ETHNOCENTRISM.

Ethnocentrism is a notion not widely used in the early twenty-first century. Coined by William Graham Sumner in the early twentieth century, the term owes what conceptual life it has to the likes of anthropology and intercultural communication. Dominant strains of these disciplines, especially anthropology, have examined the lives and cultural expressions of ethnically defined or identified groups and the misinterpretations resulting from Western perspectives.

Nevertheless, a survey of contemporary critical works on ethnicity and race, including those in critical anthropology, reveal an almost complete lack of engagement with the concept. In Anglo-American studies, the term ethnocentrism carries a largely descriptive and fleeting connotation, its meaning more or less taken for granted. It has been overshadowed perhaps by more readily invoked characterizations or charges of racism, racialization, and ethnoracial determination. This is perhaps less the case in mainstream European social analysis, where race remains a largely taboo category and ethnic configurations and characterizations are far more readily and uncritically invoked. It is unsurprising, then, that the thickest critical engagement to be found with the notion of ethnocentrism is in French works from the late 1980s (Taguieff; Todorov).

Definition

Ethnocentrism can be understood as the disposition to read the rest of the world, those of different cultural traditions, from inside the conceptual scheme of one's own ethnocultural group. The ethnocentric attitude assumes that one's own ethnic Weltanschauung (worldview) is the only one from which other customs, practices, and habits can be understood and judged. Ethnocentrism thus is conceived critically as involving overgeneralizations about cultures and their inhabitants, others' or one's own, on the basis of limited or skewed, if any, evidence. So the notion of ethnocentrism is conceived as a profound failure to understand other conceptual schemes, and, by extension, practices, habits, expressions, and articulations of others on their own terms. Standing inside our own conceptual schemes, we are blinded even to the possibilities of other ways of thinking, seeing, understanding, and interpreting the world, of being and belonging—in short, other ways of worldmaking.

It would seem to follow, as many definitions in fact insist, that ethnocentrism is a claim about the superiority of one's own culture or ethnic standing. While this is perhaps a strong presumption in many ethnocentric claims, we should be careful not to make it definitionally so. One can imagine claims of inherent and inescapably culture-bound judgments about ethnically ascribed others, about inherent differences, without assumption or assertion of cultural superiority. If there is any coherence to the concept, "differentialist ethnocentrism" must factor into any working definition of the term as well.

As an analytic concept, ethnocentrism took hold only in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the word did not appear in authoritative dictionaries until the mid-1970s. The reasons are not unrelated to the conceptual history of the term racism. While invocation of the notion of "race" in regard to human beings (and by extension, discussion of racism) became a taboo subject in Europe in the wake of the Holocaust, concerns around racism, socially and analytically, emerged forcefully in the United States. The anthropological concern with culture turned increasingly to the language of ethnicity, reinforced by the emergent hold of area studies and liberal distribution of development aid as an arm of geostrategic politics in the face of colonial liberation and the Cold War. The romance with ethnicity seemed more respectful than the legacy of race, its faux universalism enabling an easy evasiveness. At the same time, the concept of ethnocentrism—largely descriptive and individualist in analytic disposition—could offer a liberal contrast to the more critically pressing concept of "institutional racism," with its sociostructural connotations, emergent in the late 1960s (Carmichael and Hamilton). Indeed, proponents of ethnocentrism today will often claim both racism and colonialism as sub-species of ethnocentrisms. But this would seem to undercut the sociohistorical specificities of both racisms and colonialisms.

Universalizing Ethnocentrism

There is a widespread insistence among those who readily invoke the notion that ethnocentrism is a universal condition. All cultures, the argument goes, express enthnocentric attitudes toward others. This might be called the "universality of ethnocentrism" claim. It is the supposition that everyone necessarily stands inside one—and perhaps only one—culture. It would follow that we must (cannot but? always?) express inherently partial judgments about others from inside the inescapable frame, whether or not we thereby assume our own cultural commitments to be preferable or better.

This claim suggests that there is a spectrum of ethnocentrisms. They supposedly range from the less to the more pernicious, from judgments about others inescapably expressed from, and expressive of, a cultural stance not theirs to a dismissal of cultural differentiation as inferior, as lesser. Analysts or commentators usually define ethnocentrism in the latter sense, that is, as belief in or claim to the superiority of one's own culture, as this article suggests earlier. For example, mainstream Japanese society is deemed ethnocentric for its sense of discriminatory superiority over "Burakumin," or social outcasts, those deemed barely human and good only for menial employment (Weiner). Defined as such, ethnocentrism is seen as deeply linked, or leading to, the scapegoating of those deemed inferior or difficult, demanding, or incapable. Consider the enmity between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda during the 1990s Those deemed "incapable" are often identified as the cause of things gone wrong in society, of dangers threatening, of social conditions gone sour, of frustrations with socioeconomic concerns turning to ethno-tensions and fast exploding into violence. "They" are the cause of "our" difficulties. If "we" have "failed" it must be "their" fault. But it also reveals that the socially produced responses to such ethnocentrisms vary widely from avoidance or dismissal to outright rejection or, worse still, to outright attack, purging, or ultimately to genocide.

The universality claim thus expressed, however, undercuts critical judgments against ethnocentric commitment. If we are all party to such narrowness, if we are inescapably of and judge from (inside) our culture, then it cannot be that bad. After all, those so judged have their own culture not only from which to render their inescapably ethnocentric judgments but also as a form of defense. Ethnocentrism as a claim to universal inevitability conceptually reduces to a case of culture war.

The universalizability claim is considered by self-satisfied critics as revealing the poverty of extreme forms of relativism. Value universalists cannot be so smug, however. The "universality of ethnocentrism" claim on the more extreme relativistic side has its characteristic correlate among bigoted universalists too. Call this by contrast the "ethnocentrism of universality" claim. Tzvetan Todorov revealingly defines ethnocentrism to capture just this characterization. Ethnocentrism, he writes, takes the values of one's own society without warrant as universal, as applying to all anytime, everywhere.

Consider Keith Windschuttle's characteristic assumptions in attacking what he questionably deems the "ethnocentrism of [the anthropologist] Clifford Geertz," who Windschuttle reads as the quintessential relativist.

From its origins in classical thought and Christianity, Western culture has always had a strong tendency towards universalism. This principle has long been expressed in the idea of the unity of human kind and the belief that all human beings had a common origin and were equal before God. During the European Enlightenment, these Christian concepts were secularized to produce the notions of a common human nature and universal human rights.… In other words, the universalizing principle has been one of the great strengths of Western culture and has been central to the self-assurance and development of Western civilization.

Here the universalizing project of "Western Enlightenment," precisely in the name of criticizing relativistic ethnocentrism, is the project to universalize its values. This is to insist that, because these are universal values, they ought to be universally recognized. Blaise Pascal writes that "We have to admit that there is something astonishing about Christian religion … though I was born in it, I soon found it astonishing" (p. 23). So astonishing, it turns out, that its values—the only religion whose values are rationally produced, Pascal says—should hold for all, absolutely, everywhere, always. The assertion of the universality of one's society's or religion's values fails to acknowledge that even such general values as liberty and equality are open to interpretation and inflection. Liberty and equality may be general values aspired to very widely. But value universalists all too often generalize the specific interpretation or meanings of those commitments from within their own sociocultural boundaries, insisting that they should apply universally, thereby denying interpretations to these terms diverging from dominant, usually Western conceptions (though prosyletizing Islamic universalists, for example, might be guilty of this too).

These presumptively universal values and interpretations, which proponents such as Windschuttle seek to generalize and have rule the world, turn out invariably to be those of a relatively small group of people. They are a distinct minority actually in the global scheme of things, with a particular history of domination and subjugation. Critics of ethnocentrism often contrast ethnocentric disposition to that of tolerance, which is promoted as the proper response to ethnic distinction and differentiation. It is curious consequently to note accordingly how critics of value universalism are dismissed by proponents such as Windschuttle as incorrigible relativists, or even worse as relativistic multiculturalists. These are charges that themselves reveal the ethnocentric reification of such universalistic claims, not to mention the distinct horizons of application and scope when it comes to tolerance, which after all is always expressed from a position of power (Goldberg). But as Todorov points out, regarding what he calls the "ethnocentric spirit" exhibited by Pascal, having absolutized local values or interpretations ethnocentrists then judge their own values and practices as universally ordained. The "ethnocentrism of universality" becomes at once the rationalization of local values imposed universalistically.

The "ethnocentrism of universalism" and the "universalism of ethnocentrism" thus converge in the end. The ethnocentrism of universalism ends up flattening out all distinction. If I universalize the values of "my" culture (given that I can identify a coherent universalizable set) to apply to all cultural and social arrangements, I effectively deny or belie what makes those cultures unique. And if I insist, seemingly by contrast, that all societies, universally, are ethnocentric, and so their members do and perhaps can only exercise value judgments from within their cultural horizons, then effectively I must be claiming that the universalism of ethnocentrism amounts to no more than the ethnocentrism of universalism: my judgment from within a culture is, from my point of view, all there can be, and so must perversely be the grounds of universal judgment. The ethnocentric disposition at least implicitly denies historical relations connecting the ethnically dominated to the ethnically dominant. Whether taken substantively as a standpoint from which judgments are expressed about others or as an analytic framework for understanding historical circumstances, ethnocentrism implodes on the common claim to social homogeneity.

Conclusion

The social dynamics of ethnocentric charge and countercharge are confined almost exclusively to the cultural wars over values and their scope. Social power and the relative positionings of those charging and charged remain largely unaddressed. And yet power is at the heart of the ethnocentric concern, in both its universalistic versions, to maintain and refine social homogeneity. The most extreme form of ethnically predicated and produced homogenization is reflected in the phenomenon of "ethnocratic states." These are states in which a single ethnically defined or self-ascribed group seeks, and seeks to maintain, power on just those terms (Yiftachel, 2002, 2004). In the self-defining extreme, ethnocratic states are keen to remove all those identified within as "minorities" who refuse or (more likely) are refused to join or affirm the dominant conception of social value and belonging, the common "nation-state." The ethnocratic state takes itself to be born out of a single, common history, cultural legacy, language, religious tradition, and racial kinship. Consider, for example, the radical Romanian nationalist Radu Sorescu who first defined the "ethnocratic state" as an aspiring commitment, in his case for Romania in the 1930s (Dreapta). The ethnocratic state thus conceived fashions a peculiar sort of state personality, mixing the perceived need to defend society against or "clean" it of threatening heterogeneities with the related concern to claim power by asserting it over those deemed inferior or immature, distinct or detrimental.

Ethnocentrism as a concept fails in its self-assured lack of relational analysis. It refuses, by extension, any engagement with relations of social power and differentiated social positionings that has been the mark, by contrast, of race critical theory (Essed and Goldberg).

See also Colonialism ; Critical Race Theory ; Ethnicity and Race ; Race and Racism .

bibliography

Barger, Ken. "Ethnocentrism: What Is It? Why Are People Ethnocentric? What Is the Problem? What Can We Do about It?" 2003. Available at http://www.iupui.edu/~anthkb/ethnocen.htm

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Random House, 1967.

Dreapta, Noua. "The Romanian Ethnocratic State." In Fascism, edited by Roger Griffin, 207–209. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Essed, Philomena, and David Theo Goldberg, eds. Race Critical Theories: Text and Context. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Goldberg, David Theo. The Death of Race. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

——. The Racial State. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Pascal, Blaise. Pascal's Pensees. Translated by Martin Turnell. London: Harvill, 1962.

Taguieff, Pierre-Andre. The Force of Prejudice: Racism and its Doubles. Translated and edited by Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Todorov, Tzvetan. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Weinter, Michael, ed. Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Windschuttle, Keith. "The Ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz." October 2002. Available at http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/oct02/geertz.htm

Yiftachel, Oren. "'Ethnocracy': Land, Settlement, and the Politics of Judaising Israel/Palestine." 2002. Available at http://www.palisad.org/papers/yiftachel1.htm

——. "Ethnocratic States and Spaces." 2004. Available at http://www.usip.org/fellows/reports/2004/0121_yiftachel.html

David Theo Goldberg