ASSESSING THE CULTURAUL UNIVERSALITY of PHENOMENA
In considering privacy as a cultural universal, one must realize that this is an area of long-standing concern and controversy among anthropologists and other cross-cultural researchers, and that there are many pitfalls and complexities associated with any search for universals (see Lonner, in press, for an analysis of this issue). For example, the perspective of cultural relativism states that each culture or group of cultures is unique and must be understood in its own right, not through imposition of the orientation of another culture. Thus, seeking universals may be an ethnocentric or “etic” flaw, and a culture’s functioning may be misperceived by forcing on it another culture’s perspective.(This, incidently, is a complaint often raised by minority cultures in the United States.) On the other side of the coin, a purely relativistic approach may ignore generic similarities among peoples, and there is value in searching for commonalities across
cultures while still recognizing cultural uniqueness.