Cultural Relativism and its Relation to a working Deffintion of Religion

Cultural Relativism and its Relation a our working Definition of Religion:
A response to Margaret R:

Margaret R. noted an important concept in her blog post; we define culture and what entails a 'civilization' broadly across different nations of the world. Margaret’s idea relates loosely to cultural relativism- the idea that individual beliefs should be interpreted in terms of his or her own culture. I would argue that Paleolithic art and Native American rituals are both lenses in which we can look through to speculate on the origins of spirituality. But I would also argue that the idea of cultural relativism holds true, and there are some broad conclusions (as Margaret asserted) we cannot make because we hold as etic viewpoint (the view one holds outside a specific cultural context).

One problem I had while reading the “Effigy Mound” article was the number of assumptions made about Native American culture. The idea of cultural relativism comes into context when the article notes that “much conjecturing on the mounds had been done from a Euro-American world view” (112) If an attempt is made to define religion, how can we truly compile a list of commonalities every religion must consist of? The ideas behind cultural relativism make it impossible for religion to have a concrete definition. I wanted to share my opinion on this subject, because I didn’t get to express it on the first day of class.