Whether the UN’s Universal Declaration      of Human Rights should be applicable to all cultures

An Inuit mother has just given
birth to a baby. She has
a one–year–old baby still dependent on her
milk. It is the season of food
scarcity, which means the mother is not as
well nourished as she could be.
She and her husband decide that their
older child is a higher priority,
and they opt to end their newborn baby’s
life. Considering the concepts of
ethnocentrism and cultural relativism,
discuss the practice of
infanticide.

What is the traditional sexual division of Labor in American
culture? Is it undergoing
transformation? Among Btsisi’, women and men are respected for the
tasks they
perform. Do you think this is the case in the United States?

Cultural Anthropology gives three distinct
meanings of cultural relativism: a moral stance that requires
anthropologists to suspend moral and ethical judgments when
interacting with a
culture different from their own, a methodological strategy that
allows the
anthropologist to pay specific attention to the uniqueness of a
culture, and an
epistemological position that cultures are unique and therefore
knowledge about
different cultures is almost inherently not comparable. (Sec.
1.3).

In your forum contribution:
Discuss what you see as the strengths
and weaknesses of each of these three
kinds of relativism.
Identify one belief or practice in
another culture that you find puzzling,
strange, or troubling, and then
discuss the extent that cultural
relativism is a useful approach to
understanding and interacting with the
people who hold it.
Discuss the extent that cultural
relativism would be a useful approach to
understanding and interacting
with people in your own society that did
(or do) the same.
Explore the extent to which whether
one is studying in one’s own country or in
another makes a difference in
the applicability of cultural relativism
to one’s research.

Choose one of the “Consider This” boxes
that
Nowak and Laird present us with in Chapters 1 and 2
of Cultural
Anthropology, or discuss the topics below
from the film Margaret Mead: Coming
of Age, available in the Films
On Demand database, in the Ashford Online Library.
The
topics covered are:

Whether the UN’s Universal Declaration
of Human Rights should be applicable to
all cultures

Whether it is possible to truly view a
culture without being influenced by the
cultural constructs of our own
culture
How our understanding of what it means
to be a patient in the United States
reflects our different cultural
backgrounds and affiliations
In the film Margaret Mead: Coming of
Age, it is mentioned that Mead’s initial
research was criticized on
methodological grounds. Why was that? Do
you consider the criticism