Anthropologists face many challenges when they visit a different culture than their own. While most try to be very cultural relativistic, many often cannot help but be a little Ethnocentric and often encounter many ethnocentric people. Cultural Relativism: The idea that everyone can and should be able to understand other cultures. Ethnocentrism: the attitude that your own ethnic group is superior to other cultures.
In the short story Eating Christmas in the Kalahari an anthropologist encounters quite an ordeal. After buying the largest cow he could find to give as a present to the !Kung people, he is bombarded with many a negative comment about how thin and sickly the cow is. He finally figures out that it was just the way of the !Kung people, they enforce humility. In this story I felt very sorry for the anthropologist. He was being a cultural relativist and was doing all he could to understand and follow the traditions of the people he was analyzing, but he thought that he was getting totally shot down. Little did he know, they were just giving him another small piece of their culture.
In Shakespeare in the Bush it is totally opposite, no- one is really trying that hard to be cultural relativists and it ends up that they get into arguments over it. Members of this African tribe were very ethnocentric. As the anthropologist in this story tries to explain the story of Hamlet to this tribe, she is encountered with many different views about the story line, and the interpretations of the story. Laura (the anthropologist) had the ethnocentric belief that everyone everywhere interprets stories the same way, especially Shakespeare because his ideas are universal. But she was proved very wrong. Different cultures have beliefs that are so opposite from other cultures, that they cause many problems. The African tribes men in this story refused to accept Shakespeare’s Hamlet the way it was, they had to change it to fit their beliefs and would keep interrupting Laura because the thought that she was telling the story wrong. English and African cultures are so different, and just this little story helped to illustrate the differences in culture.
When they are working out in the field Anthropologists encounter a lot of different beliefs. To be an anthropologist you have to be very open-minded and listen to the people you are working with. You should always take into consideration the cultural background of the people you are talking to or what you are reading. If you don’t, you can end up as confused and frustrated as the people in both of these stories. Everyone’s beliefs are different and we shouldn’t judge people if they don’t think the same way we do about everything. Being open-minded about other cultures can help with our relationships with other people. But I also want to point out that it can be a bad thing to be to cultural relativistic. If we become to set on welcoming the ideas of other cultures, we might lose our culture. We need to keep our culture alive, so that we can have a fun diverse world like we have always had. We should find a happy medium somewhere on the scale between Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism.
A Few of My Paintings
