Ethnocentrism and relativism

ETHNOCENTRISM AND RELATIVISM

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ETHNOCENTRISM

• is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture.

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• Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion.

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. These ethnic distinctions and subdivisions serve to define each (culture) ethnicity's unique cultural identity.

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• 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.”

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• He further characterized it as often leading to pride, vanity, beliefs of one's own group's superiority, and contempt of outsiders.

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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. (standard)

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• 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 are not appropriate for the new cultures.

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• 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.

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• 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“.

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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.

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• 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. 13

• Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: "civilization is not something absolute, but is relative, and our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.“

However, Boas did not coin the term.

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Franz Boas, originally trained in physics and geography, argued that one's culture may mediate and thus limit one's perceptions in less obvious ways.

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He understood "culture" to include not only certain tastes in food, art, and music, or beliefs about religion. He assumed a much broader notion of culture, defined as :

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• the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relation to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself, and of each individual to himself.

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This understanding of culture confronts anthropologists with two problems: •first, how to escape the unconscious bonds of one's own culture, which inevitably bias our perceptions of and reactions to the world, •and second, how to make sense of an unfamiliar culture. 18

GENERALIZATION:

• 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.

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