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hi this is dr. Gregory Sadler I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason IO where we put philosophy into practice I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to youtube many viewers say

they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text I hope you find it useful as well selections from the anthropologist Ruth Benedict's article anthropology and the abnormal are often anthologized as a defense of ethical relativism and in it Benedict is arguing for a type of ethical relativism that we typically call cultural relativism which says that what is wrong or what is right what is good or what is bad what is affirmed as as ethically valuable

or as the opposite is going to vary from culture to culture in such a way that there really is nothing that you can say cuts across every single culture in a way as to provide an absolute ethical norm instead what she is saying is that different cultures provide different you might say codes or matrices however you want to think about it she doesn't tie yourself to any particular language here and those determine what the people within that culture view as right or wrong good or bad just or unjust pick whatever other moral language that you

like now she does acknowledge an incredible diversity of human beings as individuals within cultures but the culture provides a sort of framework in which they have to find their place or perhaps not find their place and be considered abnormal she's going to frame this in terms of the categories of normality and abnormality not to say that every culture uses those terms of course but she says that our modern Western culture at least within you know more or less advanced literate civilized areas tends now to think of those as the most important terms and she also

cautions she says modern civilization from the point of view that we have becomes not a necessary pinnacle of human achievement bought a lot one entry in a long series of possible adjustments she views civilizations cultures however you want to think of about them societies as being akin to languages which use a common phonemic manifold that is the apparatus that we are given as human beings which is really quite remarkable in its own respect but they they play upon it differently so that some languages will not in fact use certain sounds or they may differentiate things

in ways that we don't distinguish as in for example Mandarin where you know the place the location within the mouth for what would in it for an English speaker be the same sound like juror it means a different sound it signifies something different and you can say the same thing for cultures she also thinks they're like languages and that they develop over time without anybody saying AHA we want to do exactly this or even when they do make deliberate decisions about that it becomes just part of the process and so she talks as many anthropologists

will do about custom and habit as being established she thinks that normality and abnormality are in fact culturally defined and determined and so if we frame it in terms of abnormality and normality or deviancy is another term that she uses for abnormality then we are going to arrive at the point where we can see this in a relativistic way so she says here about halfway through every society beginning with some inclination in one direction or another carries its preference farther and farther integrating itself more and more completely on this basis discarding those types of behaviors

that are uncongenial and so convert the most valued traits of our normal individuals in our society been looked on and differently organized cultures as aberrant normality she says in short within a very wide range is culturally defined it is primarily a term for the socially elaborated segments of human behavior in any culture and abnormality a term for that the segment that particular civilization does not use they they don't like that doesn't mean that people won't show up within that segment but they're viewed as being outside they're viewed as being wrong as deviant as as sometimes

you know objects of fear or anger or derision she says here we go we don't make the mistake any longer of deriving the morality of our locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature we don't elevate it to the dignity of a first principle obviously she's not speaking for everybody in modern Western culture but she is speaking for a certain group she says we recognize that morality differs in every society and as a convenient term for what for socially approved habits so this is a very clear relativistic standpoint viewing morality or ethics

or however you want to put it as simply what has become established and approved within a given social framework which means that it's relative to that social framework she goes on and says mankind has always preferred to say it is a morally good thing rather than it is habitual and the fact of this preference is matter enough for a critical science of ethics but historically the two phases the phrases are synonymous so that here's where she says the concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good it is that which

society has approved a normal action is one which falls well within the limits of expected behavior its variability is a function of the variability of behavior patterns and it can never be wholly divorced from a consideration of culturally institutionalized types of behavior so what is good from this standpoint will vary from place to place from location to location and most importantly since you can take people out of their place by culture by the set of assumptions and practices and shared meanings that define a particular people culture Society well however you want to frame it so

cultures then determine what personality traits or what actions what motives what explanatory accounts people give of their behaviors what desires and everything else that falls into the moral range could be objects could be books which of those count as normal and which count as abnormal so she grants that there are going to be a lot of variants and she brings up examples of people who actually don't fit into other cultures one thing that we should mention as a side note is Benedict does not assume at all that every culture is you know because it's got

its own thing is always in harmony with itself as opposed to us modern Westerners who have lost our roots or anything like that every single culture is facing the same basic problem which is that it's got a code and some people because of their nature because of quirks about their their experiences some people fit solidly into that other people are on the outside and then there's mechanisms by which they get people on one side or another indoctrination catechesis modeling you know modifying people's behavior until you know they they fake it till they make and all

of those are possibilities and the anguish that that human beings often feel when they don't sense themselves as fitting into the normal that occurs in her view in practically every culture as well so every culture has you know some sort of manifold you might say and then human beings have this variability some of them are more outgoing some of them are more reflective some of them are more risk-averse we could go on and on and on about these different traits or complexes the cultures themselves tend to favor some of these at the expense of others

and every culture according to her does this so she gives several examples of these traits she says every culture is more or less an elaborate working out of the potentialities of the segment it has chosen insofar as the civilization is well integrated and consistent within itself it will tend to carry farther and farther according to its nature its initial impulse towards a particular type of action so cultures are understood as dynamic and as developmental she says from the point of view of any other culture these elaborations will include more and more extreme and aberrant traits

notice from the perspective of outsiders who have their own culture the continual ongoing development of this culture is going to seem aberrant we might use as an example the development of music you know you could think of sub genres of different kinds of rock and then think of heavy metal and then think of the development from the 90s really onward of all the many different genres of metal so that for some people heavy metal doesn't signify classic 1970s 80s heavy metal or the bands influenced by that but signifies perhaps Scandinavian death metal some some very

small niche where people are always trying to go further and further and further right even within the the normal in this case realm of traditional heavy metal there was an ongoing development you know the introduction of distortion pedals instead of having to achieve distortion by putting you know your guitar closer to the amp and having it over driven right you can hear a difference between 1970s and 1980s metal within the same band all right so these provide us with easy to understand examples and you can elaborate your own examples using contemporary instances as well provided

you can think about how a culture could could develop itself further she talks about four cultures and four sets of practices motivational structures however you want to think about them that tie in with normality and abnormality and deviancy comparing them to Western culture and then comparing them to some degree against each other she talks very briefly about transfer nomina and cata lapses going into a kind of a somnolent state and she says that within our society we regard that as quite a buret if somebody is just staring off into space we interrupt them and ask

them what are you thinking about but in India where this is actually a integral part of the culture not only because of religious and philosophical practices but because of daily day-in sort of things going on and because it's also part of a developmental structure you know in in early years you're supposed to be oriented towards things of the world in later years you're supposed to be oriented towards liberation towards human development well then in that case that could be normal behavior and not cause anyone to bat an eye she also talks about something that's been

changing to some degree can you know quite a bit in our own culture homosexuality at the time that she's writing it's viewed as deeply aberrant and we've seen this changing within many segments of modern society for example homosexuality no longer being treated by the psychiatric establishment as a disorder but rather as something that that's available for people that moved out of a Burin see or abnormality in to normality at least in some areas and other points though the clock is swinging back the example that she brings up about a culture that actually incorporates this and

allows for different orientations to be developed in some respect fits what we now you know would call homosexuality but it also fits into the entire notion of gender and being transgendered because she talks about the bear - conception which is found in some American Indian tribes she talks about men women who were men at puberty or thereafter took the dress and occupations or met men who at puberty or thereafter took the dress and occupations of women sometimes they married other men and lived with them sometimes they were men with no inversion persons of weak sexual

endowment who chose this role to avoid the jeers of the women the bird ashes were never regarded as first-rate supernatural powers as similar men women were in Siberia but rather as leaders in women act patience good healers in certain diseases or among certain tribes as the genial organizers of Social Affairs and here's the key point that she's saying in any case they were socially placed they were not left exposed to the conflicts that visit the deviant who is excluded from participation in the recognized patterns of his society there was a place for this person if

you had certain you know bents or behaviors somebody could say well maybe you're over here and that's okay right so in our society until very recently that would not have been okay and even in large parts of our contemporary modern society there are many people who feel that that's not okay as well she brings up another example from Melanesia where paranoiac tendencies are taken to an extreme that we would probably consider to be mental illness but for the people there that's considered rationality and our over trusting genial behavior would be viewed as a form of

deviancy she talks about here we go a society built on traits that we regard as beyond the border of paranoia in this tribe the exo gammak group says marrying outside of their their group look upon each other as prime manipulators of black magic so that one marry is always into an enemy group which remains for life ones deadly and unappeasable foes they look upon a good garden crop as a confession of theft everyone is engaged in making magic to induce into their garden the productiveness of their neighbors therefore no secrecy in the island is so

rigidly insisted on as the secrecy of a man's harvesting of his yams their preoccupation with poisoning as constant no woman ever leaves her cooking pot for a moment unattended even the great Affinia economic exchanges that are characteristic of this Melanesian culture are quite altered in dough boo since they are incompatible with his fear and his trust that pervades the culture and she actually talks about a deviant there a person who from birth on adopt this paranoiac structure and behaved friends in a friendly way in a charitable way to their neighbors and they reviewed as somebody

you know totally wrongheaded whereas we would look at that as as being quite affable she talks also about the tribes in in the American Northwest and some of the strange murderous as we would call it behavior that that comes about because of that and she says well you know within their culture that actually makes some sense she says among the Kwakiutl it did not matter whether a relative had died in bed of disease or the hand of an enemy in either case death was an affront an insult to be wiped out by the death of

another person the fact that one had been caused to mourn was proof that one had been put upon very you know strange perspective from our part and as she points out a strange perspective from the part of other Native American tribes so she brings up the fact that somebody from a Plains Indian tribe who would not retaliate for example if his wife was taken from him would be looked at as an idiot by these other tribes he would be viewed as the deviant whereas he would have a hard time understanding their hyper-aggressive 'ti and willingness

to seemingly take offense about anything it's at the point where they would kill people so all of these are ways of elaborating culture and if if Benedict is correct in her views then good or bad right or wrong would in fact be dependent on what is considered normal or abnormal in cultures and there wouldn't be any one single overarching culture that would determine that even if there are you know disciplines such as anthropology coming largely out of the a modern West that would only be one perspective among others you