Question

Ruth Benedict discusses how changes in a culture’s understanding of “normal” can affect our understanding about what is morally acceptable. Briefly discuss how what we conceive of as murder might not be wrong in another culture.

Answer 1

Ruth Benedict once wrote in a penultimate chapter "It is possible to scrutinize different institutions and cast up their cost in terms of social capital, in terms of the less desirable behavior traits they stimulate, in terms of human suffering and frustration". This was the opposite side of the coin. Cultural relativity was not the full lesson of the comparative study of cultures. It was true of forms but not of functioning, as she phrased the point in her course of theory, noting that "Cultural relativism breaks through ethnocentrism, but the study of cultural relativism is not final.. there is a cultural relativity fallacy".

Benedict and other anthropologists played a large role in writing guidance for explaining the actions of wartime governments and the thought behind them. Her work on these problems employed the idea of culture pattern, and it also occasioned a major refinement of that idea, a new way of representing patterns that she developed in the set of nation culture studies. Therefore she concludes that murder might not be wrong in another culture.