Cultural relativism refers to the idea that the values, knowledge, and behavior of an individual must be understood within their own cultural context. This is a fundamental concept in sociology due its recognition and affirmation of the connections between the greater social structure and the everyday lives of individual people.
The concept of cultural relativism as we know and use it today was established as an analytic tool by German-American anthropologist Franz Boas in the early 20th century.
In the context of early social science, cultural relativism became an important tool for pushing back on the ethnocentrism that often undermined research at that time - this research mostly conducted by white, wealthy, Western men often focussing on people of color, foreign indigenous populations, and persons of lower economic class than the researcher.
Ethnocentrism is the practice of viewing and judging someone else's culture based on the values and beliefs of one's own. From this viewpoint, we may consider other cultures as negatively in comparison to our own, however, when we recognize that the many cultures of the world have their own beliefs, values, and practices that have developed in a range of contexts and accept their differences and see that none are necessarily right or wrong or good or bad, then we are engaging the concept of cultural relativism.
It is this ideology I believe should be applied to the British Class system - identifying that a person's class may be different to our own but should not be judged as a result. It should not dictate personal or professional progression and should not be considered as a defining label.
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