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Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture. The term was introduced in 1906 by William Graham Sumner, a Yale professor and anti-imperialist, in his book Folkways. Ethnocentrism often entails the belief that one's own race or ethnic group is the most important and that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups. Within this ideology, individuals will judge other groups in relation to their own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and sub-divisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity.^[1]

Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski argued that any human science had to transcend the ethnocentrism of the scientist. Both urged anthropologists to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in order to overcome their ethnocentrism. Boas developed the principle of cultural relativism and Malinowski developed the theory of functionalism as guides for producing non-ethnocentric studies of different cultures. The books The Sexual Life of Savages, by Malinowski, Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict and Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (two of Boas's students) are classic examples of anti-ethnocentric anthropology.

Contents 1 Theoretical underpinnings 2 See also 3 References 4 Further reading 5 External links

[edit] Theoretical underpinnings

Ethnocentrism occurs when one culture or nation places itself at the top of an imagined hierarchy of cultures and nations and subsequently assigns other cultures and nations equivalent or lower value on that scale. The belief that Nation 'A'is intrinsically “better” than any other is inculcated in the population until it becomes “naturalized”, that is, a commonly held belief that Nation 'A' has always been the best. It has never been any other way, and that all other nations can be judged according to the model Nation “A” represents. Nation “A” is the centre and all other ethnicities must strive to emulate it in order to move up in the imaginary hierarchy. Ethnocentrism is learned. It is culturally produced and it is only through recognizing the construction of it that one can deconstruct it. However, it is not unusual for a person to consider that whatever they believe is the most appropriate system of belief or that however they behave is the most appropriate and “natural” behaviour. To be fair, a system of belief in which someone doesn't consider his or her own as the right one is inherently inconsistent, for it is admitting its own falseness. With this in mind, it is important to examine the bases for our beliefs regarding other cultures and nations: Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical “Other”.

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the humanizing and dehumanizing effects of recognizing the Other in order to sustain the Self and the problems of not being able to identify the Other. Butler notes “that identification always relies upon a difference that it seeks to overcome, and that its aim is accomplished only by reintroducing the difference it claims to have vanquished. The one with whom I identify is not me, and that ‘not being me’ is the condition of the identification. Otherwise, as Jacqueline Rose reminds us, “identification collapses into identity, which spells the death of identification itself” (146)^[2]. However, Butler’s understanding of Self and Other is Eurocentric itself because she writes that one cannot recognize Self unless it is through the Other. Therefore, Self and Other are limited through a language of binary codes. Considering that language is essential to culture, an individual will know oneself through the result of language plus culture. Dichotomous language is embedded in English and similar languages; however, dichotomous language is not universal. Indeed, there are few dichotomies in many Indigenous and non-European languages (Battiste and Henderson 76)^[3]. It is by looking into the language of a culture that one will be able to see oneself in relation to one’s environment and one’s place in the world.

A person who is born into a particular culture and grows up absorbing the values and behaviors of the culture will develop patterns of thought reflecting the culture as normal. If the person then experiences other cultures that have different values and normal behaviors, the person finds that the thought patterns appropriate to their birth culture and the meanings their birth culture attaches to behaviors are not appropriate for the new cultures. However, since a person is accustomed to their birth culture it can be difficult for the person to see the behaviors of people from a different culture from the viewpoint of that culture rather than from their own.

The ethnocentric person may also adopt a new culture, repudiating their birth culture, considering that the adopted culture is somehow superior to the birth culture. Throughout history, warring factions have been composed of fairly homogeneous ethnic groups.^{[citation needed]} Ethnic strife is seen dominating the landscape in many parts of the world even to this day. Evolutionary psychology posits that the reason for these groupings stems from the alignment of interests among members of these groups due to their genetic similarity.^{[citation needed]} In this vein, van den Berghe (1981) sees ethnocentrism as a natural outgrowth of nepotism. A comprehensive look at ethnocentrism from the perspective of evolutionary psychology may be found in the volume edited by Reynolds et al. (1987).

Types of ethnocentrism:
Afrocentrism
Americentrism
Eurocentrism
Sinocentrism

[edit] See also

• American Exceptionalism
• Far East
• Ethnic nationalism
• Consumer ethnocentrism
• Cultural bias
• Cultural competence
• Intercultural competence
• Intercultural communication principles
• Cross-cultural communication
• Cultural diversity
• Cultural relativism
• Ethnic nepotism
• Racism
• Relativism
• Supremacism
• Polycentrism
• Pseudospeciation
• Xenocentrism

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Reynolds, V., Falger, V., & Vine, I. (Eds.) (1987). The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
• Salter, F.K., ed. 2002. Risky Transactions. Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.
• Sow, Adama:, ed. 2005 Ethnozentrismus als Katalysator bestehender Konflikte in Afrika südlich der Sahara, am Beispiel der Unruhen in Côte d'Ivoire at: European University Center for Peace Studies (EPU), Stadtschleining (German)
• van den Berghe, P. L. (1981). The ethnic phenomenon. Westport, CT: Praeger.

[edit] External links

• Group Processes and Intergroup Relations