Methodological relativism

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Methodological relativism refers to a practice, by Anthropologists who are concerned with describing actual human behavior, in which the researcher suspends or brackets his or her own cultural biases while attempting to understand beliefs and behaviors in their local contexts. Relativism of this kind is intended as a methodological antidote to ethnocentric distortions in science, and should not be confused either with cognitive relativism or moral relativism. The need for methodological relativism is implied by the principle of cultural relativism, which states that an individual human's beliefs and activities are best interpreted in terms of his or her own culture.