Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture.
Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture,
especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions
and subdivisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity. Ethnocentrism may
be overt or subtle, and while it is considered a natural proclivity of human psychology,
it has developed a generally negative connotation.
Origins of the concept and its study William G. Sumner created the term "ethnocentrism"
upon observing the tendency for people to differentiate between the in-group and others.
He defined it as "the technical name for the view of things in which one's own group is
the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it." He
further characterized it as often leading to pride, vanity, beliefs of one's own group's
superiority, and contempt of outsiders. Robert K. Merton comments that Sumner's additional
characterization robbed the concept of some analytical power because, Merton argues, centrality
and superiority are often correlated, but need to be kept analytically distinct.
Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Bronislaw 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. Classic examples of anti-ethnocentric anthropology include Margaret
Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western
Melanesia, and Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture.
Anthropology People born into a particular culture that
grow up absorbing the values and behaviors of the culture will develop a worldview that
considers their culture to be the norm. If people then experience other cultures that
have different values and normal behaviors, they will find 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 people are accustomed to their birth
culture, it can be difficult for them to see the behaviors of people from a different culture
from the viewpoint of that culture rather than from their own.
Examples of ethnocentrism include religiocentric constructs claiming a divine association like
"divine nation", "One Nation under God", "God's Own Country", "God's Chosen People", and "God's
Promised Land". In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses
recognizing the Other in order to sustain the Self and the problems of not being able
to identify the Other. Butler writes: [I]dentification 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.
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, individuals will know themselves through the result of language plus culture.
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.
Biology and evolutionary theory A 2011 paper in PNAS suggested that ethnocentrism
may be mediated by the oxytocin hormone. It found that in randomized controlled trials
"oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and,
to a lesser extent, out-group derogation". In The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins writes that "Blood-feuds and inter-clan warfare are easily interpretable
in terms of Hamilton's genetic theory." Simulation-based experiments in evolutionary game theory have
attempted to provide an explanation for the selection of ethnocentric-strategy phenotypes.
See also
References
Further reading Ankerl, G. Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations:
Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. Geneva: INU PRESS, 2000, ISBN 2-88155-004-5
Reynolds, V., Falger, V., & Vine, I.. 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.
Seidner, S. S.. Ethnicity, Language, and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective. Bruxelles:
Centre de recherche sur le pluralinguisme. van den Berghe, P. L.. The ethnic phenomenon.
Westport, CT: Praeger. Martineau, H.. "How to Observe Morals and
manners". Charles Knight and Co., London. Wade, Nicholas, "Depth of the Kindness Hormone
Appears to Know Some Bounds," New York Times, Jan. 10, 2011.
External links Group Processes and Intergroup Relations