Cultural relativism is a purely intellectual attitude; it does not inhibit the anthropologist from participating as a professional in his own milieu; on the contrary, it rationalizes that milieu. Relativism, logically pursued, is self-critical only in the abstract. It does not engage the anthropologist, but rather converts him into a shadowy figure, prone to newsworthy and shallow pronouncements about the cosmic condition of the human race...
...The result to which relativism logically tends, and which it never quite achieves, is to detach the anthropologist from all particular cultures. It does not provide him with a moral center, only a job; he can only strive to become a pure professional.
One is tempted to say that relativism puts the soul of the anthropologist in jeopardy. But in the end, the relativistic stance is usually demystified in practice, and the anthropologist discovers that he is a middle-class Episcopalian Anglo-American, or a second-generation urban American Jew, whose cultural identity reasserts itself along with his humbler prejudices. It is at this recurring point that relativism is abstracted as a professional ideology and divorced from the actual life of the person...
...The avoidance of the implications of the Rousseau-Marx tradition does not work. Reductive materialism, the merely aesthetic appreciation of primitive cultures, the collapsing of the historical sense, the refusal to put one’s society in a radically critical perspective, lead only to academism and, in reality, convert the anthropologist into an instrument of that imperial civilization, in dialectical opposition to which his calling arose in the first instance.
Stanley Diamond, "Anthropology in Question", 1972. (Reinventing Anthropology, editado por Dell H. Hymes, pp. 421-423).
