Relativism, simply put.

“Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological—that is to say, methodological— procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy.“

-Marshall Sahlins, 2002. (Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg46)

Most Philosophers Agree…

“A lot of people, mostly people without a lot of money, say that money can’t buy everything. Especially it can’t buy happiness: people with 25 million, for example, are not perceptibly happier than people with 24; and besides, rich people are generally unhappy. Still the rich have many consolations, as Plato observed—the chief among them presumably being their money. And despite the fortitude it takes for the rich to endure their disadvantages (Rex Stout), most modern philosophers agree that money is better than poverty—“if only for financial reasons,” as Woody Allen speculates.”

-Marshall Sahlins, 2002.  (Waiting for Foucault, Still.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg 30)

Anthropology, or nothing.

“…The phonetic alphabet is made up of all known phonemic distinctions: of all differences in sound-segments known to signify differences in meaning in the natural languages of the world. So in principle the objective description of any language consists of its comparison with the meaningful order of all other languages.

The same for ethnography.  No good ethnography is self-contained. Implicitly or explicitly ethnography is an act of comparison.  By virtue of comparison ethnographic description becomes objective.  Not in the naive positivist sense of an unmediated perception— just the opposite: it becomes a universal understanding to the extent it brings to bear on the perception of any society the conceptions of all the others…ethnography is Anthropology, or it is nothing”

-Marshall Sahlins, 2002.  (Waiting for Foucault, Still.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg 12)