Cultural relativism, like cultural absolutism or cultural pluralism, refers to a theoretical system for classifying and understanding human variation. The concept of cultural relativism emerged as a set of descriptive and epistemological precepts within American anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, more broadly, in the course of the decline of polygenetic and biological-racial explanations for human variation. More recently, it has become central to debates over legal and political norms, particularly around multiculturalism, the politics of race and racism, and international human rights law. As a taxonomic system, cultural relativism involves a culturalist iteration of some key tenets of earlier, biological accounts of race, such as essentialism, fixity, comparability, and ranking.