Quotes About Ethnocentrism

I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.

The Arab," for comparison, he concludes, "is little more than an eater up of other men's produce; he is a destroyer rather than a creator, and he is unprolific"). Though wince-inducing now, these sorts of views were not necessarily normal and not necessarily uncontroversial then, and we shouldn't assume that these were universal British Victorian values.

I think we have cultural bias and practice some ethnocentrism when it comes to ethnic food in America.

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.

In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

Paradoxically, we have become so ethnocentric in our relativism that we feel it is only okay for others - not us - to think their religion is superior!

There's an appeal to the American sense of exceptionalism, that we're morally superior, as way to not be self-critical. I think that's a bit dangerous.

Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives "without provocation"—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but "a special Commission from God" to take their land.19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics.

I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized.

I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.

The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.

Early Muslim references to dehumanization were overtly ethnocentric. Almost without exception, the people who are transformed into subhuman creatures—specifically, pigs, apes, and rats—are Jews.

I don't know how a lot of these nations existed as long as they have till we could get some of our people around and show 'em how to be good and pure like us.

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

What shall we do with...the Jews?...I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews.

Those who protest against "Western ethnocentrism" imagine themselves to owe nothing to the West, since after all they rage furiously against it. But in fact theirs is the most Western perspective of all, more Western than that of their adversaries. Not only is the revolt against ethnocentrism an invention of the West, it cannot be found outside the West.

If you think this ethnocentric stage—with its tendencies toward racism, sexism/patriarchy, misogyny, mega-tribal dominance, oppression, and fundamentalist religion—sounds a bit like hardcore far-Right Republicans, and that it starts to push into recognized Trump territory, you'd be right.

It is characteristic of the ethnocentrism of anthropology that whereas the rationality of claims by African and other primitive diviners to be able to see what is not visible to the ordinary eye has long seemed to be a proper subject of investigation, the occult powers of our own diviners have been taken for granted. Magic has been regarded as a bizarre phenomenon, the artness of art has not.

In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, 'Dinka' simply means 'people'. People who are not Dinka are not people. The Dinka's bitter enemies are the Nuer. What does the word Nuer mean in Nuer language? It means 'original people'. Thousands of miles from the Sudan deserts, in the frozen ice-lands of Alaska and north-eastern Siberia, live the Yupiks. What does Yupik mean in Yupik language? It means 'real people'.3 In

The European colonization efforts toward the Americas, for example, operated from the assumption that the enculturation of indigenous peoples was justified because European culture was superior (Barongan et al., 1997). Forcing the colonized to adopt European beliefs and customs was seen as civilizing them.

We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.