Ethnocentrism

Essay by lilshorty466 August 2013

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Ethnocentrism

ABSTRACT

There are many issues that can be attributed to an individual's cultural beliefs and how they can relate to another individuals specific cultural beliefs and set standards. Sometimes these issues can be minor and dealt with appropriately, but in other cases these cultural differences can be monumental and cause different societies to wage wars against one another. The way that an individual judges or perceives other cultures beliefs and standards based on the guidelines of their own culture is what sociologist refer to as ethnocentrism and is what we are going to be looking at in further detail in this paper.

There are many factors that contribute to the persistent societal disputes and disagreements that are forever occurring throughout the globe. There is a great divide that can be felt in regards to understanding and accepting each individual society; each one has its own unique culture and many individuals are not capable of viewing a culture different than their own without passing predisposed judgments and ideas that are typically instilled by their own culture.

Ethnocentrism is a term that sociologists use to define this universally occurring unaccepting set of attitudes and behaviors. Ethnocentrism can be attributed to social evolution, local & foreign competition and can also be a result of cooperation with what is considered to be the in-groups and not the out-groups (Axelrod & Hammond, 2003). The main concept of ethnocentrism is individuals seeing their specific group or culture as being the in-group or the superior to the other cultures and the individuals that they are comprised of. Judging another culture by the standards of their own; it is important to remember that ethnocentrism is not the same as racism (Rodriguez, 2013).

Culture is a very important factor of ethnocentrism and it is vital to understand what...