ethnocentrism

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1. Belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group.
2. Overriding concern with race.

Any policy, research, and action on the part of individuals or institutions that promote (intentionally or unintentionally) the believed superiority of one group, profession, or set of ideals over another can be considered ethnocentric. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ethnocentrism as "regarding one's own race or ethnic group as of supreme importance" (1989, p. 424). The dictionary records the first use of the term to be in 1900 when W. G. McGee, in the Annals and Reports of American Ethnology, referred to ethnocentrism as a characteristic of primitive cultures. McGee couldn't imagine his own European culture as having ethnocentric biases. Ethnocentrism, as it is understood in the twenty-first century, was first defined in 1951. Noted anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in the publication Social Anthropology, saw ethnocentrism as claiming or believing that one group has superiority over others and urged that "this ethnocentric attitude has to be abandoned if we are to appreciate the rich variety of human culture and social life" (OED 1989, p. 424). It is apparent that a broader use of the term has entered common usage.

Success in the field of public health requires cultural and social sensitivity. Recognizing the limiting effects of ethnocentrism and heeding the call of Evans-Pritchard is essential. Public health workers and the programs they design must recognize the distinctive features and characteristics of the populations they serve. S. Van der Geest notes that ethnocentrism encourages narrowmindedness. It prevents one from entertaining different worldviews, and one becomes less inclined to challenge or question how different groups of people learn or to understand what they are interested in learning. The appreciation of different forms of knowledge and values are at the core of ethical practice, policy, and research in public health.

Understanding ethnocentrism and its relation to race in public health research is particularly important in the United States because of its history of using race in classifying and judging different groups. M. T. Fullilove notes that race is an arbitrary system of visual classification that has no scientific relevance in public health research. R. Bhopal and L. Donaldson suggest the use of nonracialized terms in public health research and caution that the use of racial categories in scientific research can be interpreted as an endorsement of racial determinism. The historical use of racial categorization was founded on the ethnocentric belief that the so-called white race was superior to the so-called black, red, and yellow races and promoted an attitude that there was no need for equality in entitlement to public goods and services. The most often cited example of racist and ethnocentric conduct in U.S. public health history is the forty-year Tuskegee syphilis study, where African-American men with syphilis were recruited to participate in a study and told they were being treated, only to be left untreated even though an effective cure was available.

In twenty-first-century America, there is concern over persistent disparities in health status between those of European or Caucasian descent and other groups—a distinction often based on racial or minority status. The disparity has persisted in part because of ethnocentric attitudes and beliefs on the part of health care providers, researchers, and health-policymakers over the most effective methods for addressing health promotion and disease prevention on the one hand, and for providing the most efficient health care services on the other. Effectiveness and efficiency are dependent on social and cultural characteristics and skills. It has been demonstrated that ethnic and cultural values and beliefs influence the way individuals and groups view health and disease and determine what practices are followed when illness occurs. Ethnocentric points of view can prevent attempts to acknowledge ethnic differences and cultural values in making health decisions that better address the health concerns of U.S. minorities. To challenge ethnocentrism is to recognize and value differences and qualities that exist in diverse groups. Such differences can include eating practices, spiritual values, body shape and size, and preventive and curative beliefs, to name but a few.

Public health often focuses too much on risk factors and not enough on protective cultural and cognitive factors in the same individuals. Public health does focus on these in attempting to promote positive health practices, attitudes, beliefs, values, and living conditions. All groups have both risk (negative) and protective (positive) factors that can determine health-related behavior and skills. The positive aspects of a group's beliefs and practices as they relate to health need to be recognized and promoted. When negative aspects of a minority group's beliefs and values must be changed, it does not follow that the strategy and approach for such change needs to conform with the strategy and approach for changing negative beliefs and values in the majority group. Failure to understand differences in the way various groups address their preventive and curative health needs often leads to ethnocentrism in public health. To eliminate the disparity in the health status of ethnic minorities in the United States, public health professionals must encourage diversity in approaches to health promotion and disease prevention and eliminate ethnocentrism in public health.

(SEE ALSO: African Americans; Anthropology in Public Health; Asian Americans; Assimilation; Biculturalism; Cultural Identity; Cultural Appropriateness; Ethnicity and Health; Immigrants, Immigration; Minority Rights; Values in Health Education)

Bibliography

Airhihenbuwa, C. O. (1999). "Of Culture and Multiverse: Renouncing the 'Universal Truth' in Health." Journal of Health Education 30:267–273.

Bhopal, R., and Donaldson, L. (1998). "White, European, Western, Caucasian, or What? Inappropriate Labeling in Research on Race, Ethnicity, and Health." American Journal of Public Health 88(9):1303–1307.

Fullilove, M. T. (1998). "Comment: Abandoning 'Race' as a Variable in Public Health Research—An Idea whose Time Has Come." American Journal of Public Health 88(9):1297–1298.

Jones, J. H. (1995). Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free Press.

Judd, C. M.; Park, B.; Ryan, C. S.; Brauer, M.; and Kraus, S. (1995). "Stereotypes and Ethnocentrism: Diverging Interethnic Perceptions of African American and White American Youth." Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 69(3):460–481.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989). Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.

Van der Geest, S. (1995). "Overcoming Ethnocentrism: How Social Science and Medicine Relate and Should Relate to One Another." Social Science and Medicine 40(7):869–872.

— COLLINS O. AIRHIHENBUWA; MICHAEL LUDWIG

For more information on ethnocentrism, visit Britannica.com.

The tendency of members of one social group to mistrust individuals belonging to another social group. It involves the belief that one's own social group is culturally superior to another group. It also involves the inability to understand that cultural differences do not imply the inferiority of those groups, which are distinct from one's own.

The belief that one's own culture is superior to all others and is the standard by which all other cultures should be measured.

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Ethnocentrism is the tendency to believe that one's own race or ethnic group is the most important and that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups. Since within this ideology, individuals will judge other groups in relation to their own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs, and religion. These ethnic distinctions and sub-divisions serve to define each ethnicity's unique cultural identity.^[1]

Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski argued that any human science had to transcend the ethnocentrism of the scientist. Both urged anthropologists to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in order to overcome their ethnocentrism. Boas developed the principle of cultural relativism and Malinowski developed the theory of functionalism as guides for producing non-ethnocentric studies of different cultures. The books The Sexual Life of Savages, by Malinowski, Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict and Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (two of Boas's students) are classic examples of anti-ethnocentric anthropology.

Contents 1 Theoretical underpinnings 2 Endogamy 3 See also 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Theoretical underpinnings

Ethnocentrism occurs when one culture or nation places itself at the top of an imagined hierarchy of cultures and nations and subsequently assigns other cultures and nations equivalent or lower value on that scale. The belief that Nation 'A' is intrinsically “better” than any other is inculcated in the population until it becomes “naturalized”, that is, a commonly held belief that Nation 'A' has always been the best. It has never been any other way, and that all other nations can be judged according to the model Nation “A” represents. Nation “A” is the centre and all other ethnicities must strive to emulate it in order to move up in the imaginary hierarchy. Ethnocentrism is learned. It is culturally produced and it is only through recognizing the construction of it that one can deconstruct it. However, it is not unusual for a person to consider that whatever they believe is the most appropriate system of belief or that however they behave is the most appropriate and “natural” behaviour. To be fair, a system of belief in which someone doesn't consider his or her own as the right one is inherently inconsistent, for it is admitting its own falseness. With this in mind, it is important to examine the bases for our beliefs regarding other cultures and nations: Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical “Other”.

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the humanizing and dehumanizing effects of recognizing the Other in order to sustain the Self and the problems of not being able to identify the Other. Butler notes “that identification always relies upon a difference that it seeks to overcome, and that its aim is accomplished only by reintroducing the difference it claims to have vanquished. The one with whom I identify is not me, and that ‘not being me’ is the condition of the identification. Otherwise, as Jacqueline Rose reminds us, “identification collapses into identity, which spells the death of identification itself” (146)^[2]. However, Butler’s understanding of Self and Other is Eurocentric itself because she writes that one cannot recognize Self unless it is through the Other. Therefore, Self and Other are limited through a language of binary codes. Considering that language is essential to culture, an individual will know oneself through the result of language plus culture. Dichotomous language is embedded in English and similar languages; however, dichotomous language is not universal. Indeed, there are few dichotomies in many Indigenous and non-European languages (Battiste and Henderson 76)^[3]. It is by looking into the language of a culture that one will be able to see oneself in relation to one’s environment and one’s place in the world.

A person who is born into a particular culture and grows up absorbing the values and behaviors of the culture will develop patterns of thought reflecting the culture as normal. If the person then experiences other cultures that have different values and normal behaviors, the person finds that the thought patterns appropriate to their birth culture and the meanings their birth culture attaches to behaviors are not appropriate for the new cultures. However, since a person is accustomed to their birth culture it can be difficult for the person to see the behaviors of people from a different culture from the viewpoint of that culture rather than from their own.

The ethnocentric person may also adopt a new culture, repudiating their birth culture, considering that the adopted culture is somehow superior to the birth culture. Throughout history, warring factions have been composed of fairly homogeneous ethnic groups.^{[citation needed]} Ethnic strife is seen dominating the landscape in many parts of the world even to this day. Evolutionary psychology posits that the reason for these groupings stems from the alignment of interests among members of these groups due to their genetic similarity.^{[citation needed]} In this vein, van den Berghe (1981) sees ethnocentrism as a natural outgrowth of nepotism. A comprehensive look at ethnocentrism from the perspective of evolutionary psychology may be found in the volume edited by Reynolds et al. (1987).

Types of ethnocentrism:
Afrocentrism
Americentrism
Eurocentrism
Sinocentrism Indocentrism

Endogamy

Endogamy describes a preference for mates of the same ethnicity, a tendency to favour the in-group. It seems to be a socially acceptable form of discrimination.

See also

• American Exceptionalism
• Ethnic nationalism
• Consumer ethnocentrism
• Cultural bias
• Cultural competence
• Intercultural competence
• Intercultural communication principles
• Cross-cultural communication
• Cultural diversity
• Cultural relativism
• Ethnic nepotism
• Racism
• Relativism
• Supremacism
• Polycentrism
• Pseudospeciation
• Xenocentrism

References

1. ^ Margaret L. Andersen, Howard Francis Taylor. Sociology: Understanding a Diverse Society. Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 0534617166. http://books.google.com/books?id=LP9bIrZ9xacC&pg=PA67&sig=ACfU3U2C0vHakrblqZtY0Qed2CEjjdbJmA. 
2. ^ Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.
3. ^ Battiste, Marie and James Youngblood Henderson. Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge. Saskatoon: Purich publishing, 2000.

Further reading

• Ankerl, G. Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. Geneva: INU PRESS, 2000, ISBN 2 88155 004 5
• Reynolds, V., Falger, V., & Vine, I. (Eds.) (1987). The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
• Salter, F.K., ed. 2002. Risky Transactions. Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.
• van den Berghe, P. L. (1981). The ethnic phenomenon. Westport, CT: Praeger.

External links

• Group Processes and Intergroup Relations

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Dansk (Danish)
adj. - etnocentrisk

Français (French)
adj. - ethnocentrique

Deutsch (German)
adj. - ethnozentrisch

Ελληνική (Greek)
adj. - εθνοκεντρικός

Italiano (Italian)
etnocentrico

Português (Portuguese)
adj. - etnocêntrico

Русский (Russian)
национальное/ расовое чванство, этноцентричный

Español (Spanish)
adj. - etnocéntrico

Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - etnocentrisk

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
民族中心主义的, 种族优越的

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 民族中心主義的, 種族優越的

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 자기 민족 중심주의의

日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - 民族中心的な, 自民族中心主義の

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮מעריך עמים ותרבויות אחרים באמצעות קריטריונים הלקוחים מעמו ומתרבותו, אתנוצנטרי‬

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