The critique of ethnocentrism in retrospect

Abstract

This article opens with a review of the origins of the term ‘ethnocentrism’ as the linchpin of modern anthropology despite the discipline's background in the colonial past. The author is stimulated by Step Stuurman's The invention of humanity: Equality and cultural difference in human history (2017) to ask to what extent the critique of ethnocentrism, which gradually gathered strength in the West, has had parallels in non‐Western civilizations. His conclusion is that the astonishing sophistication of a Persian and a Chinese polymath in studying cultures alien to their own does not seem, according to records available, to have influenced their respective civilizations in the same way that modern ‘anthropological intelligence’ (to borrow Gillian Tett's term) was extensively foreshadowed in Europe. Counter‐ethnocentrism as a principle has now become indispensable to all the social sciences that aspire to be cosmopolitan, though it still has to compete with the baleful legacy of scientific racism.