is a normative claim. The first does not imply the second. "This is coherent within their arrangement" is a sentence about facts, and it contains no "therefore one ought".
The slide really did happen in history, and with weight. In 1947 Melville Herskovits drafted a Statement on Human Rights, published in American Anthropologist, responding to the universal declaration of human rights the United Nations was then preparing: standards can only be relative to the culture one belongs to, and "universal human rights" in fact packages Euro-American notions of the individual and of property. Its motive has to be seen clearly — the colonial system was still running, and this was raising a shield for colonised peoples' cultural integrity. The strongest statement from the other side: that same shield also removes the language for criticising abuses from outside, and the people who need that language most are usually the least powerful within any arrangement. Neither side is a straw man; the discipline later moved on its own, and the American Anthropological Association's 1999 declaration turned towards actively asserting human rights. This page takes no side, but those two sentences have to be kept apart — Boas opposed Nazi race science, and that opposition too requires standing somewhere across cultures.
In 1956 Horace Miner published a straight-faced report in American Anthropologist on a people called the Nacirema: every household has a shrine, its cabinet holding magical potions prescribed by medicine men that nobody dares throw out; devotees perform a mouth-rite before holy water every morning, and periodically visit a kind of mouth-magician who probes their teeth with sharp instruments. You read on and something is off — Nacirema spelled backwards is American, and the rite is brushing your teeth. It is a joke and also a precision instrument: exoticism is not emitted by the practice being described; it is carried in by the angle of description.
The word ethnocentrism was popularised by William Graham Sumner in Folkways (1906), and means treating the group you belong to as the centre and measure of everything. The mechanism is unmysterious: any classification system needs an origin point, and the origin point of the one in your hands is your own way of life. This is the other face of the boundary mechanism from the page on race and ethnicity: a boundary always needs one side as the baseline, and by default that side is you.
The fieldwork case from the other direction is lovely. Between 1949 and 1953 Laura Bohannan did fieldwork among the Tiv of central Nigeria, arriving with one conviction: Shakespeare is universal. She told Hamlet to a group of elders, who corrected her as she went: the dead do not come back, so that "ghost" must be witchcraft or an omen; and as for an uncle marrying his brother's widow and becoming chief, what is the problem, that is how it should be. Their closing verdict was that people where she came from should listen to Tiv elders more, so as to stop misunderstanding things. The point is not that they missed Shakespeare: what the elders did is what a literature professor does, applying a coherent theory to a plot. The theory changed, not the capacity to interpret.
Relativism can also crash in the other direction, into a subtler othering: in 1983 Johannes Fabian singled out ethnography's habit of writing in the present tense ("the Tiv believe…"), arguing that it puts the people studied in a position without history, not in the same era as the writer. So where your units of comparison came from has itself to be audited — audit today's most widely used tool and you will see the point is not empty. The most popular version of cross-cultural comparison in companies is Geert Hofstede's national culture dimensions: between 1967 and 1973 he ran employee value surveys inside IBM, over a hundred thousand questionnaires, and computed a handful of dimensions (power distance, the individualist-collectivist leaning, and so on) from the results for forty countries, which business schools and multinationals have used for training ever since. The criticism is hard too, Brendan McSweeney's 2002 paper being the best known: the respondents were white-collar staff at a single firm, mostly men, and only six of the forty countries had more than a thousand respondents; more fundamentally, the nation is taken as the unit of culture and culture as a static scale. Schwartz's value surveys and the GLOBE project cut the dimensions differently and do not agree. Cross-sectional questionnaires, correlational, plus one questionable assumption: fine as a rough prompt, not as a ruler.