Methodological relativism
Methodological relativism refers to a practice, by
Anthropologists who are concerned with describing actual human
behavior, in which the researcher suspends or brackets his or her own
cultural biases while attempting to understand
beliefs and behaviors in their local contexts. Relativism of this kind is intended as a methodological antidote to
ethnocentric distortions in science, and should not be confused either with
cognitive relativism or
moral relativism. The need for methodological relativism is implied by the principle of
cultural relativism, which states that an individual human's beliefs and activities make sense in terms of his or her own culture.
