preview

The Patterns Of Culture By Ruth Benedicts

Decent Essays

In Ruth Benedicts' book "The Patterns of Culture", He describes the grieving habits of the Kwakiutl Indians that reside in the Pacific North West. When someone passes away in the tribe, the members affected by the tragedy grieve in a specific way. The tribe members take all their grievance in their hearts and convert it into anger, which leads them to lash out at anyone they please. This lashing out can go to the extreme of even killing people. It does not matter to the Kwakiutl tribe if the party chosen is guilty or not. The tribe feels that if they are hurting, innocent people should have to feel their pain as well. In "The patterns of Culture" the chief loses his niece and sister in an accident, so he has the need to take this grievance he feels and turns it into motivation for killing an innocent party of seven men and two children who were asleep that were a part of another tribe. At the end of the excerpt provided in this book in module two, it even says that everyone involved in the killings of innocent people felt good about themselves when they returned back to where they reside.
Following the definition provided in module two, the ethical view of moral relativism basically says that anything goes in a culture, there are no moral codes that need to be universal to all people. Ethical or moral relativism states that every culture has a different view of morality, and we as humans need to respect that. Going by this explanation of moral relativism, relativists

Get Access