The term "ethnocentrism" refers to the act or fact of evaluating, and usually condemning, another society or its practices, using criteria foreign to it, normally those of one's own society.
Although ethnocentrism is a normal human perspective (and arguably a necessary one to sustain the moral legitimacy of each society's particular cultural system), judging a practice is unhelpful in trying to develop an explanation of it. For this reason ethnocentrism is usually considered a methodological defect in describing other societies.
Morality and Ethnocentrism
It is both fashionable and facile to condemn all ethnocentrism. However it is difficult to avoid the idea that ethical systems, being cultural entities involved with evaluation, are inherently ethnocentric. This poses a significant challenge to responsible world citizenship. For example: It is not uncommon for people in industrialized nations today to condemn slavery and for them to work to stop the practice in such regions as southern Sudan, where it still occurs. But obviously those who condemn it do so on the basis of their own values and not those of the Sudanese slave merchants (or even the slaves), whose languages they probably don't even speak, and whose country they probably cannot locate on a world map. In other words, in view of the definition above, their condemnation of slavery is ethnocentric.
Either ethnocentrism is in some cases defensible, as when we condemn slavery based on our own values but not those of the slave traders, or one must argue that there is a universal, "natural," "non-cultural" moral system under which such an institution as slavery is unethical and reprehensible without regard to the variations in moral understandings from one society to another. Ethnocentrism, in that understanding, is beside the point.
This last is the majority view. Most ethicists would argue that it is indeed possible to imagine such a "natural" moral code. And many religious systems (such as Confucianism and Islam) share the view that there can be universal moral imperatives inherent in nature and/or revealed by God and without significant cultural variation.
Other philosophers, adopting a position of extreme "cultural relativism," maintain that ethical ideas can only be cultural, and that therefore learning to make foreign ethical judgements is like learning to speak a foreign language. Pushed to an extreme, the argument could be made that one has no right to condemn anything outside one's own immediate group (at least without having studied how to make a "native-like" judgement), except of course that even the concept of a "right" is itself ethnocentric. (Modern advocacy of extreme cultural relativism is sometimes associated with a dying movement called "postmodernism.")
Adopting a moral position of extreme cultural relativism need not mean advocating or defending slavery (to persist in this example), but it does mean that in condemning slavery one is necesssarily admitting to being ethnocentric, and is therefore arguing that ethnocentrism can be morally desirable or that it is at least unavoidable.
Potential Confusion
The underlying issue in ethnocentrism as the word is properly used is evaluation, not comparison or analysis. Comparison and analysis nearly always entail analytical categories extrinsic to the societies or customs being compared, but that does not make them ethnocentric projects. For example, to study the nutritional effects of eating grasshoppers is not ethnocentric, even if "nutrition" is not an idea of interest to grasshopper eaters. In contrast, to refuse to discuss grasshoppers as food because they are disgusting is ethnocentric because it merely makes a judgement based on values unknown to or uninteresting to the grasshopper eaters. (Grasshoppers do not taste like chicken, by the way.)
Negative and Secondary Ethnocentrism
Negative ethnocentrism is an expression reinvented from time to time to refer (1) to the unreasoned enthusiasm for what is alien to one's own cultural system or (2) to the frequent and sincere denigration of one's own society. (It is the attitude concisely condemned by W.S. Gilbert in his famous line in The Mikado about "the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone all centuries but this and every country but his own.")
Negative ethnocentrism was not an uncommon phenomenon in colonial societies of the past or in poor nations today as they view the rich ones. Negative ethnocentrism is nicely exemplified in a Taiwanese expression of contempt for people enthusiastic for all things Japanese during the period when Japan was the colonial power in Taiwan. Such "Nipponophiles" were said to believe that Japan was so superior to Taiwan that even "Japanese dung smells sweeter" (Jít-pún ê sái khah phang). After the end of Japanese colonialism and the beginning of Taiwan's status as a de facto small nation in the shadow of the United States, the same expression was modified to satirize an attitude of negative ethnocentrism which held that "American dung smells sweeter" (Bí-kok ê sái khah phang).
Secondary ethnocentrism refers to the ethnocentrism that a person picks up in the course of becoming culturally competent in a second cultural system. For example, one study of American students found that in the course of studying French they began to acquire French stereotypes about Germans. Similarly, anthropologists who spend a good deal of time with an ethnic group other than their own gradually learn to be delighted or horrified by those things that delight or horrify the people around them. Arguably, secondary ethnocentrism is a kind of cultural competence.
Conclusion
A reasoned view of ethnocentrism, then, is that it can be a source of undesirable distortion in the intellectual analysis of cultural practices (where it must be self-consciously guarded against), but that is a common and probably inescapable feature of ethical behavior (where the term itself is, however, neither common nor useful).
Content Revised: 2011-03-26
Software Last Modified: 2022-05-30
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