Hi everyone (or anyone, for that matter), lets get this show on the road. Excuse me for writing in english, it's just that its quicker for me. That doesn't mean that I expect you to reply in english.
Ok, tommorrow we have a lecture on Geertz & Spiro. I just want to say a couple of things about Spiro's article. I think geertz' speaks well enough for itself. Relativism does not need defending. Knowledge is a mass of stuff in our minds. It is not concrete reality. REALITY is out their and should not be confused with our understanding of it.
To Spiro's attack on relativism. On page 168 of our compendium Spiro says that normative relativism claims..."because all standards are culturally constituted, there are no available transcultural standards...(and) no acceptable pancultural standards...by which cultures might be judged on a scale of merit or worth. In short,...the only valid normative judgement that can be made about them is that all are of equal worth."
Look at that argument again. 'If there are no universal standards of value by which to judge cultures then the only thing we can say is that all cultures are of equal value'. That is a ridiculous argument. If we have no universal standards then we cannot make true judgements of the relative merit of cultures, including whether or not they might be equally valuable. In fact even to think that 'cultures' have some sort of basic merit that we might be able to make value judgements on doesn't make sense in a serious academic discipline. It's kind of like a beauty contest where they had managed to find scientific criteria for beauty by which to judge the contestants.
Yet this is Spiro's version of what relativism says. No serious defender of relativism has ever made such a ridiculous statement. Spiro has created his own silly relativism which he proceeds to shoot down. And normative relativism apparently isn't even his target.
Then on the following page he quotes a poor sentence of Michelle Rosaldo as a both an argument for and a proof of that epistemological relativism is a "wholesale theory of cultural determinism". Michelle used the word 'dictate' poorly. Once someone pointed out the meaning of her sentence she changed it before publication, as Spiro notes. Yet his argument is based on Rosaldo's slip, that relativism implies cultural determinism, which of course it does not.
I guess we can find a hundred such examples in this text. So the question is (not entirely seriously), is Spiro deliberately and dishonestly using false arguments in an attempt to fool us into sharing his ancient beliefs of rationality, is he really so unaware of that his arguments are mostly sham (remember this is a highly respected academic. Can he really be so dense?) or had his mind began to deteriate with old age when he wrote this?
Please, any comments. Is it I who cannot think clearly or is this article a bloody sham?