FREE ESSAY ON CULTURAL COMPARISONS ETHNOCENTRISM

CULTURAL COMPARISONS ETHNOCENTRISM

Culture
Cultural comparisons
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is the name given to a tendency to interpret or evaluate other cultures in
terms of one's own. This tendency has been, perhaps, more prevalent in modern nations
than among preliterate tribes. The citizens of a large nation, especially in the past,
have been less likely to observe people in another nation or culture than have been
members of small tribes who are well acquainted with the ways of their culturally diverse
neighbours. Thus, the American tourist could report that Londoners drive on the wrong
side of the street or an Englishman might find some customs on the Continent queer or
boorish, merely because they are different. Members of a Pueblo tribe in the American
Southwest, on the other hand, might be well acquainted with cultural differences not only
among other Pueblos but also in non-Pueblo tribes such as the Navajo and Apache. 
Ethnocentrism became prominent among many Europeans after the discovery of the Americas,
the islands of the Pacific, and the Far East. Even anthropologists might characterize all
preliterate peoples as being without religion (as did Sir John Lubbock) or as having a
prelogical mentality (as did Lucien Levy-Bruhl) merely because their ways of thinking did
not correspond with those of the culture of western Europe. Thus, inhabitants of
non-Western cultures, particularly those lacking the art of writing, were widely
described as being immoral, illogical, queer, or just perverse (Ye Beastly Devices of ye
Heathen).
Cultural Relativism
Increased knowledge led to or facilitated a deeper understanding and, with it, a finer
appreciation of cultures quite different from one's own. When it was understood that
universal needs could be served with culturally diverse means, that worship might assume
a variety of forms, that morality consists in conforming to ethical rules of conduct but
does not inhere in the rules themselves, a new view emerged that each culture should be
understood and appreciated in terms of itself. What is moral in one culture might be
immoral or ethically neutral in another. For example, it was not immoral to kill a baby
girl at birth or an aged grandparent who was nonproductive when it was impossible to
obtain enough food for all; or wife lending among the Eskimo might be practiced as a
gesture of hospitality, a way of cementing a friendship and promoting mutual aid in a
harsh and dangerous environment, and thus may acquire the status of a high moral value. 
The view that elements of a culture are to be understood and judged in terms of their
relationship to the culture as a whole--a doctrine known as cultural relativism--led to
the conclusion that the cultures themselves could not be evaluated or graded as higher
and lower, superior or inferior. If it was unwarranted to say that patriliny (descent
through the male line) was superior or inferior to matriliny (descent through the female
line), if it was unjustified or meaningless to say that monogamy was better or worse than
polygamy, then it was equally unsound or meaningless to say that one culture was higher
or superior to another. A large number of anthropologists subscribed to this view; they
argued that such judgments were subjective and therefore unscientific. 
It is, of course, true that some values are imponderable and some criteria are
subjective. Are people in modern Western culture happier than the Aborigines of
Australia? Is it better to be a child than an adult, alive than dead? These certainly are
not questions for science. But to say that the culture of the ancient Mayas was not
superior to or more highly developed than the crude and simple culture of the Tasmanians
or to say that the culture of England in 1966 was not higher than England's culture in
1066 is to fly in the face of science as well as of common sense. 
Evaluative grading
Cultures have ponderable values as well as imponderable, and the imponderable ones can be
measured with objective, meaningful yardsticks. A culture is a means to an end: the
security and continuity of life. Some kinds of culture are better means of making life
secure than others. Agriculture is a better means of providing food than hunting and
gathering. The productivity of human labour has been increased by machinery and by the
utilization of the energy of nonhuman animals, water and wind power, and fossil fuels.
Some cultures have more effective means of coping with disease than others, and this
superiority is expressed mathematically in death rates. And there are many other ways in
which meaningful differences can be measured and evaluations made. Thus, the proposition
that cultures have ponderable values that can be measured meaningfully by objective
yardsticks and arranged in a series of stages, higher and lower, is substantiated. But,
it should be noted, this is not equivalent to saying that man is happier or that the
dignity of the individual (an imponderable) is greater in an industrialized or
agricultural sociocultural system than in one supported by human labour alone and
sustained wholly by wild foods. 
Actually, however, there is no necessary conflict between the doctrine of cultural
relativism and the thesis that cultures can be objectively graded in a scientific manner.
It is one thing to reject the statement that monogamy is better than polygamy and quite
another to deny that one kind of sociocultural system contains a better means of
providing food or combating disease than another. 
Cultural adaptation and Change
Ecological or Environmental Change
Every sociocultural system exists in a natural habitat, and, of course, this environment
exerts an influence upon the cultural system. The cultures of some Eskimo groups present
remarkable instances of adaptation to environmental conditions: tailored fur clothing,
snow goggles, boats and harpoons for hunting sea mammals, and, in some instances,
hemispherical snow houses, or igloos. Some sedentary, horticultural tribes of the upper
Missouri River went out into the Great Plains and became nomadic hunters after the
introduction of the horse. The culture of the Navajos underwent profound change after
they acquired herds of sheep and a market for their rugs was developed. The older
theories of simple environmentalism, some of which maintained that even styles of myths
and tales were determined by topography, climate, flora, and other factors, are no longer
in vogue. The present view is that the environment permits, at times encourages, and also
prohibits the acquisition or use of certain cultural traits but otherwise does not
determine culture change. The Fuegians living at the southern tip of South America, as
viewed by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle, lived in a very cold, harsh
environment but were virtually without both clothing and dwellings. 
Diffusion
Culture is contagious, as a prominent anthropologist once remarked, meaning that customs,
beliefs, tools, techniques, folktales, ornaments, and so on may diffuse from one people
or region to another. To be sure, a culture trait must offer some advantage, some utility
or pleasure, to be sought and accepted by a people. (Some anthropologists have assumed
that basic features of social structure, such as clan organization, may diffuse, but a
sounder view holds that these features involving the organic structure of the society
must be developed within societies themselves.) The degree of isolation of a
sociocultural system--brought about by physical barriers such as deserts, mountain
ranges, and bodies of water--has, of course, an important bearing upon the ease or
difficulty of diffusion. Within the limits of desirability on the one hand and the
possibility of communication on the other, diffusion of culture has taken place
everywhere and in all times. Archaeological evidence shows that amber from the Baltic
region diffused to the Mediterranean coast; and, conversely, early coins from the Middle
East found their way to northern Europe. In aboriginal North America, copper objects from
northern Michigan have been found in mounds in Georgia; macaw feathers from Central
America turn up in archaeological sites in northern Arizona. Some Indian tribes in
northwestern regions of the United States had possessed horses, originally brought into
the Southwest by Spanish explorers, years before they had ever even seen white men. The
wide dispersion of tobacco, corn (maize), coffee, the sweet potato, and many other traits
are conspicuous examples of cultural diffusion. 
Acculturation
Diffusion may take place between tribes or nations that are approximately equal in
political and military power and of equivalent stages of cultural development, such as
the spread of the sun dance among the Plains tribes of North America. But in other
instances, it takes place between sociocultural systems differing widely in this respect.
Conspicuous examples of this have been instances of conquest and colonization of various
regions by the nations of modern Europe. In these cases it is often said that the culture
of the more highly developed nation is imposed upon the less developed peoples and
cultures, and there is, of course, much truth in this; the acquisition of foreign culture
by the subject people is called acculturation and is manifested by the indigenous
populations of Latin America as well as of other regions. But even in cases of conquest,
traits from the conquered peoples may diffuse to those of the more advanced cultures;
examples might include, in addition to the cultivated plants cited above, individual
words (coyote), musical themes, games, and art motifs. 
One of the major problems ofethnology during the latter half of the 19th and the early
decades of the 20th centuries was the question How are cultural similarities in
noncontiguous regions to be explained? Did the concepts of pyramid building,
mummification, and sun worship originate independently in ancient Egypt and in the Andean
highlands and in Yucatan or did these traits originate in Egypt and diffuse from there to
the Americas, as some anthropologists have believed? Some schools of ethnological theory
have held to one view, some, to another. The 19th-century classical evolutionists (which
included Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan, among others) held that the mind of
man is so constituted or endowed that he will develop cultures everywhere along the same
lines. Diffusionists--those, such as Fritz Graebner and Elliot Smith, who offered grand
theories about the diffusion of traits all over the world--maintained that man was
inherently uninventive and that culture, once created, tended to spread everywhere. Each
school tended to insist that its view was the correct one, and it would continue to hold
that view unless definite proof of the contrary could be adduced.
The tendency nowadays is not to side categorically with one school as against another but
to decide each case on its own merits. The consensus with regard to pyramids is that they
were developed independently in Egypt and the Americas because they differ markedly in
structure and function: the Egyptian pyramids were built of stone blocks and contained
tombs within their interiors. The American pyramids were constructed of earth, then faced
with stone, and they served as the bases of temples. The verdict with regard to the bow
and arrow is that it was invented only once and subsequently diffused to all regions
where it has been found. The probable antiquity of the origin of fire making, however,
and the various ways of generating it--by percussion, friction, compression (fire
pistons)--indicate multiple origins. 
Evolution
Evolution of culture--that is, the development of forms through time--has taken place. No
amount of diffusion of picture writing could of itself, for instance, produce the
alphabetic system of writing; as Tylor demonstrated so well, the art of writing has
developed through a series of stages, which began with picture writing, progressed to
hieroglyphic writing, and culminated in alphabetic writing. In the realm of social
organization there was a development from territorial groups composed of families to
segmented societies (clans and larger groupings). Sociocultural evolution, like biologic
evolution, exhibits a progressive differentiation of structure and specialization of
function. 
A misunderstanding has arisen with regard to the relationship between evolution and
diffusion. It has been argued, for example, that the theory of cultural evolution was
unsound because some peoples skipped a stage in a supposedly determined sequence; for
example, some African tribes, as a consequence of diffusion, went from the Stone Age to
the Iron Age without an intermediate age of copper and bronze. But the classical
evolutionists did not maintain that peoples, or societies, had to pass through a fixed
series of stages in the course of development, but that tools, techniques,
institutions--in short, culture--had to pass through the stages. The sequence of stages
of writing did not mean that a society could not acquire the alphabet without working its
way through hieroglyphic writing; it was obvious that many peoples did skip directly to
the alphabet.
Bibliography
Cultural Anthropology, 5th ed. (1987); Richard A. Barrett, Culture and Conduct (1984);
Marc J. Swartz and David K. Jordan, Culture: The Anthropological Perspective (1980); and
Elman R. Service, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, 2nd ed.
(1971). The unique capacity for symboling that distinguishes humans from primates is
discussed by Leslie A. White, The Symbol: The Origin and Basis of Human Behavior, in his
Science of Culture, 2nd ed., pp. 22-39 (1969); Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An
Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944, reprinted 1974); and Terence Dixon
and Martin Lucas, The Human Race (1982). The many conceptions of culture are discussed in
A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions
(1952, reprinted 1978). See also Leslie A. White and Beth Dillingham, The Concept of
Culture (1973); and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
(1973, reissued 1975). The history of theory and method in social and cultural
anthropology is traced in Fred W. Voget, A History of Ethnology (1975). 
(L.A.W./Ed.)