Eurocentrism

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Eurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective, with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European (and, more generally, of Western) culture, concerns and values at the expense of non- Europeans. Eurocentrism is an instance of ethnocentrism, especially relevant because of current and past European colonialism and imperialism. Eurocentrism typically involves assuming that non-European cultures have fundamentally similar worldviews and values.^{[citation needed]}

The source of a cultural tradition can be seen in the balance of emphasis given to various thinkers and ideas in discussing a subject. In the 1960s a reaction against the priority given to a canon of "Dead White European Males" provided a slogan which neatly sums up the charge of Eurocentrism (alongside other important -centrisms.) In both Europe and North America, the heyday of Eurocentricism was in the 19th century, today it is much less prevalent due to developments in popular culture and teaching.^[1]

Alternatively, Eurocentric and Eurocentrist are occasionally used in British political discourse to describe supporters of European integration and the European Union, in other words as an antonym of Eurosceptic.

Contents 1 Origins 2 Examples of Eurocentrism 2.1 Cartography 2.2 History 2.3 Eurocentrism in Australia 2.4 Eurocentrism in America 3 Challenging Eurocentric models 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Origins

Early Eurocentrism can be traced to the European Renaissance, in which the revival of learning based on classical sources were focused on the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, due to their being a significant source of contemporary European civilization.

The effects of these assumptions of European superiority increased during the period of European imperialism, which started slowly in the 15th century, accelerated in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and reached its zenith in the 19th century. The progressively mechanized character of European culture was contrasted with traditional hunting, farming and herding societies in many of the areas of the world being newly conquered & colonized by Europeans, such as the Americas, most of Africa, and later the Pacific and Australasia. Even the complex civilizations of Arabia, Persia, India, China, Mexico, Peru and Japan were counted as underdeveloped whence compared to Europe, and were often characterised as static. Many European writers of this time construed the history of Europe as paradigmatic for the rest of the world. Other cultures were identified as having reached a stage through which Europe itself had already passed – primitive hunter-gatherer; farming; early civilization; feudalism; modern liberal-capitalism. Only Europe had achieved the last stage after it stole and destroyed everything in Africa. The Africans were the first people ever civilized and known to be uniquely responsible for the scientific, technological and cultural achievements that constitute the modern world. Furthermore, scientific models for understanding the world were deemed to have replaced religious or speculative accounts.

For some writers, such as Karl Marx, the centrality of Europe to an understanding of world history did not imply any innate European superiority, but he nevertheless assumed that Europe provided a model for the world as a whole. Others looked forward to the expansion of modernity throughout the world through trade or imperialism (or both). By the late 19th Century, the theory that European achievements arose from innate racial superiority became widespread: justifying race-based slavery, genocide, colonisation and other forms of political and economic exploitation.

The colonising period involved the widespread settlement of parts of the Americas and Australasia with European people, and the establishment of outposts and colonial administrations in parts of Asia and Africa. As a result, the majority populations of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand typically trace their ancestry to Europe. For this reason a Eurocentric history is taught in such countries, despite geographic isolation from Europe, with many European cultural traditions.

[edit] Examples of Eurocentrism

[edit] Cartography

• The division of the landmass of Eurasia into the separate continents of Asia and Europe is an anomaly with no basis in physical geography. An alternative view is that Eurasia is a single continent, one of six continents in total. This view is held by some geographers and is preferred in Russia (which spans Asia and Europe). The separation is maintained for historical and cultural reasons, with those in the West of the landmass historically choosing to distance themselves culturally from those in the East.

• Arno Peters highlighted the political implications of map design by promoting the Gall- Peters projection, as a contrasting world map to the Mercator projection, a commonly used world map projection at the time. The Mercator projection distorts areas further from the equator, making Europe and North America appear disproportionately large compared to similar sized areas closer to the equator, such as Africa, Central America and Australia. Alaska, for example, is presented as being similar or even slightly larger in size than Brazil, when Brazil's area is actually almost 5 times that of Alaska.

• The longitude meridians of world maps have also evolved from a Eurocentric worldview, with the original definition of the prime meridian, placing Greenwich, London in the centre. This also has practical advantages- for example, it places the International Date Line in the Pacific, inconveniencing the smallest number of people.

• A residual effect of these Eurocentric origins are that regional names around the world are named in relation to their location compared to Europe- 'Middle East' describes an area slightly east of Europe, and the Orient is described as the 'Far East'. Alternatively, the Western World, or 'Western civilization' are terms that group culturally similar countries- not only Central and Western Europe, but the former European colonies of North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Although many of these terms are not intentionally designed to relegate other groups to a subordinate role to the people of Europe, the effects of Eurocentricism create a self-sustaining belief, that Europe and Europeans are central and most important to all meaningful aspects of the world's social values, and cultural heritage.^{[citation needed]} This is further reflected in the presumed centrality of Europe in the study and development of the world in the following examples.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] History

• World History

Eurocentric teaching in European or American schools of the history of science and technology describes its progression from ancient Greeks, to Romans, then stopping during the Dark Ages, before continuing with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Less mention is made of science and technology in ancient India, the history of science and technology in China, the Islamic Golden Age, or the various achievements of ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

Eurocentric study of the history of philosophy covers Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Marx, but neglects Confucius, Buddha, the Upanishads or Avicenna.

Western accounts of the history of mathematics do not give due weight to major contributions of mathematics from other regions of the world, such as Indian mathematics, Chinese mathematics, and Islamic mathematics.^{[citation needed]}

• The European miracle theory, developed initially by Eric Jones in 1987, ^[2] describes his position that Europe was more advanced and progressive than all other civilizations prior to the year 1492, allowing it to develop capitalism, reach the New World first, and dominate world trade and politics. The theory is criticized for Eurocentrism, with critics^{[citation needed]} pointing out that progress in the rest of the world paralleled Europe before 1492, and that more than half of the world's population living in urban settlements (over 10,000 people) lived in China during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Jones' work can be seen as building on a Eurocentric view of earlier European thinkers, with Max Weber's idea of the Protestant work ethic and Georg Hegel's Spirit providing a rationale for claiming the European mind (and European religion) is inherently superior to that of all other continents. Immanuel Wallerstein's idea of a world-economy and world-system originating in Europe also comes through in European miracle theory.

• Eurocentrism was once embedded in the study of greek classic liturature. Garry Wills, the journalist and professor of American Studies at Northwestern University, writes that this Eurocentrism created a false picture of the classics themselves. Through multiculturalism scholars have learned that "the West" is an admittedly brilliant derivative of the East. Ideas such as the fact that Semites created many of the stories the Greeks revered in Homer have increased interest in the classics, according to Wills. Debunking eurocentrism with respect to the classics leads to a more full and complete picture of their history.^[3]

• Eurocentrism has been said to to deny Africans agency in the creation of their own history. For example, until recently, in Western scholarship cities such as Dakar, Banjul (Bathhurst), Abidjan, Conakry and others were assumed to be creations of Western colonizers. However, though they were transformed in both negative and positive ways by colonization, these cities predate colonization as did many of the economic and institutional patterns found in Africa.^[4]

[edit] Eurocentrism in Australia

The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was one of the first Acts of Australia's Federal Parliament after nationalism lead to the country's independence from European (British) rule. The Act placed "certain restrictions on immigration and... for the removal... of prohibited immigrants". Edmund Barton, the prime minister, argued in support of the Bill with the following statement: "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." The White Australia Policy was gradually removed after World War Two until the 1970's.

Less overtly Eurocentric was the view that the Indigenous people of Australia did not require any compensation or consideration when their land was claimed as a British colony, as their use of the land did fit with recognised (European) views of land ownership. They were later specifically denied citizenship in the Australian constitution, and traditional European views of appropriate lifestyles and attitudes lead to a policy of cultural assimilation, designed to eradicate the race through measures including the forced removal of children.

[edit] Eurocentrism in America

During the 17th century, British settlers and immigrants from across Europe brought their Eurocentrism with them to America. After the American Revolution, the colonists Eurocentrism morphed into the Americentrism that was epitomized in the zeitgeist of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny.

[edit] Challenging Eurocentric models

During the same period that European writers were claiming paradigmatic status for their own history, European scholars were also beginning to develop a knowledge of the histories and cultures of other peoples. In some cases only one locally established history was accepted, such as the Aryan invasion theory for the origin of Vedic culture in India, which has been criticised for having at one time been modelled in such a way as to support claims for European superiority. At the same time the intellectual traditions of Eastern cultures were becoming more widely known in the West, mediated by figures such as Rabindranath Tagore. By the early 20th century some historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee were attempting to construct multi-focal models of world civilizations. Toynbee also drew attention in Europe to non-European historians such as the medieval Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun. He also established links with Asian thinkers, for example through his dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai International.

At the same time, non-European historians were involved in complex engagements with European models of history as contrasted with their own traditions. Historical models centering on China, Japan, India, Persia, Arabia and other nations existed within those cultures, which to varying degrees maintained their own cultural traditions, though countries that were directly controlled by European powers were more affected by Eurocentric models than were others. Thus Japan absorbed Western ideas while maintaining its own cultural identity^{[citation needed]}.

Even in the nineteenth century anti-colonial movements had developed claims about national traditions and values that were set against those of Europe. In some cases, as with China, where local ideology was even more exclusionist than the Eurocentric one, Westernisation did not overwhelm long-established Chinese attitudes to its own cultural centrality.^[5] In contrast, countries such as Australia defined their nationhood entirely in terms of an overseas extension of European history. It was, until recently, thought to have had no history or serious culture before colonization. The history of the native inhabitants was subsumed by the Western disciplines of ethnology and archaeology. In Central America and South America a merger of immigrant and native histories was constructed. Nationalist movements appropriated the history of native civilizations such as the Mayans and Incas to construct models of cultural identity that claimed a fusion between immigrant and native identity.

[edit] Bibliography

• Samir Amin: L´Eurocentrisme, critique d´une idéologie. Paris 1988, engl. Eurocentrism, Monthly Review Press 1989, ISBN 0853457867
• J.M. Blaut: The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History . Guilford Press 1993. ISBN 0898623480
• J.M. Blaut: Eight Eurocentric Historians. Guilford Press 2000. ISBN 1572305916
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton UP 2000
• Gerhard Hauck, Die Gesellschaftstheorie und ihr Anderes : wider den Eurozentrismus der Sozialwissenschaften, Münster 2003
• Vassilis Lambropoulos, The rise of Eurocentrism : anatomy of interpretation, Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1993
• Jose Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, Vol 2), University of Oklahoma Press 1994
• Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: multiculturalism and the media, Routledge 1994
• Charlotte Spitzer, Neorassismus und Europa : rassistische Strukturen in der Selbstvergewisserung Europäischer Identität, Frankfurt am Main [etc.] : Lang, 2003
• Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1993
• Robert J.C. Young, White mythologies : writing history and the west, 2nd edition, Taylor & Francis, 2004

[edit] See also

• Afrocentrism
• American exceptionalism
• Anthropocentrism
• Ethnocentrism
• Pan-European identity
• Orientalism
• Postmodernism
• Sinocentrism

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Eurocentrism in Mathematicsbg:Евроцентризъм

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