ANT100Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Jacques Derrida, Relativism, Double Negative
Cultural and Moral Relativism
• Cultural relativism:
o Assumptions and behaviours mean different things in different cultures
• Recognize that historical, social, and economic conditions strongly affect our behaviour
and that of others
• Understand the other’s behaviour and thoughts, in context (of their culture)
• Moral relativism:
o There are no absolute values
o What is good or evil depends on the culture
• Absolute or relative morality: questions
o Is female genital mutilation fine?
o How about burning widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands?
o Exposing the elderly to death?
o Polygamy?
o Abortion?
o Circumcision?
o Should we agree for babies to die in places like Alto?
• Universal (absolute) moral values
o Believing that these exist is the opposite of moral relativism
o It is not necessarily the opposite of cultural relativism
• Cultural relativism allows for moral universals and moral particulars
o Universals (and particulars) of language
Noam Chomsky:
• There is an innate, universal “language acquisition device”
• Language is an innate and universal ability
o (Are absolute moral values also innate as well as universal?)
• We learn specific languages from others in our society, but all humans learn a language
• Every child will learn language, but not right away
o By the age of 6 or more
The Universal Levels of Language:
• Texts (studied in discourse analysis)
• Sentences (studied in syntax)
• Words (studied in morphology)
• Phonemes (studied in phonology)
• Phones (studied in phonetics)
• “Language” (in universal terms) has these, but they are different in every language
Text:
• Any meaningful item or items perceived as a unit
• A meaningful item or items understood as not forming part of a larger item
o “To be or not to be”: a text
o Hamlet: a text
• Linguistic and non-linguistic texts
Everything is a text and we can read it
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ANT100Y1 Full Course Notes
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