Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture.^[1] The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to his or her own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and subdivisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity.^[2]

Origins of the concept and its study[link]

The term ethnocentrism was coined by William G. Sumner, upon observing the tendency for people to differentiate between the ingroup 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."^[3] He further characterized it as often leading to pride, vanity, beliefs of one's own group's superiority, and contempt of outsiders.^[4] 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.^[3]

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. The books The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, by Bronisław 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.

Anthropology[link]

People who are born into a particular culture and grow up absorbing the values and behaviors of the culture will develop patterns of thought reflecting the culture as normal.^[5] 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.^[6]

Examples of ethnocentrism include religiously patterned 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".^[7]

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 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).^[8] 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. 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).^[9] 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[link]

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".^[10]

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."^[11] Simulation-based experiments in evolutionary game theory have attempted to provide an explanation for the selection of ethnocentric-strategy phenotypes.^[12]

See also[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• 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. (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.
• Seidner, S. S. (1982). Ethnicity, Language, and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective. Bruxelles: Centre de recherche sur le pluralinguisme.
• van den Berghe, P. L. (1981). The ethnic phenomenon. Westport, CT: Praeger.
• Martineau, H. (1838). "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[link]

• Group Processes and Intergroup Relations