Quotes About Ethnocentrism

We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.

Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That's not generic prosociality. That's ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is.

Oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate mother-infant bond formation and monogamous pair-bonding, decrease anxiety and stress, enhance trust and social affiliation, and make people more cooperative and generous. But this comes with a huge caveat—these hormones increase prosociality only toward an Us. When dealing with Thems, they make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic. Oxytocin is not a universal luv hormone. It's a parochial one.

US/THEM-ING TYPICALLY involves inflating the merits of Us concerning core values—we are more correct, wise, moral, and worthy when it comes to knowing what the gods want/running the economy/raising kids/fighting this war. Us-ness also involves inflating the merits of our arbitrary markers, and that can take some work—rationalizing why our food is tastier, our music more moving, our language more logical or poetic.

You Englishmen,' said Herr Wurter. 'You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.

it is the West's provincialism, which leads it to perceive the rest of the continent as a failed copy of itself

While exorting us to judge other cultures in their own terms, he [Said] asks us to judge Western culture from a point of view outside---to set it against alternatives, and to judge it adversely, as ethnocentric and even racist.

Most of the Americans believed that any culture other than their own was backward and beneath contempt.

local people notice we aren't there to learn from them but to teach them; we won't ask questions but will give answers; we aren't there to be with them but to train them; we won't build trust but will attempt to transform them; we're not there to dialogue but to lecture. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, calls this a "subject-object relationship." Unchecked ethnocentrism turns human beings into objects to be manipulated.

Barbarians are no more marvelous to us than we are to them, nor for better cause," Montaigne wrote. "Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice," Montaigne observed

I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

But too many Christians are content in their own salvation and allow an ethnocentric provincialism to dismiss the imperative of God's mission to the nations.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

The very concept of "ethnocentrism," which is used like a sledge-hammer to disparage the West, is a Western invention.

Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! [...] I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians.

WEIRD people (people in cultures that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)

People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They

pseudospeciation, the reduction of alien societies to the status of inferior species, not fully human, who can be degraded without conscience. Even

human nature" had, of course, been going on for some time. The earliest examples of "natural men" had been the American Indians. It had been they who had provided Montaigne with much of the material he had used to cast doubt on the civility and humanity of his Christian contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and to suggest that, after all, "barbarian" might be nothing more than a word we use to describe what is unfamiliar to us.

There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism - scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it - but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country.

In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.

Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.