Ethnocentrism

Integrated Perspectives

Boris Bizumic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317284611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ethnocentrism works to reinvigorate the study of ethnocentrism by reconceptualising ethnocentrism as a social, psychological, and attitudinal construct.

Using a broad, multidisciplinary approach to ethnocentrism, the book integrates literature from disciplines such as psychology, political science, sociology, anthropology, biology, and marketing studies to create a novel reorganisation of the existing literature, its origins, and its outcomes.

Empirical research throughout serves to comprehensively measure the six dimensions of ethnocentrism—devotion, group cohesion, preference, superiority, purity, and exploitativeness—and show how they factor into causes and consequences of ethnocentrism, including personality, values, morality, demographics, political ideology, social factors, prejudice, discrimination, and nationalism.

Ethnocentrism is fascinating reading for scholars, researchers, and students in psychology, sociology, and political science.

1

The history and context of study

The history of the study of ethnocentrism is somewhat ethnocentric, with almost all English-speaking researchers who have studied ethnocentrism attributing the origin of the concept to an English-speaker, US social scientist Sumner (1906). Nevertheless, Ludwig Gumplowicz, a Polish Jew who had an academic post in Austria-Hungary and who was one of the founders of sociology, had used the concept in publications written in German and Polish (e.g., Gumplowicz, 1879, 1884). Sumner, like many other US sociologists at that time, was influenced by Gumplowicz (Martindale, 1976), but failed to mention that Gumplowicz had also used the term. Accordingly, other social scientists, writing in English, did not read Gumplowicz’s books and journal articles, but read Sumner’s 1906 book and assumed that Sumner had invented the concept. Therefore, when one reads books, journal articles, and encyclopaedia articles on ethnocentrism, or when one does an internet search trying to learn about ethnocentrism, Sumner emerges at the person who invented the concept in his 1906 book.

Gumplowicz also proposed another related concept that, unfortunately, has never been adopted by the social scientists. The concept is acrochronism (Gumplowicz, 1895), and is similar to ethnocentrism in that it denotes a phenomenon whereby what is closely related to the self is seen as more important than what is distant. Here, however, the focus is on time, so that the present time is seen as more important, better, and superior to any past time. The past is seen as just the preparation for the superiority of the present time. Gumplowicz thought that acrochronism is also a fundamental bias and delusion as ethnocentrism is. Interestingly, Gumplowicz’s writings on ethnocentrism have been ignored by modern theorists and researchers into ethnocentrism possibly because of these two biases (ethnocentrism and acrochronism): Gumplowicz did not write in English, and he is a nineteenth-century social scientist, and the social sciences tend to disregard the old in favour of the new (Andreski, 1972).

Writings on ethnocentrism before the development of the social sciences

Gumplowicz was not the first to notice ethnocentrism, and the phenomenon was recorded in ancient times and in all probability observed by many people in prehistoric times. Many writers across different ages recognised that people are ethnocentric. This is, unfortunately, often overlooked in the modern literature on ethnocentrism, which assumes that we have only recently noticed and discovered ethnocentrism and that people were blind to ethnocentrism for a long time. Most often a review of the work on ethnocentrism starts with Sumner’s 1906 book and then focuses on later contributions (e.g., Booth, 1979/2014; Brewer & Campbell, 1976; Kinder & Kam, 2009; LeVine & Campbell, 1972). For example, a recent book on ethnocentrism stated: “We are indebted to Sumner for noticing ethnocentrism in the first place, for naming it felicitously, for defining it sensibly” (Kinder & Kam, 2009, p. 29). In fact, there have been many who have noticed ethnocentrism in humans. I will not attempt to be exhaustive in my presentation, but I will present historical examples of scholars noticing and attempting to explain ethnocentrism. My aim is to correct the biases by showing that many have noticed ethnocentrism in human groups for a long time. I also include here certain writings by authors, such as Zimmermann (1758/1797), who have rarely, if ever, been connected to the study of ethnocentrism.

Early writings on ethnocentrism can be found in the works of several ancient Greek writers. For example, Aristotle in the eighth book in the Nicomachean Ethics wrote that animals, but especially humans, show affection and love for the members of the same race (Aristotle, trans. 1881). Aristotle used the term tois homoethnesi, which has been translated as the same race (Whiting, 2006), to indicate special affection among members of the same ethnos or clan. Jennifer Whiting (2006) claimed that Aristotle’s point “is that human beings stand out among animals as especially clannish. We are the most ethnocentric – or, as Aristotle puts it, the most homoethnic – of animals. That is why we praise those who are (simply) philanthropoi: they have managed to overcome this common but regrettable tendency” (p. 291). Interestingly, observing the same bias, and many centuries later, Darwin (1875) wrote that social instincts, which include love and affection for one’s community, exist in animals, including humans, but that they do not extend to the whole species.

Another ancient Greek, Herodotus (trans. 1947), wrote that preference for one’s culture and its customs is universal among humans. Herodotus also wrote that this preference is not fully ameliorated, transcended, and corrected by having knowledge about other cultures. According to him, even upon examining and knowing other cultures, humans would select their own as the best:

For if one were to offer men to choose out of all the customs in the world such as seemed to them the best, they would examine the whole number, and end by preferring their own; so convinced are they that their own usages far surpass those of all others.

Herodotus, trans. 1947, p. 160

Here Herodotus put forward an idea that corresponds closely to the modern conceptualisation of ethnocentrism, which is the view that ethnocentrism is a universal phenomenon characteristic of all cultures (D. E. Brown, 1991, 2000, 2004). Herodotus also postulated that preference and superiority are two related aspects of this phenomenon.

Another ancient Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus (trans. 1725/1814), remarked that many ethnic groups believe that they are vastly superior to others. He also mentioned that many ethnic groups believed that all humans originated in their ethnic group and that their group alone is responsible for numerous discoveries from which all humans have benefited. For example, ancient Egyptians believed that gods and first humans were born in Egypt because the climate and nature were superior in Egypt to anywhere else: “The Egyptians report, that at the beginning of the world, the first men were created in Egypt, both by the reason of happy climate, and the nature of the river Nile” (Diodorus Siculus, 1725/1814, p. 18).

Ancient Chinese and Roman thinkers have also noticed ethnocentrism. For example, in the fifth century BC, an ancient Chinese philosopher, Mozi (also spelled Mo Tzu) asserted that because many people favour their own country over others, they dislike and want to harm people from other countries. The only way to ameliorate this unfortunate state of affairs, according to Mozi, is for people “to regard other people’s countries as one’s own” (Chan, 1963, p. 214). Writing negatively about the Jews, the ancient Roman Tacitus described them: “among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies” (Tacitus, trans. 2003, p. 564). This association of strong ingroup positivity and strong outgroup negativity would later become the main conceptualisation and operationalisation of ethnocentrism (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950).

Ethnocentrism became salient during the time commonly known as the Age of Discovery, and authors such as Las Casas (1550/1974), Montaigne (1580/2003), and la Bruyère (1688/1885) recognised this phenomenon. The Age of Discovery was the time when people from Western countries began to “discover” the many “distant” lands – or what they called the “New World” – and in the process became acquainted with almost the entire spectrum of human diversity and with people who had strikingly different values, beliefs, morality, practices, and norms to those in the West. This was also the time of unbridled imperialism and colonialism, which resulted in the rampant exploitation of people in these “distant” lands. Ethnocentrism facilitated this exploitation as it helped the Western powers take advantage of the ethnic groups perceived to be too different and needing instruction and civilisation. The Western powers saw themselves as economically superior, being technologically more advanced, but also culturally and morally superior. They often relied on their own dominant religion, Christianity, to proclaim that they are superior to “savages and heathens” who worshipped “primitive” gods.

Although it is often perceived that people from Western countries were unified in their ethnocentric attitudes towards other human groups and approved of exploitation, there were alternative and deviating voices. One of the earliest recorded voices was that of Bartolomé de Las Casas, who lived in Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In his books, such as In defense of the Indians (Las Casas, trans. 1974), he argued forcefully against the Spanish exploitation of Indians in the Americas and confronted ethnocentric attitudes prevalent in his time. For example, while discussing the concept of barbarians and how the Spanish applied it to Indians, he maintained that the concept is relative as all groups with distinct languages perceive each other as barbarians. In another book, published only in the twentieth century, Las Casas maintained that “just as we consider the people of the Indians to be barbarians, they judge us the same way, since they do not understand us” (as quoted in Todorov, 2010, p. 20).

These same ideas are later revisited and further elaborated on by the French essayist Michele de Montaigne, when he wrote about indigenous peoples who lived on the coast of Brazil:

I find (from what has been told me) that there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!

Montaigne, 1580/2003, p. 231

Montaigne presented here a modern description of ethnocentrism, where people use the norms, practices, beliefs, morality, and values of their own ethnic group or culture to judge others, giving rise to the perception of superiority. Here, as in Las Casas’s writings, we see the argument in favour of cultural relativism where there are no absolute criteria for judgement, and therefore no superior ethnic groups or cultures. Similar ideas are also expressed by another French author, Jean de la Bruyère (1688/1885):

Our prepossession in favour of our native country and our national pride makes us forget that common sense is found in all climates, and correctness of thought wherever there are men. We should not like to be so treated by those we call barbarians; and if some barbarity still exists amongst us, it is in being amazed on hearing natives of other countries reason like ourselves.

p. 339

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1744/1948), who lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, discussed national self-conceit in his influential book New Science. He referred to Diodorus Siculus’s claim that all national groups believe themselves to be the oldest and that their history goes back to the beginning of time. He maintained that because people make judgements about things that are unknown and distant with the reference point of what is known and near to them, they tend to give a lot of importance to themselves – despite having objectively minor importance. Vico contended that, like nations, scholars are also self-conceited because they judge things that they do not know through the prism of what they do. Vico condemned scholars who attempt to interpret the world through the prism of the national self-conceit, and argued that their conclusions are most often biased and erroneous. This is in essence an argument that ethnocentrism leads to biased and poor science, and this argument would later be strongly endorsed by, for example, Gumplowicz, cultural relativists in anthropology, and contemporary cross-cultural psychologists.

Another elaborate discussion of ethnocentrism is in the Swiss author Johann Zimmermann’s (1758/1797) book on national pride, which was widely read in the eighteenth century. The prominent political psychologist Harold Lasswell (1925), more than a century and a half later, discussed the importance of this “forgotten study” for the discipline of political psychology. Despite Lasswell’s views, this book has almost never been mentioned explicitly in relation to the study of ethnocentrism and is largely forgotten now. Zimmermann conceptualised national pride as a sense of ethnic or cultural superiority, which is a central conceptualisation of ethnocentrism. Zimmermann wrote on national pride, but he made it clear that he used the term to describe a sense of real or imagined superiority among ethnic groups and cultures.

Although Sumner (see Sumner, 1906; Sumner et al., 1928) is usually praised for sampling diverse examples of ethnocentrism (Kinder & Kam, 2009; LeVine & Campbell, 1972), Zimmermann had already proposed numerous examples, many of which would be used later by both Gumplowicz and Sumner. For example, one such widely cited example is that of non-industrial societies often calling themselves the only and original humans: “Ask the Carribee Indians, who live at the mouth of the Oronoque, from what nation they derive their origin; they answer, ‘why, we only are men.’ In short, there is hardly any nation under the sun, in which instances of pride, vanity, and arrogance, do not occur” (Zimmermann, 1758/1797, p. 40). The other examples Zimmermann offered are about Egyptians, who believed that they had themselves already existed for 48,863 years before Alexander’s age, and who believed that it was in Egypt where the first gods, then the first demigods, and then the first men lived. Similarly, he wrote about the Japanese, who believed that their real ancestors were gods; about Indians, who believed that the Indian culture had existed for millions of years; and about the Chinese, who believed that their empire was in the centre of the world, that it had begun even before the world was created, and that it occupied most of the world – with the rest of the world, as represented by Chinese maps, being small islands, which have peculiar and amusing names.

Zimmermann also attempted to describe and explain the phenomenon that would be later called ethnocentrism. For example, the following statement by Zimmermann (1758/1797) includes characteristics and explanations of ethnocentrism that would become prominent later: “Every nation contemplates itself through the medium of self-conceit, and draws conclusions to its own advantage, which individuals adopt to themselves with complacency, because they confound and interweave their private with their national character” (p. 1). Zimmermann assumed, similarly to modern social identity theorists, that a sense of group superiority is caused by perceiving oneself as being one with the group and by wanting to enhance one’s own self-esteem (Tajfel & Turner, 1986; Turner, 1999). He also maintained that people tend to like other individuals whom they agree with because people want to be right and feel superior to others.

A contemporary of Zimmermann, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson (1768) also recognised the phenomenon of ethnocentrism, and, like Vico before him, argued against ethnocentric biases, in particular against their influences on understanding humans and social life. He also claimed that when people judge others, they use their own group as a reference point. He maintained that national groups use different dimensions to assert their superiority. For example, he wrote in his book, titled An Essay on the History of Civil Society:

No nation is so unfortunate as to think itself inferior to the rest of mankind: few are even willing to put up with the claim to equality. The greater part having chosen themselves, as at once, the judges and the models of what is excellent in their kind, are first in their own opinion, and give to others consideration or eminence, so far only as they approach to their own condition. One nation is vain of the personal character, or of the learning, of a few of its members; another, of its policy, its wealth, its tradesmen, its gardens, and its buildings; and they who have nothing to boast, are vain, because they are ignorant.

Ferguson, 1768, p. 312

Ferguson also gave examples of different cultures being ethnocentric, such as Russians believing themselves to be superior to their western neighbours, whom Russians held in contempt and called Nemci, which can be translated as mute people. Ferguson’s views have been directly linked to ethnocentrism (e.g., C. Smith, 2013), because he believed that people tend to use their own culture, and their own time period, as a standard while judging other cultures and other time periods, making them perceive other cultures as defective, wrong, and improper, or at least as less good than people’s own culture. It should be noted that Ferguson also maintained that the positivity that members of a group have for each other goes hand in hand with negativity towards others, and that the two reciprocally influence each other. For example, he noted that “it is vain to expect that we can give to the multitude of a people a sense of union among themselves, without admitting hostility to those who oppose them” (Ferguson, 1768, p. 37).

Social scientific writings on ethnocentrism

A systematic social scientific study of ethnocentrism started in the nineteenth century with the development of the social sciences. Evidently, Vico and Ferguson could be seen as early social scientists, and they wrote on the phenomenon later to be labelled ethnocentrism. Nonetheless, the social sciences would experience more systematic and rapid developments in the second half of the nineteenth century, when disciplines such as sociology and psychology developed.

The increasing interest in ethnocentrism was in part influenced by the fact that many people, primarily those from a more educated background, had become increasingly acquainted with immense differences between cultures – stemming from growing anthropological work – and that many people began to question what is correct, good, and moral across societies. Additionally, with the development of Darwin’s (1875) theory of evolution, many thinkers had begun to reject supernatural explanations, and attempted to find scientific explanations for the myriad phenomena, including social phenomena. Therefore, the view that had gained a lot of credence was that social phenomena, considered as just extensions of natural phenomena, are legitimat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The history and context of study
• 2 The concept of ethnocentrism
• 3 The causes of ethnocentrism: Fear and self-aggrandisement
• 4 The causes of ethnocentrism: Social factors, biology, and evolution
• 5 The consequences of ethnocentrism
• 6 Integrating the causes and consequences
• 7 Ethnocentrism in psychology
• References
• Appendix A. Definitions of ethnocentrism and thematic analysis
• Appendix B. The Ethnocentrism Scale 1: the 36-item version
• Appendix C. The Ethnocentrism Scale 2: the 36-item and 12-item versions
• Index