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So far, we have presumed that the ethical relativist believes that morality is relative to a particular culture. That, however, is no easy notion. What, precisely, do we mean by a culture? Typically, we tend to think of some isolated tribe in New Guinea or some other such secluded place, and this does provide a clear-cut example of another culture that is radically different than our own and that is generally isolated from our own. However, such examples are quickly becoming the exceptions. Few such isolated cultures remain in the world today, and it is likely that their number and degree of isolation will rapidly diminish in the near future. The simple fact of the matter is that most cultures interact with and mutually influence other cultures. In fact, the issue is even more complicated than this because cultures often seem to contain quite a bit of internal diversity.

Consider American culture. We may refer to it as though there were some single culture, but when we look more closely, we uncover a lot of diversity. A generation ago there were many neighborhoods in major cities where one did not need to know English. German, Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, Greek, or any number of other European languages might have sufficed. Were these part of American culture, or should they be seen as part of the culture of their original country?....We can refer to this as the problem of how we individuate a culture, that is, how we draw the lines to separate on culture from another. It's rare, in these days of shifting political systems and mass migrations of people, that cultural boundaries coincide strictly with geographical ones. Furthermore, in an age of increasing mass communication and ever-expanding international trade, individual cultures are less and less likely to remain isolated. [Lawrence  M. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory p. 42]