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Melville Herskovits was a student of the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University in the 1920s. He developed a strong interest in the cultures of west Africa and of Africans in America. In addition to books such as The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) and The Human Factor in Changing Africa (1962), he developed some more philosophical ideas on the relationship between culture and ethics. His ideas on ethics were collected and published after his death in Cultural Relativism (1972).

What of the moral questions inherent in the practice of monogamy as against polygamy, the adjustment of children raised in households where, for example, the mothers must compete on behalf of their offspring for the favors of a common husband? If monogamy is held to be the desired form of marriage, the responses to these questions are predetermined. But when we consider these questions from the point of view of those who live in polygamous societies, alternative answers, based on different conceptions of what is desirable, may be given.

....Thus polygamy, when looked at from the point of view of those who practice it, is seen to hold values that are not apparent from the outside. A similar case can be made for monogamy.... And what is true of a particular phase of culture such as this, is also true of others. Evaluations are relative to the cultural background out of which they arise.

Cultural relativism is in essence an approach to the question of the nature and role of values in culture. It represents a scientific, inductive attack on an age-old philosophical problem, using fresh, cross-cultural data, hitherto not available to scholars, gained from the study of the underlying value-systems of societies having the most diverse customs. The principle of cultural relativism, briefly stated, is as follows: Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation. Those who hold for the existence of fixed values will find materials in other societies that necessitate a re-investigation of their assumptions. Are there moral standards, or are moral standards effective only as far as they agree with the orientations of a given people at a given period of their history?

For cultural relativism is a philosophy that recognizes the values set up by every society to guide its own life and that understands their worth to those who live by them, though they may differ from one's own. Instead of underscoring differences from absolute norms that, however objectively arrived at, are nonetheless the product of a given time or place, the relativistic point of view brings into relief the validity of every set of norms for the people who have them, and the values these represent.

Every society...has its moral code, which carries unquestioned sanctions for its members. But once we move into another society, we find a series of values differently conceptualized, differently phrased, but having sanctions of equal force. It is therefore apparent, by extending this observation to human society in general, that while the fact that every culture has an accepted code governing attitudes and conduct has been empirically established, the absolute worth of any one of these codes, except for a given society in terms of its own culture, is amenable to no such empirical validation.

From Melville Herskovits, Cultural Relativism, edited by Frances Herskovits. p. 12, 14-15, 31, 89.