Western Ethnocentrism Research Articles

Vodou Haitiano. Espîrito, Mito E Realidade ed. by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel (review)

Vodou Haitiano. Espirito, Mito E Realidade. Edited by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel. Pallas Editora: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2011. (Translation into Portuguese by Amanda Orlando of Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, Reality, edited by Patrick BellegardeSmith and Claudine Michel. Indiana University Press; Bloomington, 2006).If you belong to Axe, say you do!This book arrived in Brazil at a moment when the social forces of African religion were engaged in a campaign to encourage their faithful to identify as such in the 2010 Census. Stigma and opprobrium marked the path of these religions and their people, targets of social, religious, economic and police persecution over centuries in all the Americas. In Brazil, until 1974, houses of Candomble had to be registered at police stations. In this context, the faithful established the habit of identifying with the official religion-Christianity-when questioned by authorities. Thus statistics reflect a tendency parallel to that of demographic data: the underrepresentation of religions of African origin corresponds to the underestimation of the black population that resulted from social stigma against dark skin color. At the end of the twentieth century, the campaign Don't let your color pass for white helped encourage people to assume their black identity. Today's census data reflect this fact: 51.5% of the population identifies as black (bardo or preto in the Census jargon).By hiding their religious identity from the powers that be, the faithful of black religions were adopting an attitude of protection-protecting themselves and their communities. This stance is not strange to theology of African matrix, in which protection often comes with what is secret. Perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of these religions, in comparison with official ones, is that they are not evangelical; they do not seek to convert. Their houses of worship receive, accept and shelter those who seek or are willing to follow the teachings needed to delve deeply into the relationship of human beings with cosmic mystery. Salvation is not their concern because they do not postulate original sin or guilt. Rather they occupy themselves eminently with the ethics of social and environmental responsibility as a prerequisite to mutual and collective protection. The place of the secret in this ethical universe distinguishes it from the public morality of civil society. Mystery, or what is secret, merges with protection in two senses: protection of the individual in his or her existential journey and protection of the community in its social life and in its relationship with nature.Haiti and Brazil have cultural and historical aspects that at once converge and differ. Like all countries of the Americas, they both were forged in the violent process of enslavement of Africans and genocide against Native Americans. Thanks to these peoples' capacity for resistance and renewal, Brazil and Haiti, like the other American nations, bear current and dynamic witness to cultures and civilizations that the West subordinated and used multiple tools and strategies to repress.For a long time these cultures and civilizations received the West's attention as objects of study, something exotic and curious for being outside the norm of true civilization-that of the West itself, raised to the status of by force of arms and colonial imposition. Only recently has this Western ethnocentrism been challenged critically by those it sought to exclude from the category of universal humanity. Shamans and diviners-considered ignorant and primitive-won their voices and took the floor, producing knowledge in the proper academic form. Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, Reality brings us the reflections of creative thinkers and social scientists, practitioners or authorities of Vodou, mediated and enriched by their mastery of scientific discourse.Haiti differs from Brazil in one fundamental event: the African population as protagonist and the force of its religion helped Haiti to free itself much earlier from the formal colonial yoke. …

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.

Cannibalism in Montaigne, de Certeau and Derrida

In this text we introduce the discursive strategies of Montaigne, de Certeau and Derrida in analysing the figure of the cannibal. Both de Certeau and Derrida use textual strategies for their analysis, but whereas de Certeau remains at the level of discourse and words and therefore at the level of phonocentric language, Derrida’s analysis moves beyond Western ethnocentrism. These different approaches lead de Certeau and Derrida to different conclusions. During the Renaissance, the figure of the cannibal was the source of horror because it ate its own kind and married several women. De Certeau inverts this ethnocentric ethics and shows that cannibalism was a form of paying tribute to the valor and honor of the victim, and polygamy showed the devotion and fidelity of women towards their husbands, not as a sign of male domination. Contrary to de Certeau, but building upon his critique of ethnocentrism, Derrida does not bring about any reversal of values when analysing a particular cosmovision in the figure of the cannibal, for example. Taking the meaning of the word “eating” in both a literal and a figurative sense, Derrida shows that all cultures are organized around a notion of sacrifice that consists in clearing up an area that allows for a noncriminal putting to death. It is in this context that Derrida denounces the ‘mass exterminations’ of animals and the ‘crimes’ against the environment that sustain carnivorous and industrialised countries. The figure of the cannibal also provides a good example of how Western society constructs the height of its morality and good consciousness symbolically sacrificing and demonizing the other (the savage, the cannibal) just because it sacrifices another ‘other’: as all cultures are organized around sacrificial structures that are ethnocentric.

Antropología del 'sentido histórico' de la vida. Una crítica al etnocentrismo cultural occidental desde Ortega

In this paper I analyse some of the outstanding aspects concerning the world of ethnography and ethnology in today’s Western societies. For this, I will examine the cultural and philosophical anthropology of Ortega y Gasset, which complements exceptionally well my ideas about this topic. I defend a double perspective: empirical and metaphysical. In the present essay, I offer the reader keys to understand serious aspects of human culture. I focus on the notable importance of the cultural and anthropologic aspects upon the life of the common person. Above all, I delve into the following questions: modernity and Western ethnocentrism, classical evolutionism, and cultural progress.

¿Qué queda de la Ilustración? Apuntes para un debate

The present article is a contribution to the discussion about the significance and the content of truth we confer to the concept of Enlightenment. It covers the most important critiques that the Enlightenment has historically received from different sides and reflects about whether these affect its normative core. Besides, it wants to show the necessity of rethinking the validity of this normative core for the coordinates of our paradoxical world, in which a globalization said to have imperialist features confronts a reflexive pluralism which questions western ethnocentrism.

The Greek evil eye, African witchcraft, and Western ethnocentrism

The aim of this study is to illustrate the ethnocentrism of Western thought by projecting its own science-oriented culture onto cultures with different beliefs. A comparative study between African witchcraft and the Greek phenomenon of the evil eye will be done to investigate whether similar reasons can be given for their existence today. The article reflects on the view that has been prevalent since the Enlightenment, namely that belief in the supernatural is “primitive” and has no place in a world where most things can be explained or solved scientifically. Against this background, contemporary Western perspectives on evil are explained and compared with those of the Greek Orthodox worldview, which shows similarities with New Testament textual evidence. This correlation is demonstrated by an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of the evil eye as seen from a social, cultural and ecological point of view. These insights are compared with the belief in witchcraft, demonic possession and exorcism within African tradition and spirituality.

CITIES BETWEEN MODERNITY AND DEVELOPMENT

ABSTRACT The concept of modernity forms a basis for much intellectual work on the cultural politics of cities today. Yet the concept itself carries the traces of its origins in western cities, and in western urban theory. This has had profound consequences for how cities in poorer countries are conceptualised, and has had the effect of diminishing the intellectual resources for imagining the creativity and dynamism of these places. The paper explores the locatedness of the concept of modernity through the work of Walter Benjamin, and suggests how the association of the western city with modernity left cities in other places in a troubled relationship to the modern. The work of urban anthropologies in the 1950s and 1960s presented an opportunity for revitalising urban theory, and reconsidering accounts of urbanism which carried the traces of western ethnocentrism. This was undermined by the emergence of developmentalism, and the consequent division with in urban studies between western urban theory and urban development studies which focussed on the third world city. The paper suggests, following Benjamin, that one possibility for transforming current parochial conceptualisations of modernity and urbanism, might exist in revisiting the dialectical clash which urban anthropology had begun to stage between the west's self-definition of urban modernity, and the diversity of urbanisms which characterise cities around the world.

Ethnocentrism as a Form of Intuition in Psychology

Ethnocentrism is conceptualized as a basic Kantian form of intuition that plays aknowledge-producing role. Although all cultures have developed their particular forms of intuition, the focus of this analysis is on Western ethnocentrism, which is discussed in four psychological manifestations. The most explicit expression of Western ethnocentrism in academia is scientific racism, which has been an important research program in the history of the science of mental life. Another manifestation of ethnocentrism as a form of intuition in Western psychology is researchers’ prejudices, which play a significant role in the context of discovery. Besides these two explicit manifestations of ethnocentrism, a hidden one is analyzed, which expresses itself in terms of exclusion or disregard of non-Western views, or in their assimilation without a reconceptualization of mental life. In this type of ethnocentrism it is assumed that Western psychological conceptualizations are superior. Finally, a fourth manifestation is discussed, which expresses itself in the institutional practices of academia, such as hiring, publishing and teaching.

Towards a definition of Egyptian complimenting

Abstract Compliments are often viewed within the framework of politeness theory. Work on politeness, such as that of Brown and Levinson (1987), has, however, often been infected with a western ethnocentrism, such that cross cultural variations are assumed to be captured within a single politeness model. Recent research on cultures such as Chinese and Japanese have challenged this ethnocentric perspective, and the present work extends the critique in relation to Egyptian Arabic. In the paper, we argue that compliments are culture specific objects. In the case of Egyptian Arabic, any understanding of compliment behavior must take account of such things as values, tact, courtesy, and general group, as opposed to individual, values. Working with a range of compliment behaviours we introduce a model of a ‘social contract of values’ which allows us to move beyond western ethnocentrism, and to capture more directly the process of Egyptian complimenting behavior.

THE SILENCES OF MAINSTREAM FEMINIST ACCOUNTING RESEARCH

This paper is concerned to articulate the silences and omissions of mainstream feminist accounting research. Such research overlooks considerations of class, race and culture. It leaves unquestioned the current socio-political and economic order, succumbs in effect to current racial biases and fails to offer a counter to prevalent Western ethnocentrism. It not only tends to conservatism in these respects but also, relatedly, it fails to develop a critique of patriarchal social arrangements.

An Analytical Map of Social Scientific Approaches to the Concept of Law

An intractable puzzle brought almost to a standstill the development of theory in the social scientific study of law from the 1950s through the 1970s. The debate over a social scientific concept of law was the central focus of theoretical discussion during this period. The puzzle lies in the fact that the debate seemed incapable of resolution. There appeared to be almost as many concepts of law as there were theorists, with no apparent means to determine which concept, if any, was the correct one. Legal philosophers have also long been exercised by the question of what law is, as H. L. A. Hart noted on the very first page of The Concept of Law.' But a lack of agreement has not been as debilitating. Legal philosophers, especially those in the positivist tradition, have the luxury of focusing on state law. Many social scientists, in contrast, consider state law to be an unacceptable starting point because it does not comprise a scientific category, and more so because application of the state law model would result in the conclusion that many societies (historically speaking) did not have law. Especially for legal anthropologists, this smacked of Western ethnocentrism. This mix of scientism and concern about ethnocentrism resulted in analytical gridlock. Scientists who declared-at the outset of the enquiry-that 'No society is without law',2 were inevitably led to identify a different concept of law from those scientists who believed that whether or not particular societies have law should be an empirical question, one that can be answered in the negative. After decades of heated exchanges, with no apparent progress, scholars in the field became frustrated with the issue. The debate over what is law? was characterized as 'endless wrangling' which operated 'to the hindrance of more

On the Borders of Social Theory: Learning from other Regions

In the first section of the paper a few general remarks concerning three lineages of universalism are outlined; these comments act as an introduction to a more detailed examination of ‘Euro-Americanism’. In this second section, the main focus of analysis falls on examples taken from the literature of critical urban studies. In the final part, a briefly stated case is made for learning from the South. It is suggested that it is not only crucial to question all forms of Western ethnocentrism, but that by scrutinizing critically the historical constitution of the relations between the First World and the societies of the periphery, the realities of the West can be better comprehended. In fact, it is argued that without such a connection First World geographers will not be able to grasp the meanings and dispositions of the societies in which they live, and in this important sense will remain ‘intellectual prisoners of the West’.

The Return to Second-class Citizenship in China

China's open-door policy toward the West has let in more than Western ideas about dem cracy and free enterprise.1 Along with new sources f foreign capital and technology needed for China's industrialization, Deng Xiaoping's open door has also let in Western ethnocentrism and latent biases against the Chinese. Indeed, an increase in foreign investment in China has helped to create a variety of institutionalized forms of discrimination against Chinese citizens, promulgated by foreigners and occasionally even by the Chinese government. Once again in this century we are witnessing a return to second-class citizenship in China for the Chinese.2 In the West we are culpable for encouraging the rebirth of second-class citizenship, and in China the government is frequently responsible for enforcing it. It is uncomfortable to speak about in the United States and impossible to discuss publicly in the China of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng. For our part, we would rather not believe that this is happening. If it is, we certainly do not want to accept responsibility for it. Understandably, acknowledgment of this phenomenon by the Chinese government, which is dependent upon foreign investment to modernize China's economy, is problematic and therefore unlikely. A year has passed since prodemocracy demonstrators were massacred in Tiananmen Square on 4 June by the Chinese government.3 In response to this tragedy and the continuing crackdown in China against the forces of democratization, a great many Western nations have imposed various types of sanctions on the Chinese government.4 In the private sector, one of the most severe consequences of the Chinese government's crackdown has been the slowdown of foreign investment. Even after receiving assurances from

Islamization of Anthropological Knowledge

The expansion of Western coloniaHsrn during the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies brought in its wake the economic and political domination andexploitation of the Third World countries. Western colonialism andethnocentrism went hand in hand. The colonial ideology was rationalizedand justified in terms of the white man's burden; it was believed that theWhite races of Europe had the moral duty to carry the torch of civilizationwhichwas equated with Christianity and Western culture-to the dark comersof Asia and Africa. The ideology of Victorian Europe accorded the full statusof humanity only to European Christians; the "other" people were condemned,as Edmund Leach has bluntly put it, as "sub-human animals, monsters,degenerate men, damned souls, or the products of a separate creation" (Leach,1982).One of the most damaging consequences of colonialism relates to a massiveundermining of the self-confidence of the colonized peoples. Their culturalvalues and institutions were ridiculed and harshly criticized. Worse still, theWestern pattern of education introduced by colonial governments produceda breed of Westernized native elite, who held their own cultural heritage incontempt and who consciously identified themselves with the culture of theircolonial masters.During the nineteenth century Orientalism emerged as an intellectualally of Western colonialism. As Edward Said has cogently demonstrated,Oriental ism was a product of certain political and ideological forces operatingin Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that it wasinextricably bound up with Western ethnocentrism, racism, and imperialism(Said, 1978).Most of the colonized countries of the Third World secured politicalliberation from Western powers during the early decades of the present century.Regrettably, however, political liberation was not always followed byideological, cultural, and intellectual jndependence. For one thing, most ofthe ex-colonial countries continued with the colonial pattern of education.Secondly, most of them were drawn into the political and cultural orbit ofeither the United States or Soviet Russia. A subtle but pervasive form of ...

Some Reflections on Third World Feminist Historiography

COMMENT: Some Reflections on Third World Feminist Historiography Janet Afary In her "Six (or More) Feminists in Search of a Historian," Sharon Sievers presents an eloquent argument for a historically grounded feminist theory. Much of the nonwestern world views feminism not as a revolutionary ideology but as a form of cultural imperialism that is to be shunned, and the reasons for this attitude are found in the pervasive ethnocentrism of the western feminists, she argues. European and American feminists construct theories of feminism that are oblivious to the actual historical experiences of nonwestern cultures. Studies in the history of the nonwestern societies demonstrate, however, that feminism—perhaps without the term and definition as we know it today—has existed in a variety of forms within these societies in the past few centuries. A historicaUy grounded feminism that recognizes the existence of the idea of feminism within a multiplicity of cultural and national traditions would further explore contradictions of this history rather than shy away from them. Sievers contends further that this means distinguishing women's history from feminist history, exploring those forms of feminism that have historically accommodated themselves with colonialism and western imperialism, and trying to make clear choices about "what is and is not universal about feminism." There is no question that the construction of a multicultural history of feminism will not only begin to correct the errors of ethnocentrism and broaden the concept of feminism itself, but also give us a new and more complex view of the historical past in the political, social, cultural, and ideological realms. For example, the historiography of the first decade of the 20th century has begun to recognize socialist and feminist dimensions of the labor movement and other social movements in both Europe and the United States. But the same period has generaUy been seen as an era of nationalist movements in the nonwestern world. Closer study of this period demonstrates , however, that the movements that shook Iran, Turkey, India, British Guyana, Mexico, South Africa, as well as China and Japan—movements which were often inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1905—also witnessed the participation of activist women on a large international scale and as a distinct social group for the first time. In British Guyana, the women involved in the movement were referred to as the "Amazons." The revolts in South Africa were referred to as the "maid's revolt," and in parts of India the rebellions were known as the "women's war."1 In several of © 1989 IQURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY, VOL. 1 NO. 2 (FALL)_________________________ 148 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY FALL these countries, the movement found a clearly recognizable socialist and feminist dimension. In China, some of the most powerful writings against male domination, the practice of foot binding, and forced marriage were penned at this time.2 Sievers has movingly described the history of Japanese feminists and socialists as early as 1904 in her Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan.3 In my article in this volume, I have attempted to show that the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 quickly developed a strong socialist component that called for an eight-hour day, land to the peasants, and education for women. A number of women activists, who were influenced by socialist ideas from the Russian Caucasus, estabUshed the Council for Freedom of Women and many other semisecret societies of women, as well as schools, hospitals, and cultural centers. Feminist intellectuals in Iran called for an end to the dowry tradition, polygyny, and easy male divorce; when confronted by a hostile minority of conservative clerics, they did not hesitate to speak out or publish articles on the subject in the newspapers of the period. A second question emerges in this period when the history of the women's movements of Iran and other nonwestern societies are studied within the context of the debates among European socialists of the time, namely the debates within the German Social Democracy on the relationship of social movements in the underdeveloped east to those in the technologically more advanced west. These debates can inform our discussions and criticisms of western ethnocentrism in a new...

Women and Family in Development Plans in the Arab East

AbstractThe role of women and the family in economic development in the Middle East has often been misunderstood. One reason for this has been Western ethnocentrism. The diversity of women's situations has been ignored, including their agricultural and craft labor, their labor in the home, and their assumption of the role of the household head. Thus development plans to benefit women and the family must take into account a wide variety of economic arrangements, and recognize the symbiosis between the formal and the informal economic sectors.

Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem

Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem

A Western Apache Writing System: The Symbols of Silas John

At the outset of this article, it was observed that the adequacy of an etic typology of written symbols could be judged by its ability to describe all the emic distinctions in all the writing systems of the world. In conclusion, we should like to return to this point and briefly examine the extent to which currently available etic concepts can be used to describe the distinctions made by Western Apaches in relation to the writing system of Silas John. Every symbol in the Silas John script may be classified as a phonetic-semantic sign. Symbols of this type denote linguistic expressions that consist of one or more words and contrast as a class with phonetic-nonsemantic signs, which denote phonemes (or phoneme clusters), syllables (or syllable clusters), and various prosodic phenomena. Phonetic semantic signs are commonly partitioned into two subclasses: logographs (which denote single words) and phraseographs (which denote one or more words). Although every symbol in the Silas John script can be assigned to one or the other of these categories, such an exercise is without justification. We have no evidence to suggest that Western Apaches classify symbols according to the length or complexity of their linguistic referents, and therefore the imposition of distinctions based on these criteria would be inappropriate and misleading. A far more useful contrast, and one we have already employed, is presented in most etic typologies as an opposition between compound (composite) and noncompound (noncomposite) symbols. Used to break down the category of phonetic-semantic signs, these two concepts enable us to describe more or less exactly the distinction Apaches draw between "symbol elements put together" ( keʔeščin łedidilgoh ) and "symbol elements standing alone" ( keʔeščin dołedidildaahi ). The former may now be defined as consisting of compound phonetic-semantic signs, while the latter is composed of noncompound phonetic-semantic signs. Up to this point, etic concepts have served us well. However, a deficiency appears when we search for a terminology that allows us to describe the distinction between "symbols that tell what to say" and "symbols that tell what to do." As far as we have been able to determine, standard typologies make no provision for this kind of contrast, apparently because their creators have tacitly assumed that systems composed of phonetic-semantic signs serve exclusively to communicate linguistic information. Consequently, the possibility that these systems might also convey nonlinguistic information seems to have been ignored. This oversight may be a product of Western ethnocentrism; after all, it is. we who use alphabets who most frequently associate writing with language. On the other hand, it may simply stem from the fact that systems incorporating symbols with kinesic referents are exceedingly rare and have not yet been reported. In any case, it is important to recognize that the etic inventory is not complete. Retaining the term "phonetic sign" as a label for written symbols. that denote linguistic phenomena, we propose that the term "kinetic sign" be introduced to label symbols that denote sequences of nonverbal behavior. Symbols of the latter type that simultaneously denote some unit of language may be classified as "phonetic-kinetic" signs. With these concepts, the contrast between "symbols that tell what to say" and "symbols that tell what to do" can be rephrased as one that distinguishes phonetic signs (by definition nonkinetic) from phonetic-kinetic signs. Purely kinetic signs—symbols that refer solely to physical gestures—are absent from the Silas John script. The utility of the kinetic sign and the phonetic-kinetic sign as comparative concepts must ultimately be judged on the basis of their capacity to clarify and describe emic distinctions in other systems of writing. However, as we have previously pointed out, ethnographic studies of American Indian systems that address themselves to the identification of these distinctions—and thus provide the information necessary to evaluate the relevance and applicability of etic concepts—are in very short supply. As a result, meaningful comparisons cannot be made. At this point, we simply lack the data with which to determine whether the kinetic component so prominent in the Silas John script is unique or whether it had counterparts elsewhere in North America. The view is still prevalent among anthropologists and linguists that the great majority of American Indian writing systems conform to one or two global "primitive" types. Our study of the Silas John script casts doubt upon this position, for it demonstrates that fundamental emic distinctions remain to be discovered and that existing etic frameworks are less than adequately equipped to describe them. The implications of these findings are clear. On the one hand, we must acknowledge the possibility that several structurally distinct forms of writing were developed by North America's Indian cultures. Concomitantly, we must be prepared to abandon traditional ideas of typological similarity and simplicity among these systems in favor of those that take into account variation and complexity.