FAMILY, CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND SOCIAL INJUSTICE IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Cultural relativism has introduced, in a historical perspective, the bias of setting down one sovereign to immediately glorify another: therefore, the upheaval that has set down from the
throne the Swiss adolescent, king until then, to make a monarch of the little Latin American Indian.
Radicalization of this stereotyped view of “cultural relativism” introduces a serious error underlying the non critical propaganda of this relativism, an error that confuses anthropological perspectives with sociological ones, the former legitimately burying every manner of etnocentrism, together with every eugenic and nazistic idea of “superior race”, and the latter with the emphasizing descriptions of persistence and growth of social injustice.
Radicalization of these stereotyped views of “cultural relativism” may convert exploitation into etnographic data, sanctifying and translating into “culture” practices which, in fact, express
mechanisms of social survival.
Viewing Human Development from this point, therefore, may lead to an approach that makes the distinction between cultural practices and poverty very difficult.