Moral anthropology at a crossroads In his article “Relativism and Universalism in Moral Anthropology” the leading American anthropologist Richard Shweder recounts the story of the tensions and disputes between extreme moral universalism and extreme moral relativism in anthropology. He recalls that in 1997, “the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (whose membership included the avowed cultural relativist Melville Herskvitz) refused to endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Man on the grounds that it was an ethnocentric document”. For his own part, Shweder advocates a position that he calls “universalism without uniformity”. The phrase sounds appealing: while…