Eurocentrism

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Eurocentrism

• A False Understanding of Universality?

2
Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations.
1999
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Samuel Huntington A Clash of Civilizations?

• A drastic examples of an actual eurocentric
  worldview.
• Citation Western concepts differ fundamentally
  from those prevalent in other civilizations.
  Western ideas of individualism, liberalism,
  constitutionalism, human rights, equality,
  liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free
  markets, the separation of church and state,
  often have little resonance in Islamic,
  Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox
  cultures. (Huntington 1993, 40)
• Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations?.
  In Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993 22-49.

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Makes the term Western values any sense?

• individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism,
  human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law,
  democracy, free markets, the separation of church
  and state
• Whatever these values may be, they obviously are
  not stable.
• And they are full of contradictions.

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Western values

• have developed considerably over time, and have
  kept changing
• E.g. three generations of Human Rights
• Declaration 1948
• Social Pact 1966
• Resolution on the right of development 1986

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History teaches us that

• Western thinking at an earlier stage was
  basically driven by religious and mystical
  narrow-mindedness, by superstition in its
  Christian or non-Christian versions, by all the
  things that the West today believes are specific
  for Muslim or Hindu societies.

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The following examples are taken from

• Hippler, Jochen Anstatt einer notwendigen
  Satire Eine kleine Polemik zum Clash of
  Civilizations nebst einigen Anmerkungen zum
  Islamismus. In
• http//www.jochen-hippler.de/Aufsaetze/Clash_of_Ci
  vilizations _-_Polem/clash_of_civilizations_-_pole
  m.html (07.08.06)

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Stable European Family Structures?
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Family Structures

• While stable family structures have been very
  important until into the twentieth century, today
  family cohesion has lost most of its meaning and
  importance.
• Even being married does not matter very much any
  longer, at least in big cities of Europe.
• In many of them, some one third of the household
  are single persons and one third of all marriages
  end in divorce.
• Just a few decades ago this would have been
  unthinkable.

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Family Structures

• But what does it imply for Western values?
• Are family values not any longer part of them,
  after they were for centuries?

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Strong pro-human rights tradition in Europe
versus Fascism and Stalinism
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Western values have entailed both freedom and
repression,

• both human rights and the holocaust, and both
  streaks of traditions have fought with each
  other.
• To define Western values only as the positive
  side of this double faced history is an arbitrary
  attempt to purge European history of its
  destructive and depressing aspects.

13
Economic Moderinzation

• Many of the values mentioned may have less to
  do with western culture,
• but with economic modernization.

14
Results of Capitalism, of Mechanization, of the
Market Mechanism

• The weakening of religion in Europe, the growth
  of individualism, or, again, the decline of the
  family, all not necessarily are Western values
  at all, but results of capitalism, of
  mechanization, of the market mechanism.
• In this case they would just appear Western,
  because these phenomena have first happened on a
  large scale in Europe, but they would in fact be
  above cultural specifics.

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Western values is not anything stable or
homogenous

• These trends would then not constitute European
  values, but shape them.
• Only the societies affected would obviously
  perceive them as something forming part of their
  original identity.

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The Charge of Eurocentrism

• 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).

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Anti-Western Idea in the 1960s

• The fall of Universal History and the rise of
  Multicultural World History
• An anti-Western attitude stating, that the single
  most important phenomenon of modern world history
  is the imperialist expansion of Europe against
  the development of societies situated in the
  periphery.

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1st Definition of Eurocentrism

• is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of
  placing emphasis on European (and, generally,
  Western) concerns, culture and values at the
  expense of those of other cultures.
• Eurocentrism is an instance of ethnocentrism,
  perhaps especially relevant because of its
  alignment with current and past real power
  structures in the world. Eurocentrism often
  involved claiming cultures that were not white or
  European as being such, or denying their
  existence at all.

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2nd Definition of Eurocentrism

• A set of scientifically proved criterias and
  categories for dealing with the others,
  constituting their particular inferiority
• e.g. Friedrich Willhelm Hegels Hirarchy for the
  comparision of world regions
• America is inferior to Africa due to the
  comparative short sature of the american flora
  and fauna
• Asia is inferior to Europe, because it is old
  aged and exhausted
• Africa is inferior to Europe due to its lack of
  civilization
• Gerbi, Antonello. Dispute of the New World The
  History of a Polemic, 1750-1900. 1955. Trans.
  Jeremy Moyle. Pittsburgh U of Pittsburgh P, 1973.

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3rd Definition of Eurocentrism

• Emerges in the slipstream of universality the
  mayor myth of The West
• Raimon Panikkar (1995) Religion, Philosophy and
  Culture. In polylog. Forum for Intercultural
  Philosophy http//them.polylog.org/1/fpr-en.htm
  (2006-09-12)
• demanding MULTI- and
  INTERCULTURALITY

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Every Culture Creates Its Own Myths
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Western Culture ...

• ... states that there was no myth in its culture

but a basis sciences
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There are no Cultural Universals

• Each culture possesses a cosmovision and reveals
  the world in which we live ().
• Each culture is a galaxy
• which secretes its self-understanding,
• and with it,
• the criteria of truth, goodness, and beauty of
  all human actions.
• Panikkar 1995

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There are no Cultural Universals

• i.e. concrete meaningful contents valid for all
  the cultures, for mankind throughout all times.
• What one calls human nature is an abstraction.
• And every abstraction is an operation of the mind
  which removes (abstracts) from a greater reality
  (as seen by this mind) something (less universal)
  which it considers as important. There cannot be
  cultural universals, for it is culture itself
  which makes possible (and plausible) its own
  universals.
• Panikkar 1995

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Culture is a Subject

• By saying that there are no cultural universals,
  we are using a way of thinking which is foreign
  to the modern "scientific" mentality, in which
  predominates (when not dominates) simple
  objectivity (and objectibility) of the real.
• Culture is not simply an object, since we are
  constitutively immersed in it as subjects () ,
  i.e. subjectivity, essentially belongs to the
  human being.
• Panikkar 1995

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The Conquering Myth

•  It is very revealing to inquire whence and why a
  "mythology" was born (not the narrative,
  mythos-legein) as a rational science about
  others' myths (legends). All those who do not
  come from the South or the Center of England
  speak English with an accent only the "natives",
  of course, speak without an accent ... Everything
  which did not fit into the mental framework of
  what is called the Enlightenment, which
  flourished precisely when the West had
  politically "conquered" more than three quarters
  of the planet, has been called primitive myth,
  and still nowadays, "on the way to development".
  Panikkar 1995

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Examples of such a critique

• Tzvetan Todorov
• Carlos Castaneda

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Pluralism and Interculturality

• Cultural respect requires that we respect those
  ways of life that we disapprove, or even those
  that we consider as pernicious. We may be obliged
  to go as far as to combat these cultures, but we
  cannot elevate our own to the rank of universal
  paradigm in order to judge the other ones.
•  () one of the cements of interculturality.
• Panikkar 1995

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Against Eurocentric History

• Andre Gunder FRANK ReOrient. Global Economy in
  the Asian Age. University of California Press
  1998. obligatory reading Chapter 1, p. 1-51.

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Against Eurocentrism

• Frank 1998,7
• 19. Jh. leadership not hegemony shifted to the
  west
• 21. Jh. leadership not hegemony shifted again to
  the east

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Thesis of Eurocentrism in Western historiography

• National histories formed nation states in Europe
  and America serving the ideological,
  political, and economic interests of their ruling
  classes. (XIX)

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If any regions were predominant in the world
economy before 1800, they were in Asia. (Frank
1998, 5)

• Adam SMITH (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and
  Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
• was the last major (Western) social theorist to
  appreciate that Europe was a Johnny-come-lately
  in the development of the wealth of nations.
  (Frank 1998, 13)

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Frank against Eurocentrism

• We need more than global terminology. We also
  need global analysis and theory (Frank 1998,
  38).
• history makes people more than people make
  history (Frank 1998, 41).
• globological perspective (Frank 1998, XV).
• We must analyze the whole, which is more than
  the sum of its parts (Frank 1998, XV).

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Prominant References in Frank 1998

• Classics
• Fernand Braudel
• Karl Polanyi
• Werner Sombart

• Coevals
• Edward Said
• Samir Amin
• Sidney Mintz
• Eric Wolf
• Janet Abu-Lughod
• John K. Fairbank
• Martin Bernal