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Anthropological and sociological research in the last few decades has shown us a perspicuous cultural diversity undergirding a manifoldness of epistemic and value positions. These reports have added weight to the salient position within contemporary social theory which holds that relativism in all spheres of life is an obvious case of the matter. The burden of proof, it seems, now rests on the shoulders of those who would want to argue for some kind of universality regarding humans and their cultures. They must show that what seems obvious is not really so. I shall attempt here to discharge this burden by showing that indeed, the obvious relativism is not really so. To this end I draw from classical sociological theory and make a crucial distinction between relativity and relativism. That is, I acknowledge that relativity is indeed a fact of life. Not all meaning is transparent, nor are all ideological-practical positions shared by all cultures or by all individuals within a given culture — despite the strain of hegemonic structures to exact consensus. But such relativity, I hold, refers to the level of social life I call the presented. This level, however, does not exhaust all of social life, though it is its most conspicuous side. There is another level in social life which I call the given. This level has to do with more permanent and underlying social constructs both within societies as well as among societies.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-4362-9_11

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