7:57 a.m.
Doing research on a paper I am revising- really fascinating overview of Franz Boas- the
father of anthropology- and of cultural relativism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas
…which is a thorn for many of us right now and a bit of a mixed bag- of course- the
opposite would be cultural absolutism- which isn’t so popular either- this social-cultural
stuff- very thorny and it isn’t so surprising:
“At the time, Boas had no idea that speaking at Atlanta University would put him at odds
with a different prominent Black figure, Booker T. Washington. Du Bois and Washington had
different views on the means of uplifting Black Americans. By supporting Du Bois, Boas
lost Washington's support and any chance of funding from his college, Carnegie Mellon
University”-
Booker T Washington who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama is viewed as the more
conservative person of the day- and being friends with Theodore Roosevelt- who was both
Republican and Progressives of the day- but at odds with Du Bois- who was a Marxist-
actually a Stalinist, even after the abuses of the Bolsheviks became known- which has
tainted the better parts of his legacy up until present day. The fights between Booker T
Washington- Dubois, and the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey (who is cited frequently in
CRT literature with Du Bois) are legendary- neither of the three liked each other very
much up until death- and three very different visions for African-Americans following
reconstruction that you can see still in current discourse.
From the paper I am working on:
Cultural Relativism
Sasso (2001) provided some of the most cogent and forceful discourses
against the extremes of cultural relativism, which in many ways, is as problematic as
cultural absolutism. In his now seminal paper describing the retreat in the field from
empirical inquiry and objective knowledge, Sasso (2001), expressed many concerns that he,
and others in the field of special education were having regarding the relativistic
influences of post-modern ideologies. Sasso (2021) noted that the initial, largely
liberal, civil and disability rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s were characterized
“by a faith that logical inquiry, reason, and knowledge would support their positions and
bring about needed change in society.” (p. 178). This “liberal spirit” according to Sasso
“informed the 1960s and early 1970s and provided the energy and impetus for the civil
rights and women’s movements, as well as the science of behaviorism in education and
psychology.” (p. 178). Overtime, these movements began to “espouse forms of cultural
relativism, which, for want of a better term, can be called postmodernism, an intellectual
current characterized by the more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition
of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from any empirical test, and
by a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a myth or
a social construction.” (p.178).
And
Gross and Levitt (1998) describe a hard break after the civil rights movement between the
intellectual old and new left regarding the role of science, the nature of reality, and
how issues of justice should be conceptualized and pursued. Gross and Levitt refer to the
intellectual left in academia collectively (and somewhat cautiously) as “The Academic
Left” (p. 2), although to be more precise, the term and competing viewpoints should be
divided into the largely activist and non-empirical “postmodern left” and the “empirical
left.” In this break, the postmodern left largely rejected a scientific and empirical
viewpoint and instead embraced a strong form of social-cultural constructivism whose
epistemological position is: “science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought
forth by one particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular
historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge
and testable conjecture concerning the “real” world. It is a discourse, devised by and for
one specialized “interpretive community,” under terms created by a complex net of social
circumstances, political opinion, economic incentive, and ideological climate that
constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is
but one discursive community among the many that now exist and have existed
historically…science deludes itself when it when it asserts a particular privileged
position in respect to its ability to “know” reality (Gross and Levitt, 1998, p. 45).
We should talk about during a meeting sometime the difference coin terms
nomothetic<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomothetic> and
idiographic<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiographic> because they are used in
educational psychology still in regards to research.
All the grand “meta” theories, ideologies, and narratives the post-mods said are dead are
back again- in force…trickling down to us in education- a minefield.
MDB
Mack D. Burke, Ph.D.
Department of Educational Psychology
Applied Behavior Analysis and Special Education Programs
Behavioral Education & Assessment Research (BEAR Lab)
School of Education, Baylor University