The Pros And Cons Of Ethnocentrism

The word ‘ethno’ is Greek and refers to a people, nation or cultural grouping, while ‘centric’ comes from Latin and refers to the center, of course. The term ethnocentrism refers to the inclination for each society to place its cultural patterns as the center of things. It is the practice of comparing one’s cultural practices to another and finding the other to be mediocre. Ethnocentrism is a human reaction found worldwide in all known societies, in all groups or clubs, and in mostly all individual. When a child is young, they have a possessive trait over their toys and when in a group of other young children, it translates into “my toys are better than yours.” In public, their parents may scold their offspring from saying things such as …show more content…
If my group has better ideas than yours, why would I interact with your group? Attitudes such as suspicion and hostility are likely to be created, as well as possible stereotyping. Ethnocentrism was also an important part of a few things in our history. In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler believed that Jews, as well as people that were not his ethnicity, did not deserve to live. Thousands and thousands of people were slaughtered in concentration camps all because they were not of a ‘pure’ race which he said was superior above all. Ethnocentrism is not always this extreme though. In the movie ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’, a Greek family believed that the ‘Greek’ way was the only adequate way to live and …show more content…
Each person is going to have an opinion about a behavior and it is not always the same. Perspective is important to understand history, psychology and politics as well as many other social sciences. With cultural perspective, one can understand why certain actions are considered right or wrong by a particular culture. For an example, an ancient society might have considered it an insult or punishable offense if a person had dyed their hair a certain color. In today’s culture, we would find that odd and maybe even oppressive. Yet if we would utilize the skill of cultural perspective, we would then be able to understand that it was not the fact that the person had dyed their hair, but something entirely different altogether. Rather than saying that we need to understand the morals of other cultures, cultural relativism is saying that we cannot judge the morals of the other cultures. If we are to abide by cultural relativism, we cannot say that human sacrifice is wrong or that treating the elderly is a good thing to