Ethnocentrism was likened to believing the Sun circles the Earth
The nineteenth-century Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz compared ethnocentrism to geocentrism: every people imagining itself at the summit of all nations, past and present. The habit of judging others by your own culture's yardstick turns out to be ancient, and anthropology spent decades learning to catch itself doing it.
The word joins Greek ethnos, nation, and kentron, centre. Gumplowicz is usually credited with coining it, though some think he merely popularised it. The American sociologist William G. Sumner is often wrongly named as the inventor; according to Boris Bizumic, his real role was bringing the idea into English-language social science through his 1906 book Folkways, which described a group treating itself as the centre and rating all others against it, often with pride and contempt.
Later theories sharpened the mechanism. Theodor Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, in The Authoritarian Personality of 1950, framed it as warmth toward an in-group combined with hostility toward an out-group. Donald Campbell's realistic group conflict theory and Henri Tajfel's social identity theory followed. Ethnocentrism need not involve racism, but it tends to sharpen under competition between groups, and it can even hurt the performance of workers posted abroad.
Nineteenth-century anthropology was itself deeply ethnocentric. Scholars ranked cultures on ladders of progress built from Western milestones. Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture of 1871 set out a scale of civilisation, Thomas Macaulay claimed one shelf of a Western library outweighed Asian literature, and Hegel argued non-Western histories were not worth preserving.
Franz Boas led the counter-attack. His 1911 book The Mind of Primitive Man argued that we value our own civilisation because it has shaped us since birth, and that other civilisations might be just as valuable. Legend says he read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason through freezing nights on Baffin Island in 1883. With Bronislaw Malinowski he pushed fieldwork as a cure for bias, helping establish cultural relativism: studying a society on its own terms. Classics followed, including work by Boas's students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, though Mead's Samoa study later drew heavy criticism for faulty data.
Source: Ethnocentrism
