Week 3. Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism
Ethnocentrism — the tendency to assume that one's own culture and way of life represent the norm or are superior to all others.
Cultural Relativism — the viewing of people's behavior from the perspective of their own culture.
Cultural relativism is the principle that...
...an individual person's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. It was established as accepted in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students.
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 Promised Land.
Ethnocentrism is insensitive to other cultures, while...
...cultural relativism shows high cultural sensitivity.
Ethnocentric individual...
...judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs and religion.
Ethnocentrism is...
...judging another culture based upon the values and standards set in one's own culture.
In the study of Anthropology, ethnocentric are...
...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.
These ethnic distinctions and subdivisions...
...serve to define each (culture) ethnicity's unique cultural identity.
Other Cultural Views
1. Xenocentrism — a position that everything about the other culture is wrong, unreasonable, detestable and wicked. 2. Prejudice — an unfair feeling of dislike for a person or group because of race, sex, religion, etc. 3. Racism — a discriminatory behavior towards members of another race.
According to William G. Sumner
Ethnocentrism is defined 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.
Cultural relativism was in part a response to Western ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism may take obvious forms, in which one consciously believes that one's people's arts are the most beautiful, values the most virtuous, and beliefs the most truthful.
Ethnocentrism
It is a form of bias, where we tend to immediately judge another culture as 'bad" or 'wrong' based upon their actions, if their values are not aligned with our own beliefs. We all do it, sometime or the other, mostly not even realizing that we're being ethnocentric at that moment.
Example 1: Terrorism and Hate Crimes
Terrorism and hate crimes take place when one religion or community believes that it is superior, and better than any other religion or community. Ethnocentrism tends to blind people from seeing things from another perspective— just because another community does something that yours doesn't— like a particular style of worship, for instance, doesn't make it inferior to yours, and nor does it make the other community's style of worshiping incorrect.
Example 3: In American Society
The popular belief among American ethnocentric people is that their country, culture, values, development, and everything else is superior to every other nation in the world, and that every other nation is inferior to the United States. This belief has led to political meddling among the matters of other countries, leading to misunderstandings and miscommunication between different countries in the world.