Does cultural relativism's refusal to judge a practice by an outside standard leave it unable to condemn practices most societies regard as harmful, or does that criticism mistake a method of understanding for an endorsement of whatever it studies?

When the American Anthropological Association drafted its 1947 Statement on Human Rights around relativist principles, anthropologist Julian Steward directly challenged it: "Either we tolerate everything, and keep hands off, or we fight intolerance and conquest," and asked whether anthropologists would "approve the social caste system of India, the racial caste system of the United States, or many other varieties of social discrimination." Stanley Diamond and George Stocking pressed a related, postcolonial version of the same worry, that popularized relativism can end up rationalizing rather than critiquing unequal power between societies. Clifford Geertz defended the principle on the opposite reading, that it addresses provincialism rather than endorsing every practice it describes. The normative reach of the principle, not its descriptive core, is what remains unsettled.