What do you think of the idea of eating a cat for dinner? How about young boys being taught proper techniques for essentially giving a blow job to an older man to ingest semen in order to become a man? Or leaving your newborn baby on the floor, locked in a room, and waiting for it to die or even smashing your baby against a tree?
If your automatic reaction is one of outright disgust, shock, or even anger, you have work to do.
Understanding cultural differences is probably one of the most important things that as human we need to do, and haven't done yet. Many of us are stuck in this ethnocentric state of judging cultures that are different from our own, that may not have the same values, the same beliefs. In short, ethnocentrism is judging without understanding. This inevitably leads to prejudice, or negative ideas, which can then lead to discrimination, negative actions.
Now that you know what we are doing wrong, it's time to learn what we can do to make it right. And this lies in the term cultural relativism. This is the central tenet, or key principal of anthropology. Contrary to popular belief, cultural relativism is not the idea that whatever a culture does is okay. It contains three main points: 1) understand a culture on its own terms, or from an emic (insiders) perspective, 2) understand the biases of your own culture, and 3) post-judice, or judging with understanding. Let me show you how this works.
Don't like the idea of cat for dinner? People from China do. How some of us may view that is the way Hindus view Americans and other cultures eating cow.
How about the idea of 8-12 year old boys being taught and forced to give blow jobs in order to become men? Well to the Sambia of New Guinea, to not do so would mean cultural rejection.
Passive infanticide, or a parent allowing an infant to die. In the shantytowns of Brazil, this happens so often that they are told by their religious leaders that heaven does not have enough room for all the babies. And these deaths, as told by Nancy Scheper-Hughes in her article, “Death Without Weeping,” are deaths without tears because they happen so often. Why? Because these shantytowns are so poor that the majority of these babies are born and die in complete dehydration and they do not know that a simple sugar-water solution could help them, or rather, they don't have the means to get it.
Active infanticide, as practiced by the Yanomamo in South America, occurs when a child is born deformed or ill. Their belief is that they must put that child out of suffering, and that the child would not be able to actively participate in the community. Still think this child bashing is sick? Think about pre-birth testing, think about abortion. Active infanticide post-birth, or active infanticide pre-birth?
All information acquired from Castleton State College, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Professor Paul Derby
Philosophically, I'm a moral absolutist, and I believe absolute truths exist, in the tradition of Socrates and Plato. I would not confuse the term "absolutism" with "enthnocentrism." Humans know that certain things are wrong, no matter who commits them and in what cultural context. Some may be afraid of being accused of intolerance, and therefore remain silent on the matter. There are those, unfortunately, are have become so disembodied from their own sense of humanity that they attempt to rationalize horrific practices like infanticide.
The difficulty in adopting an absolutist perspective is determining from which perspective to practice absolutism. Humans, like all animals, are born with innate qualities- often called instincts. The philosopher Descartes theorized that one such human instict is reason, and it is from the platform of reason that we can demand moral absolutism.
Others theorize that humans are born with knowledge of right and wrong, but our cultural norms can corrupt the ability to distinguish between the two. We can rationalize practices like infanticide, but I doubt that many people truly feel, deep down from their hearts, that it is right. Rather than focusing on "accepting" these practices, we should be trying to change them through education and compassionate assistance.