Cultural Relativism or Eurocentrism? A Historical Perspective

This paper explores how international identities have been historically treated which allows us to see how cultural relativity has grown to be part of the treatment of foreign, as well as one’s own, society. Whether referring to present concerns over human rights and environmentalism or historical concerns over imperial expansion, the distribution of disease, or rights to ‘citizenship,’ different nations have used cultural comparisons to distinguish the progressive society from the barbaric, the civilised from the uncivilised, the modern from the ‘traditional’ society. These categories, like all classification systems, have always had problematic boundaries. But through travel and the uses of Enlightenment ‘sciences of man’ to inspect foreign frontiers, strides were made to map the margins of the historical and scientific classification of populations—‘primitive’ or ‘enlightened,’ within a ‘European’ or ‘extra-European’ domain. This paper looks at eighteenth-century theories of European identity