Examples Of Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism is when a person judges a group by the standard of their own culture. Ethnocentrism come in many shapes and forms and takes place in all cultures. The example I found to be the best representation and explanation of ethnocentrism, was the TedTalk: Chimamanda Adichie The Danger of a single story. In her talk she relays times in her life where she thought all books had to have white British characters in them because she only read books, which had those types of characters. She also relayed the story of here first time in college where she had an American room mate who assumed she would have no idea how to do simple tasks like use a stove (Adichie). Ethnocentrism is like having a single story we see other cultures only as our culture

We judge other cultures by our standards because we have not had any other story but our own.

Another example of ethnocentrism was in Eating Christmas in the Kalahari. In this article the story the narrator tells us about how he wanted to give back to the community who had allowed him to stay with them and study them. To do this he went and bought the best ox he could find and was going to gift it to the community for their Christmas Feast. However, when the community members leaned about the ox they informed the narrator that the ox was no good. In the weeks to come the villagers would tell him that there was no meat on that ox and that it would not make for a plentiful feast. The narrator reacted just as anyone from our

It doesn’t matter if you are in the field or reading out the work your ethnocentrism will paint your opinion of other cultures. As I was reading my view of the article was wrong because I couldn’t see past what our culture had told me was correct. Up until this point I had only had the one story on how you should react when you are given a gift and that greatly impacted how I viewed the community. I realized at the end of the article how wrong I had been about the community and that what they did made sense for their community