Cultural Relativism in AP Human Geography

Relativism and ethnocentrism as a matched pair

Cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are the two attitudes toward cultural difference that the course pairs in Unit 3: Cultural Geography, Topic 3.1: Introduction to Culture. Both connect to the bigger question of how geographers study culture without distorting it.

Both attitudes look at the same thing, a culture trait that differs from the observer's own. Culture traits include architecture, food preferences, and land use, among many others. The difference is the yardstick each attitude uses to judge that trait.

Take the treatment of cattle in much of India. An ethnocentric observer might call it wasteful to leave cattle wandering city streets instead of raising them for beef. A relativist explains the practice through Hindu reverence for cows and the roles cattle fill in daily life, such as providing milk, dung for fuel, and labor. The trait is the same in both cases, and the two observers read it in opposite ways.

Spotting the relativist in a scenario question

A traveler who personally objects to a custom but studies why it persists in that society is still a cultural relativist. Multiple-choice scenarios like this describe how a traveler, researcher, or government official reacts to another culture, and that reaction is enough to pick the attitude that matches.

The main trap is personal disapproval. A geographer can dislike a practice, or even oppose it, and still be a cultural relativist if they insist on explaining it within its cultural context. Relativism is about how you analyze a practice. It doesn't require you to approve of it. When a stem says something like "although she personally objects to the custom, she studies why it persists in that society," the answer is cultural relativism.

A quick test helps:

• If the observer ranks or compares ("their homes are primitive compared to ours"), it's ethnocentrism.
• If the observer contextualizes ("flat roofs make sense in a dry climate where people sleep outdoors in summer"), it's cultural relativism.
• If the observer claims the physical environment forces a culture to develop a certain way, that's environmental determinism. It's an idea about the causes of culture, so it doesn't fit as an attitude toward cultural difference.

A related wrong answer is cultural diversity. Diversity describes the fact that many cultures exist in a place. Relativism describes an attitude toward those cultures.

Reading places and diffusion with a relativist lens

Beyond Topic 3.1, relativism works as a method for the rest of Unit 3. In Topic 3.3: Cultural Patterns, you explain how language, religion, and ethnicity shape the look of places and a sense of place. That explanation only works if you describe what a sacred site, a script on street signs, or a neighborhood's architecture means to the people who made it, without grading it against your own culture.

The same goes for Topic 3.4: Types of Diffusion. When a trait spreads and gets adapted, as in stimulus expansion diffusion, a relativist reads the local version as a reasonable fit to local beliefs and conditions. An ethnocentric reading would treat it as a watered-down copy.

Cultural relativism could also be useful in a free-response answer, especially on Question 2 (One-stimulus question) and Question 3 (Two-stimuli question) when the stimulus is a photo of a place or a map of a cultural pattern. Strong answers explain why a feature exists in terms of the culture's beliefs, history, and environment. Answers that call a practice "backward" or "strange" fall into ethnocentric language and skip the explanation the prompt is asking for.