The word ethnocentrism designates a way of seeing another ethnicity (and its derivations, such as culture, habits, religion, language and ways of life in general) based on one's ethnicity. The ethnocentric worldview does not allow the observer of a culture recognize the otherness and makes him establish his own culture as a starting point and reference to quantify and qualify other cultures. As a result, roughly speaking, the ethnocentric observer sees himself as superior to others in cultural aspects, religious and ethnic-racial.
See more: Brazilian culture: from diversity to inequality
what is ethnocentrism
The word ethnocentrism contains the radicals "ethno" (derived from ethnicity, which means, in turn, similarity of habits, customs and culture) and "centrism" (position that puts something at the center, as a central reference to everything that is its return). The ethnocentric view is one that see the world based on your own culture, disregarding other cultures or considering yours as superior to others.
EverardRock, anthropologist and professor at the Social Communication department at PUC-Rio and a great Brazilian scholar of ethnocentrism, says that the
“ethnocentrism is a vision of the world where our own group is taken as the center of everything and all others are thought and felt through our values, our models, our definitions of what the existence. On the intellectual plane, it can be seen as the difficulty of thinking about the difference; on the affective level, such as feelings of strangeness, fear, hostility, etc”.|1|
Ethnocentrism can be related to the racism, with the xenophobia or with the religious intolerance, but these elements are not strictly the same things.
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Ethnocentrism and Racism
While ethnocentrism designates a classification by ethnicity, racism stems from the notion of "breed”, which has been socially constructed over the years, and defends the position that different ethnic groups can relate to different “races”.
The notion of race is already in disuse in the field of anthropology and sociology, because it intended, when it appeared, to assume the thesis that the human species was classified by different hierarchical races, so that some were superior and others inferior.
In nineteenth-century anthropology, one tried to associate the level of cultural development with "race" (understanding race as a biological aspect), where “superior cultures” would derive from superior races, and “inferior cultures” from inferior races.
This view, being ethnocentric and based on the white European man, justified, at the time, the exploitation of African peoples, Asians, Indians, and natives of Oceania and the Americas, by the Europeans.
Ethnocentrism and xenophobia
Xenophobia is the aversion to what is foreign, to what came from outside. An ethnocentric view, by starting from their own culture to establish a cultural hierarchy, tends to see the foreigner as inferior in habits, customs, religion and other cultural aspects. What results in that aversion to what came from another place and is, therefore, inferior to what already inhabited the place of reference.
Ethnocentrism and religious intolerance
This relationship is similar to those described in the previous topics, but it is directly related to religion. The trend, in this case, is that the religion of the other be seen as wrong and inferior, which implies a notion of classification, hierarchy and prejudice regarding religions, resulting in a religious ethnocentrism.
Read more: What is the difference between sect religion?
religious ethnocentrism
The ethnocentric view of religion causes religious intolerance and the prejudice against spiritual manifestations other than those that the ethnocentric observer follows. Take the West as an example, which is mostly Christian. O christianity it was widespread within Europe, and the colonization of the Americas by the European peoples forced the entry and spread of this religion on our continent.
The native peoples here had their beliefs forcibly desecrated by the colonizers, who even promoted large campaigns for the catechization of the natives through Christian religious groups, the Jesuits, like the Society of Jesus. For Europeans, Christianity was the correct religion, which would lead to the salvation of the soul, while the religion of the native peoples was inferior, wrong, sinful, etc.
There are still cases of religious ethnocentrism today, when, for example, African-based religions are disrespected by Christians, which associate them with sin and what is considered demonic, and the reverse movement can also happen (which is more difficult to occur due to Western Christian hegemony). This is because the practitioner of a particular religion tends to consider their religious group as the only dogmatically correct manifestation.
Also know: Difference between Candomblé and Umbanda
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism
in the 19th century, the process of neocolonialism or European imperialism. England, France, Germany and others European capitalist powers invested in new territorial expansion policies and practically divided the territories of the Africa, gives Asia and Oceania.
To justify the exploitation of the wealth of those places and the policy of racial segregation, Europeans had to seek a scientific justification, because, in the nineteenth century, science was already widely disseminated and religion was no longer sufficient to justify any kind of authoritarian action.
In this sense, the anthropology it arose as an attempt to create scientific theories that would justify the exploitation of peoples outside Europe by European peoples. The first theories in this area, developed by the English biologist and geographer Herbert Spencer, claimed that there was a kind of hierarchy of races.
From this perspective, white Europeans were superior, followed by Asians, Indians and Africans, with the latter being the least developed. This current was known as DarwinismSocial or social evolutionism, as he appropriated the theory of biological evolution from Charles Darwin and applied it in the sociological field. At the end of the 19th century, the German anthropologist and geographer Franz Goodquestioned social evolutionism by getting to know the culture of the native peoples of the current state of Alaska, in the United States.
From the 20th century onwards, the ethnocentric view of anthropology was revised by scholars such as the Polish anthropologist bronislawMalinowski, who carried out fieldwork with Australian Aborigines, and the Belgian anthropologist based in Brazil ClaudeLevi-Strauss, who for years approached Brazilian indigenous tribes to develop his anthropological work. Strauss gave the most precise start to the field of cultural anthropology and anthropological structuralism, besides recognizing once and for all the importance of respect cultural diversity.
Respect for cultural diversity destroys any notion of cultural hierarchy and brings up the idea of relativism, that is, that aspects of a culture must be observed respecting the identity of that specific culture and not starting from a notion of its own culture. This notion of cultural relativism is necessary to establish a serious and accurate study of different cultures, but caution must be exercised about its use.
The Brazilian philosopher and professor emeritus at USP Marilenachaui draws attention, in your book Invitation to philosophy, to the fact that a exaggerated cultural relativism can lead to the normalization of inhumane cultural behaviors and habits. An example of this is in Somalia, where inhabitants of local tribes practice the extirpation of the girls' clitoris, which causes irreparable damage to their health. This practice, already denounced and condemned by the UN, is an example of what a cultural habit cannot always be relativized in the name of a refusal to ethnocentrism.
Examples of ethnocentrism
THE colonization of the americas it began supported by an ethnocentric bias. In fact, any movement that intends to colonize a place inhabited by other human beings is ethnocentric. An excerpt from the letter written by Pero Magalhães Gândavo, Portuguese historian of the 16th century, to the King of Portugal, exemplifies the ethnocentric view of the Portuguese on Brazilians:
“[...] the language they use, all along the coast, is one: although in certain words it differs in some parts; but not in a way that they fail to understand. (…) It lacks three letters, it is worth knowing, there is no F, nor L, nor R in it, something worthy of astonishment, because that way they have no Faith, nor Law, nor King, and in this way they live disorderly”.|2|
This vision exposes a hierarchy of cultures that lowers the native peoples of Brazil and establishes the European point of view as the superior arbitrarily. The Portuguese regarded the tribal way of life as disorderly because they deliberately sought only the European way of life as a cultural reference.
In Brazil theethnocentrism still prevails today, because the white man who lives here still sees the indigenous as someone socially backward. We also see ethnocentric manifestations here when we notice the inhabitants of the states of the South and Southeast of the country find themselves more culturally or socially developed than the inhabitants of the North and North East.
Another example of ethnocentrism that still exists in our time is the view that the African continent is backward, devastated by ills and hunger. If there is still hunger, misery and disease in sub-Saharan Africa, this is a consequence of european exploration which, in addition to taking the natural resources of that continent, established a division of States that forced rival tribes to live together, causing bloody civil wars and endless.
A striking example of ethnocentrism occurred inNazi government in hitler, in Germany, who thought there was a superiority of the supposed white Aryan race in relation to the others, which justified the apprehension, expulsion and even the death of people from other origins, especially the Jews.
authors
To better understand ethnocentrism, two introductory and easy-to-read books are required: what is ethnocentrism (First Steps Collection), from EverardRock, and Relativizing - an introduction to social anthropology, by the Brazilian anthropologist, professor and writer Roberto da Matta.
For more advanced studies, we recommend reading the French anthropologist's books Claude Lévi-Strauss, like race and history; structural anthropology; wild thought; and sad tropics. Another must-read to understand ethnocentrism more deeply is the book South Pacific Argonauts, by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinosowski.
Grades
|1| ROCHA, Everardo Pereira Guimarães. What is ethnocentrism?. Col. First steps. 5. Ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988, p. 5.
|2| GANDAVO, Pero Magalhães. The first history of Brazil: history of the province of Santa Cruz which we commonly call Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2004.
by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor
