A brief observation on the fields of the social sciences and philosophy (particularly ethics).

As of the Fall 2022 semester, I'm currently taking an intro-level sociology class with Dr. Charles Brooks, an expert in Hindu culture and anthropology. When discussing the methods of an ethnographic study, he emphasized the lens of cultural relativism -- the idea that a culture or society is allowed to decide what is best for itself. And this is understandable within the context of studying a culture's descriptive facts. However, Brooks takes cultural relativism further than a simple lens with which we can use to our advantage when studying the world. Rather, he turns the idea into a worldview. No longer are we only interested in staying unbiased when methodically and systematically understanding a foreign culture. Instead, all cultures are free of criticism altogether from outsiders. 

Dr. Brooks' cultural relativism seems to be a reactionary response to ethnocentricism. Which is understandable, given the history of moral imperialism the west has perpetrated. 

Now, this idea is staunchly in contrast to the survey that was published in PhilPapers, which puts moral realism as the most popular and majority stance of philosophers (56%) and my own experiences in engineering ethics, where one of my professors called moral relativism incoherent and repugnant. I myself am a moral realist. 

How do I reconcile these two fields? Is Dr. Brooks an outlier within the social sciences? Or are all social sciences relativistic in nature? Or is he simply unfamiliar with the literature regarding metaethics, and a moral realist in reality? Or am I misinterpreting the use of the word "cultural relativism" when he discusses it in an anthropological context, as opposed to how I use it in ethics? As he is an expert with far wider and deeper knowledge, I'd like to eliminate the possibility of the third option.