Western Ethnocentrism Research Articles

Auerbach's Hunger: Mimesis as an Anthropology of Violence

Abstract This article argues that Erich Auerbach's Mimesis depicts figural thinking as inextricable from ritual violence perpetuated against vulnerable, minority populations. To an extent that has been underappreciated, Mimesis also reflects on Auerbach's own complicity with anti-Semitic Western ethnocentrism. The article uncovers an unexpected intertext for the book's second chapter, “Fortunata,” which narrates the birth of figural thinking. It reads this chapter in conjunction with earlier versions of the ending of Mimesis preserved in Auerbach's Istanbul lectures. The unexpected intertext of “Fortunata” is a then-recent bestseller about Nero's persecution of the Christian, Quo Vadis? (1896), by the Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, in which Peter and Petronius feature as major characters and as each other's doubles. Reading Mimesis through this lens helps one see that it constructs, around such spectacles of violence, a Viconian account of Western culture's foundational, recurrent brutality.

Eucontamination: Enacting a Centered-Set Theology in a Multicultural World

This article addresses ways that the logic of disgust has left the church vulnerable to colonialism, western ethnocentrism, and racism. The authors present the concept of eucontamination as an inversion of contamination logic, wherein the impure is made pure through contact with the Divine rather than the pure needing to be kept separate. Purity metaphors in the Bible have often been read by the white, western church in such a way that the pure is experienced as fragile and kept apart from the contaminating, powerful impure. Eucontamination, however, upends this power balance in such a way that the dirty is left fragile and the clean robust. This, then, facilitates the enactment of centered-set theology by removing fear and disgust, which unconsciously reinforce the boundaries of an exclusionary, bounded-set theology. In this way, eucontamination is presented as a corrective lens through which the church can reimagine its role in the world. By addressing the psychological impact of disgust and the way in which the gospel of Christ inverts the controlling purity metaphors, this article posits a more embodied faith that embraces the other. Eucontamination thus allows for Christians to address their own internalized systems of oppression and confront the ways in which disgust has allowed ethnocentrism and racism to reign over their imagination of the gospel. The authors explore practical applications of liturgies of eucontamination like the Eucharist, foot washing, and the love feast as basic formational practices for Christians to begin to deconstruct their own disgust reactions.

Employment Discrimination against Indigenous People with Tribal Marks in Nigeria: The Painful Face of Stigma

Drawing from in-depth qualitative interviews (N = 32), this article examines the impact of indigenous tribal marks on employment chances in southwest Nigeria. It employs indigenous standpoint theory to frame the argument around what constitutes stigma and in what context. The results of our thematic analysis indicate that tribally marked job applicants and employees face significant social rejection, stigmatization and discrimination, and can suffer from severe mental illnesses and even suicidal ideation. We explain how these tribally marked individuals navigate the changing contours of tradition and modernity in Nigeria. Tribal marks, although once largely perceived as signals of beauty and high social status, are now increasingly viewed as a significant liability in the labour market. This article makes a unique and original contribution to the study of stigma and employment discrimination by eschewing the prevailing Western ethnocentrism in the extant research and instead placing the indigenous standpoint at centre stage.

Ethnocentrism and Arab Women in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove

Arab women bear the struggle of their local tradition in their countries and the tradition of the Westerns when they live between them. They are victims of gender discrimination and racism. Ethnocentrism is the inclination of people who consider their customs, civilizations, culture, skin, and colour superior, demanding others to follow and imitate them. This paper examined the influence of ethnocentrism on Arab women in Arabian and Western countries by analysing Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove (2007). The framework in this study is guided by ethnocentrism as a concept in postcolonial theory. The findings revealed that (i) due to ethnocentrism, Arab women suffer gender discrimination, violence, marginalisation, slavery, and death, (ii) Western ethnocentrism abuses and dehumanises the Arab women immigrants, and (iii) ethnocentrism creates many chronic social and political diseases in the minds of people (colonizers, colonized and decolonized people, men and women ), (iv) and some Arab women view the Western world as a unique model that should be imitated.

Women’s Empowerment in UN Documents neither a Safe Haven nor a Pandora’s Box: Need for A Holistic Perspective

This article is a critique on the UN – promoted concept of women’s empowerment which is presented in the international instrument of women’s rights, called Platform for Action, (1995) and which is reviewed since then for every five years. It is asserted in the article that though women’s empowerment in the general sense of women’s development and advancement is essential; but this UN-based concept of women’s empowerment is constructed on a specific perspective, called ‘gender perspective’ which is problematic. Critical analysis of ‘gender perspective’ shows that heterosexual marriage, family and reproduction through marital union are all perceived as social construction and they are perceived as obstacles in the way of women’s empowerment. It is therefore contended in the article that this concept of women’s empowerment represents Western ethnocentrism because it ignores certain gender differences and their resultant gender roles and also overlooks the need for institutional agencies like religion and family which are necessary for legitimizing ‘power.’ It is asserted that all cultures should be given the right to re-conceptualize and pursue women’s empowerment following their own perspectives based on their respective civilizations.

The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre: The Displaced Mirror by Min Tian

Reviewed by: The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre: The Displaced Mirror by Min Tian John K. Gillespie THE USE OF ASIAN THEATRE FOR MODERN WESTERN THEATRE: THE DISPLACED MIRROR. By Min Tian. London: Palgrave, 2018. 313 pp. Hardcover, $89.99; paperback, $59.99. With this well researched book, Min Tian adds to the continuing discussion of theatre manifesting other-culture aspects. Such efforts have been termed fusion, cross-cultural, intercultural, transcultural, transnational, and Eurasian, among others. Tian eschews them all, pronouncing the idea of intercultural theatre as rejected for what he calls "'new' interculturalisms" (p. 1) that nonetheless remain, he declares, "theoretically Eurocentric … and the historical divide remains between the East and the West" (p. 1). He maintains that Asian theatre's appeal, though "shared by the founding fathers of modern Western theatre" (p. 2)—he includes Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe, Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, William Butler Yeats, Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing, Charles Dullin, Antonin Artaud, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Bertolt Brecht—ultimately became what he calls "displacements," uprooted from the original Asian context and tossed into their thoroughly Western, ethnocentric concepts. Tian's notion, borrowed from Freud's "Entstellung" ("distortion") and filtered through Jacques Derrida, is key: "The … productive and destructive displacement of a performance text makes impossible the dialectical reassemblage of the totality … into … any particular saturated theory or model" (p. 7). It's a provocative approach and bears consideration. Within that frame, Tian probably reaches his objective. He discusses how and why each of the Western figures discovered Asian theatre, citing their overt disaffection with the era's torpid naturalism, the affinity they perceived between symbolism, and certain Asian performance aspects, the various Asian troupes then performing in Europe, and the appearance of milestone translations—for example, Noël Peri's Cinq nô; drames lyriques japonais and Arthur Waley's The Nō Plays of Japan, both in 1921. Tian sleuths through breathtakingly abundant essays, letters, notes, meetings, confirming what the Europeans knew, saw, or heard, plus the related exchanges among them. That information alone makes for compelling reading. Concluding every chapter, whatever the European figure borrows, Tian reiterates that it constituted not influence but displacement, distortion—cf. his title's "displaced mirror"—unmoored from its tradition. For example, he writes that Yeats's nō plays, though popular in Japan, "must be put in their proper historical place as a displacement of the Japanese model" (p. 91). And Tian's chapter on [End Page 334] Meyerhold, carries the tagline, "Welding the Unweldable," concluding that Meyerhold's approach, "necessitates the refraction, and thereby the displacement, of the original essence of those popular traditions out of their historical-social as well as their aesthetic contexts" (p. 204). Tian deems the process his selected Europeans followed as displacing something from its rightful context and claims, in an oddly self-fulfilling prophecy, that the aspect in question would have happened anyway, even without Asian contact! For example, he opines that Artaud, had he never "witnessed the performance of the Balinese dancers, would have seen the same 'effigy' or 'double' of his Artaudian Occidental self in any other non-Western primitive tradition" (p. 263) and concludes that "in the hyphenation of differences and traditions, there is no escaping the law of displacement" (p. 271). Is this "Tian's law," I wonder? Furthermore, his tone throughout regards displacement as not merely caused by Western ethnocentrism; it is also inauthentic, even unethical. I read Tian's book with great interest, though at some point it struck me that his assessment carried limitations; there was nowhere to go with it. I mean, what of the most asked questions about a play: What do you think? Good drama? Effective performance? There's very little insight in that regard, beyond his displacement notion, or even about theatre in general. Therefore, I would like to offer several rejoinders to Tian's fundamental point. For example, in a concrete sense, any truth about Asian aspects adapted to Western performances could be as likely about inauthentic Asian theatre as about displacement. Several such troupes were performing in Europe in the early 20th century. To cite one, Kawakami Otojirō, a shinpa performer, and by nature...

Rorty’s socio-ethnocentrism: the problem of its justification

‘Solidarity’ is one of the key concepts of the late Richard Rorty’s philosophy. Arguing that justification of knowledge is a matter of its acceptance by the community, Rorty reduces social relations to the discursive (intertextual or dialogical) ones. Thereby he faces a number of theoretical difficulties. Rorty’s willingness to substitute the idea of objectivity for that of solidarity is at odds with his socio-ethnocentrism. Antirepresentationalist attitude is not shared by the overwhelming majority of Rorty’s ‘cultural peers’, not to mention professional philosophers, but he strongly holds to antirepresentationalism, considering it to be sufficiently justified, not caring about what others think and whether such a strategy is politically relevant or desirable from a pragmatic point of view. Consequently, he endorses the picture of warrant as independent of communal opinion. Western (Anglo-Saxon) ethnocentrism, Rorty argues, is of a special kind: it is the ethnocentrism of a “we-community” (“we liberals”) which is dedicated to enlarging itself and creating more and more variegated, inclusive and heterogeneous society. It’s a worldview of a liberal “ironist” and cosmopolitan who is always aware of the contingency of her language and moral self, and who “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses”. But to say, with Rorty, “We are lucky that our ethnocentrism is based on distrust of itself,” amounts to recognize the truth of anti-ethnocentrism. One who believes in cultural and social progress towards “a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society” is de facto anti-ethnocentrist. Even if he denies it verbally.

A better scholarly future rests on reuniting the West with the rest, the present with the past, the theory with practice

ABSTRACT Holism, i.e. the unity of theoretical and applied reality across disciplinary demarcations, is the main leitmotiv here. The scholarly disciplines of political science, law, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and history provide the context for the discussion. The only realistic way to understand, explain, and address global challenges is to think beyond the existing scholarly divides within academia. In the course of the discussion, scholasticism and methodological perfectionism come under fire – not only as unintended façades for Western ethnocentrism, but also as the source of reform policies and prescriptions which tend to rest on partial (and often potentially misleading) diagnoses. The argument is that only when the analysis is holistic, is the diagnosis more accurate and the prescription effective. The article calls for a cross-disciplinary perspective of an integrated, interconnected, complex whole in order to, first, better understand and explain, and then secondly, to successfully address the attending applied challenges.

Controversial Animal Tourism Considered from a Cultural Perspective

An aspect of controversial animal tourism that has received little attention is its relationship with cultural tourism. The article presents a categorization of cultural tourism, and sports attractions and events related to the abuse of animals. It shows how tourists, driven by cultural omnivorousness and the wish to stand out from the crowd, eagerly enjoy controversial forms of animal tourism on their travel. In order to avoid the pitfall of western ethnocentrism ending in accusations of barbarism, the issue is also reflected on from an intercultural point of view, which helps to understand that local communities have different attitudes to animals and their wellbeing. In addition, a historical overview shows that ‘animal friendliness’ does not have a long tradition in western thinking about the human-animal relationship and is only of recent date. Sustainable solutions for controversial animal tourism have to be found by raising tourists’ awareness by means of information and education.

The Brighton Conference on Women and Sport

ABSTRACT This article is the first detailed academic analysis of the background, organisation, content, and immediate outcomes of the first World Conference on Women and Sport which took place in Brighton, UK, between 05 and 08 May 1994. Women and sport conferences are now commonplace in many parts of the world. Yet in the mid-1990s, Brighton was ground-breaking and the result of concerted activism for women and sport by agents who had participated in various advocacy organisations for decades. Titled ‘Women, Sport, and the Challenge of Change’, the Conference convened approximately 280 delegates, including representatives of major sporting and non-sporting organisations, based in over eighty countries. They contributed toward establishing a more coordinated and purposeful international strategy for women and sport. However, confusion and competition between existing organisations advocating for women and sport is apparent before and during Brighton. The Conference has also encountered criticism for Western ethnocentrism and liberalised political outcomes. This article contributes to understanding the galvanisation of a collective identity and politicisation of advocacy for women’s sport, and the salience of conferences as sites enabling this. Archival document analysis and interviews with key agents involved with the advocacy were employed to understand the relations, politics and significance of the Conference.

ETNOGRAFÍA DEL CONFLICTO SOCIOCULTURAL EN TORNO A LOS BURROS-TAXI DE MIJAS

These pages attempt to contribute ethnographic material to the discussions and contextual circumstances of a peculiar sociocultural conflict over the relationship between humans and animals in the village of Mijas-Miha (Andalusia, Western Mediterranean), where the existence over six decades of a local service of Donkey-Taxi for tourists has recenly unleashed an abolitionist campaign by animal rights activists. Through the use of ethnographic methodology, this fundamentally descriptive and case-based article is originated around the contradictions of the urban-animalist ideology regarding the ways of life and the Andalusian peasantry culture. Processes which sometimes places us in the urban vs. rural traditional dialectic, or as a result of a globalizing Western ethnocentrism in relation to how to apprehend the nature and the human.

Editorial

The social sciences are intimately linked to understanding the societies in which we live. This is why the question of the historical and political anchoring of this knowledge arises. As postcolonial studies have shown, the social sciences have produced theories, concepts, and paradigms in Southern societies conveying a discourse on “modernity.” According to Edward Said, scientific knowledge is a form of power that confers authority on the person who produces it. However, knowledge is largely controlled and produced by the West, which therefore has the power to name, represent, and theorise (Said 1995). By entering into the field of these theories, indigenous researchers impose on themselves a representation of themselves and the other that endorses these power relationships. In order to finally break with this type of domination, indigenous societies are encouraged to move away from the Western ethnocentrism carried by the social sciences, and their particular vision of modernity, in order to construct their own narratives. Issues of domination are therefore at the heart of the social sciences, and in China as elsewhere, in the modern and contemporary period, these issues have not ceased to be taken into account, discussed, and thwarted. Historically, the birth of the human and social sciences in China at the turn of the twentieth century is closely linked to the desire of intellectuals to contribute to the emergence of a “powerful and prosperous” China (fuqiang 富强) following its traumatic encounter with the Western powers during the Opium Wars. As an integral part of the “self-reinforcing movement” (yangwu yundong 洋务运动), which consisted of learning from the West in order to better counter it, the human and social sciences, in China as in other non-Western societies, from the start engaged the relationship to the Other (the West) and to the Self. Trained for the most part abroad and especially in Japan, a country through which Western concepts first passed, Chinese researchers quickly strove to situate themselves in relation to this Western knowledge. As early as the 1930s, in the wake of the sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong in particular, many sought to “indigenise” the social sciences, in order to better understand the issues specific to their country and to move in the direction of a specifically Chinese modernity. The same dynamic is found in the aftermath of the Maoist period, marked by the isolation of China and the ban on social sciences. The“feverish” re-introduction of Western theories to fill the three-decade gap, which marked the 1980s, was followed by a movement of critical re-appropriation of these theories (Merle and Zhang 2007). The lecture given by Xi Jinping in May 2016, during which the President of the PRC called on Chinese researchers to “accelerate the construction of a philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics” (jiakuai goujian Zhongguo tese zhexue shehui kexue 加快构建中国特色哲学社会科学), raises the question of the extent to which national characteristics are linked to the social sciences of each country and to question the validity of epistemological relativism. Is the assertion of a national specificity of the disciplines compatible with the aim of the human and social sciences, and to what extent can a scientific discourse or approach have cultural or national characteristics? Xi Jinping’s speech also calls for an update on the longstanding opposition between Western and Chinese social sciences, inherited from postcolonial studies, which this discourse seems to mirror. What is the significance of such an injunction today in China, and how do Chinese researchers respond to it? Ultimately, this special issue aims to question the relationship between knowledge and power, science and ideology in the light of the Chinese case.

Time to Face the Music: Musical Colonization and Appropriation in Disney’s Moana

Despite Disney’s presentation of Moana as a culturally accurate portrayal of Polynesian culture, the film suffers from Western ethnocentrism, specifically in its music. This assertion is at odds with marketing of Moana that emphasized respect for and consultation with Polynesians whose expertise was heralded to validate the film’s music as culturally authentic. While the composers do, in fact, use Polynesian musical traits, they frame the sounds that are unfamiliar within those that are familiar by wrapping them with Western musical characteristics. When the audience does hear Polynesian music throughout the film, the first and last sounds they hear are Western music, not Polynesian. As such, the audience hears Polynesian sounds meld into and then become the music that defines a typical American film. Thus, regardless of Disney’s employment of Polynesian musicians, the music of Moana remains in the rigid control of non-Polynesian American composers. Rather than break new ground, Moana illustrates a musical recapitulation of white men’s control and marketing of the representations of marginalized people. Moana’s music is subject to appropriation, an echo of how colonial resources were exploited in ways that prioritize benefits to cultural outsiders.

DeGroove Is indeMove

<i>De</i>Groove Is in<i>de</i>Move

Una sociología histórica global de la construcción del estado racionalizado en la modernidad internacional

El estado es una institución clave en la modernidad internacional. Desde sus orígenes al estado se le ha supuesto y reconocido una capacidad racional y funcional. Este estatus racional del estado ha sido incorporado a la realidad naturalizada en la modernidad internacional contemporánea y se ha constituido como estado racionalizado. El análisis de la construcción social del estado racionalizado se centra en la relación entre ideologías e ideas y las dinámicas de las estructuras sociales. El análisis se organiza en un doble eje. Primero, el eje interior y exterior de los estados en la historia occidental: se distingue entre la dimensión interior respecto al orden social interno y la dimensión exterior en la relación con otros estados y sociedades. Segundo, el eje occidente y no-occidente: el enfoque global aspira a superar el etnocentrismo occidental, y reconoce que el mundo no-occidental ha sido es una referencia clave para la construcción del estado racionalizado. Se concluye que: primero, el estado racionalizado ha sido una construcción histórica, social y cultural liderada por los países europeos y occidentales en relación a y con la realidad no-occidental; y en segundo lugar, que el estado racionalizado es un factor clave en la creciente multipolaridad en las relaciones internacionales.

K pojmu reflexivní modernizace v sociologii

The author has attempted a systematic interpretation of the concept of the theory of reflexive modernisation in contemporary sociology. He contrasts the meanings of the terms „modernity“ and „modernisation“, doing so in the analytical, temporal and spatial context of the evolution of the main sociological approaches to the theory of modernisation. The author points out the fact that western ethnocentrism is in current conditions coming up against its limits. Reflexive modernisation is explored primarily as a critical reaction, in part to the classical theory of modernisation, and in part to the theory of postmodernisation. The theory of reflexive modernisation has emerged once again primarily in the context of the reflection of western societies, a fact evident in the emergence of the theory of the modernisation of modern society. Another central characteristic is emphasis on the side effects of the modernising process as the moving forces of the development of reflexive modernisation. The author documents these aspects with an analysis of the concept of the risk society and the so-called second modern movement of Ulrich Beck, as well as Anthony Giddens's concept of the evolution of modern reflexivity in late high modern society. The mutual dependencies associated with global modernisation are creating a dilemma for the investigation of social changes. On the one hand there is historical evolution on the time axis, and on the other mutual relations in supranational globalised spaces. The historical and supranational configurations are having an effect on the theoretical starting-points of research on the social consequences of transformation and their reflexivity in the conditions of life of our society.

Cómo se construye una imagen estereotipada de Europa, Asia y nuestro país en los libros de texto de España y Japón

El presente trabajo trata de un estudio comparativo entre libros de texto de España y Japón. Se examina, a través del análisis del discurso, cómo los libros de texto de Ciencias Sociales construyen estereotipos en la representación de Europa y Asia, así como sus posibles influencias en las imágenes del propio país, España y Japón. Hemos analizado los términos “Europa” y “Asia” desde cuatro perspectivas diferentes. Los resultados demuestran que, además de algunas estrategias discursivas, la idea subyacente del etnocentrismo occidental desempeña un papel importante en la construcción de imágenes estereotípicas de Europa y de Asia y de nuestro país.

David Simpson Romanticism and the Question of the StrangerRomanticism and the Question of the Stranger. David Simpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. x+271.

David Simpson Romanticism and the Question of the StrangerRomanticism and the Question of the Stranger. David Simpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. x+271.

God’s World Is Not an Animal Farm—Or Is It? The Catachrestic Translation of Gender Equality in African Pentecostalism

Building on scholarly debates on Pentecostalism, gender and modernity in Africa, this article engages a postcolonial perspective to explore and discuss the ambivalent, even paradoxical nature of African Pentecostal gender discourse. It analyses the conceptualization of gender equality, in particular the attempt to reconcile the notions of ‘male–female equality’ and ‘male headship’, in a sermon series delivered by a prominent Zambian Pentecostal pastor, and argues that the appropriation and interruption of Western notions of gender equality in these sermons can be interpreted, in the words of Homi Bhabha, as a catachrestic postcolonial translation of modernity. Hence, the article critically discusses the Western ethnocentrism in some scholarly debates on gender and Pentecostalism in Africa, and points to some of the fundamental questions that Pentecostalism and its ambivalent gender discourse pose to gender-critical scholarship in the study of religion.

The changing faces of heroines: Korean women in folklore

This article analyzes the many and changing faces of heroines in Korean folklore by interweaving the Korean cultural ethos of han and the action paradigm of resistance. Kim argues that feminist discourse often relegates alternative modes of resistance to the margins due to Western ethnocentrism and ideological politicization. She analyzes four types of heroines: archetypal, virtuous-but-not-virtuous, pioneering, and hanful resister. In doing so, Kim draws on Giddens’ knowledge and action theorem, which advances the simple equation between consciousness and resistance. Furthermore, Kim explores folklore’s validity as a legitimate commemorative medium. She introduces five memory units (storage/remembering, deletion/forgetting, retrieval, commemorative medium, and commemorative agency) and argues that the genre of folklore serves as a bridge between literature and collective memory scholarship. Since the field of memory studies validates lesser-known historical pasts, folklore deserves careful attention as a legitimate mnemonic medium. Korean folklore, a communal mnemonic result of production, retrieval, and transmission, shows diverse acts of resistance as women link presentism and traditionalism.