# Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism #

In Ancient Greece, non-Greek speaking peoples were called
barbarians after their language, which the Greeks could not
understand, and considered to be just "bar bar bar bar," that is,
babbling nonsense. Barbarians did not live in a city-state. They had no
language. In other words, the Greeks thought the barbarians were not
just a different //ethnos// (nation), but that they lacked things
which Greek culture possessed, and hence they were inferior
(Levi-Strauss 1952: 11).

Like many cultures, Greek culture is highly **ethnocentric**. It
considers itself to be a standard against which other cultures can be
judged. Ethnocentrism is a way of thinking about cultural difference
in which different cultures are ranked on a scale according to how
closely they approximate the culture of the observer (Eriksen 2001:
6). For generations and still today European society described foreign
societies based on terms such as primitive, savage, barbarian,
traditional, civilized, and modern. The way they decided where other
societies fell was by comparing them to European ways of life,
[[Pangloss|which they assumed was the best]]. Chinese civilization has
also developed its own form of ethnocentrism as a way of representing
national minorities of China and peoples of Asia (Guldin 1994). In
fact, in many other cultures, large and small, the foreigner is
conceptualized as the exact opposite of oneself, which is the
representative of humanity. If one is human, then people from other
cultures are animal-like and inferior (Levi-Strauss 1952: 12).

Wherever it has gone anthropology has struggled to shed itself of its
own ethnocentric roots and develop a new approach to cultural
differences based on a holistic study of culture on its own terms and
in its own context. Most explanations of behavior in contemporary
anthropology are based on **the doctrine of cultural relativism**. This
simply means that to understand any one pattern of behavior within a
culture, it must be seen in relation to the other patterns within that
society, and the system of social institution and cultural values and
ideas which members of a culture share. The reason for adopting this
doctrine is that anthropologists generally start from the view that
the patterns within a community are elements of an integrated system
and all the parts work to understand the whole. So, for instance, if a
society has a practice of placing the infant child in a wooden cage
for sleep, removing it only when it wails hysterically in fear, this
is not because the mothers lack education or love their children
less. Anthropologists would argue that this pattern persists because
of how the pattern fits in relation to a system of child-rearing
practices. This is also why this pattern makes sense and seems natural
to the people who do it.

This is a crucial distinction. Anthropologists do not seek to justify
any one culture's practice. Nor do they only wish to endorse a belief
or value of the people in one society. In fact, most people have no
opinion about the patterns of daily life because they never stop to
think about them. There is no value judgement implied in what they do,
because they don't choose to do it. Likewise, a relativist explanation
is not an endorsement of the value of a cultural practice.
Anthropologists only seek to understand why a particular pattern is
maintained. Moreover, they do not seek to explain all behavior is
through a relativist lens. For instance, deviant behavior is by
definition not widely practiced and so cannot be explained as a part
of a system. Similarly many situations are not part of one single or
one complete system, and so one cannot explain why patterns exist by
framing them in relativist terms, because in these situations people
are choosing which patterns to follow.

## References ##

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2001. Small Places, Large Issues: An
Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology. 2nd ed. London:
Pluto Press.

Guldin, Gregory Eliyu. 1994. The Saga of Anthropology in China: From
Malinowski to Moscow to Mao. London: Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1952. Race and History. Paris:
UNESCO. http://archive.org/details/racehistory00levi.



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