‘Custom is king of all things,’ Herodotus proclaimed, arguing that if customs were like goods in a marketplace, set out alongside other such goods, each people would choose its own above all others. An experiment conducted by the Persian king Darius proved the point for Herodotus. Greeks, who buried their dead, had been confronted with Callatian Indians, who ate theirs: both groups were equally disgusted. Herodotus’ meditation on cultural relativism has often been seen as a high-water mark of Hellenic enlightenment, a rejection of the ethnocentric views that put Greeks on a loftier plane than non-Greeks. But the passage cuts two ways. People have no hope of transcending their preferences; they will always choose their own culture, since nothing prompts them to sample someone else’s. That the Greeks and Indians recoil in horror from one another proves that neither race can claim its burial rites to be morally superior. But it also suggests they will forever regard one another as fundamentally ‘other’. Custom rules its kingdom with an iron hand.

LRB 15 December 2011 | PDF Download