The novelist Virginia Woolf once said, "on or about December 1910, human character changed." (see Jackson Lears). She was kidding about the specificity of the date but in earnest about the change.

In the early 1970s, renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his most influential book, The Interpretation of Cultures. The book was widely read throughout the social sciences and humanities, ...

Cultural relativism, the realization that diverse cultures have different, incommensurable aesthetic standards, anticipated by Montaigne and Machiavelli, was the discovery of the Neapolitan ...