Cultural Relativism: A Way of Life Essay

If you are my baby, it dont matter if youre caustic or white. These words reverberate in my mind as I heard the news virtually Michael Jacksons death. His song, Black or White is one of my favorites because it talks about a fathers potableance of his child despite the babys color. Later, when I encountered the bourne ethnic relativism in school, I understood better what the song wants to promote, and how this drop be accomplished.Cultural relativism is greensly known as the practice of judge and living harmoniously with people of different cultures. If we observe our party today, we testament notice different kinds of peopleAfricans, Caucasians, Asians, Latinos, and a lot of mixtures coexist. Cultural relativism is what allows them to feel in peace with each other, to accept and respect other cultures wish well they do their own. Considering the present scenario, we may say that cultural relativism is not expert a practice or aspect of life, it is already a path of lif e, a must for every person to live and prosper.Ideally, a society that adheres to cultural relativism allows the existence and exchange of different cultures. Although this has not been fully know in many places, we can guarantee that it is already a common aspect of the learning environment. In school, students get the chance to interact with others, and arrive at aspects of different cultures. Everyday interaction with Asians, African-Americans, and Latin Americans allows us to see that afterwards all, it is not difficult to coexist with different people.Often, all we need is to volunteer opportunities for interaction and sharing. Specifically, in my dealings with different cultures, I learned to value the hard work of the Chinese, the ingenuity of the Japanese, the friendliness of Filipinos, the family values of the Latinos, and the cool spatial relation of the African-Americans. Cultural relativism has helped me esteem different cultures, and allowed me to grow more matur ely.To practice cultural relativism, I personally follow three steps. First, I try to see why people are behaving the way they do. I rely on my background knowledge to probe the situation. Next, I observe and see the positively charged effects of their practice, and third, I try to find more information about the practice by inquiring from the person or researching online.For example, seeing the Chinese sip the soup out of the bowl without using spoon ab initio made me felt indifferent. However, in applying cultural relativism, I tried to analyze why they do this instead of using a spoon. Then, I effected that the Chinese use chopsticks instead of spoon, making it impossible to have the soup without sipping it directly from the bowl. Also, one time I encountered a Japanese accusative showing a man perfecting a trade name.He seemed mindless of the enkindle he used to shape the sword, and from there I wondered why the Japanese give such importance to swords when guns are more reliable for protection. receivable to this, I searched the Internet for answers, and found out that perfecting swords is part of the Japanese Samurai culture, the host men in the history of Japan. I learned that the Samurais treat swords as their companion in battle, and swords serve as representations of them. Therefore, a Samurais sword should be well-kept at all times because it is a family inheritance and symbol of honor.Knowledge of others culture definitely helps us understand and appreciate them. However, there are also practices which I believe I cannot accept even though I already have a honourable grasp of cultural relativism. One of these is the suicide killing done by 9/11 hijackers.Unlike the Japanese version of suicide which hopes to talk a persons regret for a mistake committed, suicide killing among the Muslims intends to kill non-Muslims on the bases of religious and political conflicts. What makes it truly improper is killing innocent people for some selfis h intent. Considering this, cultural relativism becomes a difficult aspect of reality, similar to pushing a child to swallow a whole fresh egg straight to the stomach.