"Cultural Relativism" and Orientalism

I recently heard a comment in a university setting that we should teach about "cultural relativism" and Orientalism when discussing how "we" encounter other cultures.

The view the person was trying to express, I think, was something like the following. We should teach students to think critically about the cultural and social field in which they live, so that they don't unthinkingly reinstate the imperialist gaze, common in the "West", that afflicts so much thinking about "non Western" cultures. This is a point I happen to agree with. But it's unclear that you can agree with this if you are a "cultural relativist".

Here's why. If "cultural relativism" is true, then we shouldn't quarrel with what some in the West say about other societies. For how, according to the "cultural relativist" story, could ethnocentrists and imperialists do otherwise? In succumbing to the Orientalist gaze, you might think, all ethnocentrists in the West are doing is proving that "cultural relativism" is true. They are merely asserting one facet of what they understand to be their own culture, in a plural field in which different cultures operate according to different, incommensurable paradigms. If, for instance, a defender of British imperialism claims that all Asians are barbarians, we could locate this view within a segment of historically-situated British culture and conclude that this person's belief is just a matter of their particular culture. To judge it otherwise would be a mistake.

Here's a quick and dirty account of what I understand by "cultural relativism". It is the view that "worldviews" are internal to a particular "culture", of which there are many in the world. Value has no specific meaning outside of a particular culture, and there are many cultures. To apply values from one culture to that of another, therefore, is to do something that doesn't make sense (notice that we can't say that this is to do something wrong, since then we would have to appeal to an extra-cultural value like toleration, or the like).

Let's leave aside what "culture" might mean here, and how we might go about clearly demarcating its boundaries. Let's also leave aside how this view simply assumes that we cannot critically engage our "own" culture (whatever we might mean by "culture"). Let's also leave aside who it is that actually believes this view (I'm not sure hardly anyone does, despite what they may think or say about the matter).

Let's just consider how this view jibes with Orientalism. It seems to me that if you think that former is true, then you clearly disagree with Said's thesis about Orientalism.

Orientalism amounts very roughly to the tendency not to see other societies or cultures as they are, but as the typical, historical Western onlooker wants to see them. This tendency often takes the form of imposing mystical, mythic, fantasies onto cultures outside of Western Europe, a tendency which has deep roots in European literature, politics and culture. This imposition need not always be the assignment of predicates that are ostensibly 'bad', they could be traits like possessing obscure wisdom, sexual powers, magic, etc. That these imposed traits are not obviously 'bad' (as, for example, characterizations of non-Europeans as barbarous, animal-like, uncivilized, etc.), does not make them any less imposed or false.

But this view is an indictment of a certain trend in literature, culture, politics and the history of ideas in the West. It claims that myths and fantasies (or anxieties, contradictions, desires, etc.) are simply imposed upon a foreign culture and taken for granted when subsequently talking about them and assessing them. This tendency has, as Said points out, deep roots in Western societies. It has taken on a life of its own in some respects, and may even appear to some in those societies as the way things actually are. Some may not have even considered that these myths and fantasies about "the Orient" could be otherwise.

But to be able to point all of this out, you'd need to firmly reject the crude view often called "cultural relativism". You'd need to think that the ethnocentrism of the traditional Western gaze is wrong, that it uncritically accepts falsehoods about other people and their societies, and that it imposes fantastical traits onto foreign cultures that are alien to them. Moreover, you'd need to critically engage the cultural landscape of Western societies, thus presupposing that culture is the sort of thing that can be criticized and pulled apart.

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