Culture is one of the main characteristics of human behavior that can be shaped through the existing beliefs, norms, and values. There are several ways to learn the importance and impact of culture, and the two most common approaches are cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. For a long period, ethnocentrism was the norm for understanding the context of a culture in human interactions. The main idea is that someone’s culture should be considered a standard for measuring other cultures. In other words, researchers aim at comparing similarities of different cultural elements (beliefs or practices) through the prism of a particular culture. It is enough to use one culture for analysis and rely on its origins for judging other cultures. However, this method is usually associated with incorrect or subjective assumptions about behaviors. To eliminate provocative biases and questions, cultural relativism was introduced as a possibility to assess cultures using their specific standards instead of focusing on the basics of one culture. Thus, the main difference between cultural relativism and ethnocentrism is the role of foreign cultures in evaluation.
There are many examples of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism in the modern world. One of the most evident illustrations of ethnocentrism is the American belief that all people, regardless of their origins, should know and speak English as it is the world’s dominant language. Using the same example, cultural relativism helps explain a variety of languages across the globe and justify this diversity as an attempt to recognize the validity of choices and moral rights. In this case, cultural relativism may be too extreme because it is difficult for people to communicate in different languages. There has to be a rule or a standard beyond cultures that allows individuals to cooperate internationally. The processes of globalization and industrialization are inevitable today, and cultural relativism may be inappropriate when equal conditions should be created for some activities.