Cultural Relativism is one of those topics that is entirely misunderstood by many people.

Cultural Relativism is a tool, a suspense of your own personal viewpoints and cultural bias temporarily to try to understand the conditions of a particular cultural practice or problem. If we want to understand something (This is especially true of very contentious things) then we have to approach it with as fresh and objective a mind as possible. That doesn’t mean you can’t have judgments of the topic, but it means putting those judgments in check to see things more clearly.

Some important points:

1. Cultural Relativism does not mean anything a culture or group of people believe is true
   
   A good example of this is flat earthers. Just because someone believes this to be true, doesn’t make it so. We have endless evidence against their claims. However, if you wanted to understand how the flat earthers came to believe this point, you would temporarily put aside your own views and evidence for a moment and try to examine their claim from thier point of view. This can also be valuable in debunking some of their claims in the long term. By learning to speak their ‘language’ we can open lines of communication that are more productive, and hopefully get them out of their insane beliefs.
2. Cultural Relativism does not mean that anything a culture does is good or moral. This is one of the ones that confuses people. Some people might claim that we can never understand something because it’s ‘cultural’. Not so. There are certain beliefs and practices that are objectively harmful. But this is where someone, who has never studied anthropology might not understand that kinship/marriage patterns don’t actually contain any real morality outside of culture. For example, there is nothing objectively wrong with a woman practices polyandry (she has several husbands), such as is practiced in some parts of the Himalayas. Cultural relativism teaches us that, marriage patterns are cultural options, not objective truth. We can also examine the history of our own (I am American) cultural relationships to marriage and see these things have changed over time. However, it’s pretty easy to say that a group of people who kill their neighboring tribes for the purpose of cannibalism is wrong. We can all easily agree that murder is a bad thing across culture. An anthropologist in this circumstance would use cultural relativism (one of the three main aspects of the anthropological lens) to understand why a tribe engages in this practice and how it relates to their worldview. An applied anthropologist would take it one step forward and perhaps use that cultural knowledge to try and put an end to the harm that is being created by the practice.
3. Cultural Relativism doesn’t mean that cultures can’t be compared There is sometimes a strange notion that there are no commonalities between cultures. It is true that there are very few universals across all human experience, but there are definitely some core things that humans all do, most of which relate to survival and continuity. But even in practices that are entirely different, we can find comparrison as a useful tool for understanding ideas and points of view. But again, cultural relativism is about putting aside our preconceptions and having an experience that is less tainted by our past knowledge and experience. This is especially powerful and useful when problem solving in other cultures or even our own.
   
   Cultural Relativism is important to anthropology and one of the things that makes anthropology unique because it is a tool, a method for attempting to see things from a multiplicity of viewpoints so as to better understand them. This is one of the reasons why those trained in cultural anthropology are often great problem solvers for complex issues. We are able to put ourselves aside for a moment and explore something that would make most people uncomfortable.

I hope this helped.