By: Dr. Antoon De Baets
During most of the last two centuries,the prevailing popular view of world history held that a mainstream of facts could be identified in the flood of events taking place since the dawn of humanity. Essentially, this mainstream coincided with the history of Europe and its antecedents and successors—all the heirs and transmitters of civilization. The source of this stream of facts was located in Egypt and the Near East, and via Greece and Rome it slowly flowed westward to medieval western Europe. In the course of two colonization waves—the first starting in 1450, the second in 1870—it finally came to encompass the whole planet.
During the twentieth century,Europe’s child, the United States, gradually succeeded Europe as the mainstreams driving force. This mainstream principle divided the peoples of the earth into two categories: active peoples in the heart of the mainstream and passive peoples in its periphery. Non-Western cultures belonged to the passive peoples, but they could change their status and become historical agents through three forms of contact with Europe: either they had to threaten Europe (the Islamic peoples between the seventh and seventeenth centuries); be discovered, civilized, and converted by Europe (the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries); or modernize like Europe (Russia in the eighteenth and Japan in the nineteenth century).
The mainstream concept of world history had at least two anomalies,the first of which was structural: The mainstream’s beginnings lay outside Europe—in Egypt and the Near East. This demonstrates that the mainstream principle has illogical characteristics. The second anomaly was teleological and related to colonialism: unlike the independence struggle of other colonies, the eighteenth-century decolonization of the United States was often portrayed (especially after 1945) as a rebellion of heroes. This anomaly can only be explained by the fact that the successors of these American heroes took the lead of mainstream history after 1945.
In this popular grand narrative,the era of European colonization (1450-1945) was nothing other than European history outside Europe, the European epic of discovery and incorporation of other territories. With supernatural strength, European colonizers walked around the globe, realized their plans, and met “indigenous” peoples who were inferior, deficient, and helplessly unable to resist Europe’s grip.
Non-Western cultures,such as the Aztecs of Mexico or the Incas of western South America, were introduced into the narrative with brief flashbacks at the very moment of their disappearance or submission. Instances of bloody invasion, colonial mass murder, and slave trade, as well as episodes of anticolonial resistance, were explained away or minimalized, and often conveniently forgotten. In the centuries of imperialism, this popular view was fed by, and penetrated into, scholarly thinking.
As late as 1965, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) could write:
Perhaps, in the future,there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history. Please, do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped. (Trevor-Roper 1965, p. 9)
Mainstream logic perceived post-1945 decolonization as a process in which Europe withdrew—mostly voluntarily—from its colonies. Insofar as the colonized (then called “colored peoples”) were able to act, they did so because Western doctrines of nationalism and human rights had “awakened” them. Most countries emerging from decolonization, however, were seen as retarded and dependent. Called underdeveloped countries or the third world, they were thought to bridge the gap only by giving up their own culture and traditions to emulate modern Europe and, by extension, the West.
FIVE LEVELS OF EUROCENTRISM
The mainstream principle reveals a broader tendency— namely, to perceive one’s own culture as the center of everything and other cultures as its periphery. This tendency is called ethnocentrism.
If we exclude the seventeenth-century forerunner Francis Bacon (1561-1626)—a British historian and philosopher of science who identified four Idols (or fallacies), among which were Idols of the Cave (fallacies of group loyalty)—the first to describe and name this tendency was the American anthropologist William Sumner (1840-1910) in 1906. Ethnocentrism is a universal phenomenon occurring at all times and places; therefore, it is not negative but logical to give one’s own culture the most attention. It exists everywhere, for example, in Europe (Eurocentrism), China (Sinocentrism), and Africa (Afrocentrism). The concept, however, takes a dangerous turn when, first, centrality changes into superiority, and second, this attitude of superiority is held by people who have the power to dominate others.
Eurocentrism took this double step.It became more influential than other forms of ethnocentrism because it was the cultural ideology of the European colonizers who conquered the world—first in their capacity as early modern societies; later, in the nineteenth century, in their capacity as industrial nations. The more arrogant forms of Eurocentrism had a negative impact upon non-Western cultures and their history. Depending on the non-Western cultures targeted, they manifested themselves at five levels. They are described here in order of importance.
Level 1:”Non-Western history does not exist.” This ontological Eurocentrism, concerning the reality of non-Western history and promulgated by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), among others, served to justify Western expansion toward those non-Western cultures that were cataloged as ”primitive.” ”Primitive” peoples were ”peoples without history” because they were deemed incapable of historical agency. Their past was seen as a succession of chaos, barbarism, poverty, and stagnation. They were thought to develop myths instead of causal logic to explain the past. They were also thought to possess a cyclical conception of time, and therefore to live in a static present, referred to as the ethnographic present.
Sometimes, ”primitive”peoples were compared to ”prehistoric” peoples (the archaic illusion) or to children (the recapitulation theory). The most radical form of onto-logical Eurocentrism consisted in denying that indigenous peoples had ever lived on certain territories before the arrival of the Europeans. On disembarking, the latter preferred to believe that many of these territories— especially in what are now called the Americas, South Africa and Australia—were ”empty.” These regions were regarded as not inhabited, not owned, and not used; this is the terra nullius (land of no one) doctrine.
Historiography (the writing of history)of later years has adequately and extensively refuted these misconceptions by revealing that for centuries ”primitive” peoples have successfully survived, and, far from being static, they introduced important innovations (such as fire, food production, plant and animal domestication, symbols, music, language, art, etc.). Perhaps, then, negative forms of ontological Eurocentrism have disappeared today, although two of its positive forms may be said to survive. One of these positive variants maintains that the happiest peoples are those without history—a modernist variant on the centuries-old theme of the noble savage. Another variant, divulged by concerned anthropologists, holds that indigenous cultures are vanishing under the pressure of modernization and globalization (ironically called the despondency theory by American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins [b. 1930]), thereby denying any autonomy or historical agency to these cultures.
Level 2:”Non-Western history cannot be known.” This epistemological Eurocentrism concerns the knowability of history and was the result of the primacy that for centuries had been given to written sources. Where non-Western written sources were not available, alternative sources remained unacknowledged; where alternative sources had been preserved, they were generally either ignored or destroyed by colonial authorities.
In combination with first-level Eurocentrism, two versions of epistemological Eurocentrism developed. The milder version held that ”non-Western history exists but cannot be known,” while the stronger version held that ”non-Western history cannot be known, therefore it does not exist.” Only gradually was the definition of sources extended to include archeological, iconographical, linguistic, and oral evidence.
Even so, it remains incontrovertible that scores of non-Western sources are lacking and that the history of certain non-Western periods, regions, and social strata cannot be reconstructed—or only with the greatest difficulty. The reasons for this shortage were climatic, political (destruction of sources by those in power), and social (in some cases, non-Western conceptions of time or history were not document- and archive-oriented). Unavoidably, this structural lack of balance between sources from different regions leads to a Eurocentric bias in the writing of world history.
| Insiders and Outsiders definedINSIDERS ACCORDING TO: Insiders | Outsiders |
| We care more about our culture. | They are biased and ethnocentric. |
| We have superior experience, knowledge, imagination, | They cannot guarantee superior or uniform insight. |
| and insight when it regards our culture. | |
| Our understanding is determined by origin and identity. | Their understanding is not guaranteed by origin and identity. |
| Their purist and protective cultural ownership reflex should be rejected because it leads to autobiography, not history. | |
| OUTSIDERS ACCORDING TO: | |
| Insiders | Outsiders |
| They often speak clinically about our culture. They cannot guarantee that they are impartial.Their empathy with our culture is impossible.
Their version of history should be rejected for not depicting our “living” culture. Their study of cultural taboos fouls our culture. |
We possess distance and detachment.We acquire experience, knowledge, imagination, insight by disciplined training and terms of stay and study in their culture.
Our empathy with their culture is possible because humans of all times and places are intellectually and psychologically comparable, and therefore knowable to a large extent. We are equipped to study cultural taboos (slavery, dictatorship, genocide) and determinants of life (demographic or ecological patterns) not immediately evident to insiders. |
Table 1 the gale group.
Level 3:“Non-Western history has little value.” This ethical Eurocentrism was the classical form of Eurocentrism. Whenever episodes of non-Western history were effectively dealt with, they were evaluated and stereotyped according to Western concepts and criteria. Typical popular prejudices heard in the post-World War II era were: “The third world is still living in the Middle Ages” or “The third world will never arrive in two generations’ time at development levels that the West took two millennia to attain.”
Non-Western societies(“primitive” ones and others) were thus characterized by their real or alleged deficiencies: they had no writing, no state, no unity, no prosperity, and no culture. Therefore, their history was not considered worth studying. Great achievements contradicting this view were often explained away by an assumed pristine European intervention in non-Western territory (in studies of Africa this view is known as the Hamitic hypothesis).
Today,non-Western history is gradually being revalorized. It has also become apparent that comparability between present-day non-Western cultures and the pre- or protoindustrial situation in Europe is very limited because the present global context is radically different from the European context in the medieval or premodern period.
Level 4:”Non-Western history is not relevant or useful.” This was utilitarian Eurocentrism. Ignorance about non-Western history (the result of second- and third-level Eurocentrism) led to an underestimation of non-Western achievements, and particularly of numerous non-Western contributions to Western culture. It resulted in the equation of ”Western culture” with ”culture” as such and in the perception of seeing culture as the exclusive result of ”Western genius.” It was either forgotten that many contributions came from outside Europe, or it was assumed that these contributions had only been perfected by Western hands.
The combined third- and fourth-levelethnocentrism left no room for other ”mainstreams” than the European. To be sure, European superiority at the technological level after 1500 and at the economic level between 1800 and 1945 was very real. To a large extent, post-1500 world history is effectively a story of westernization. It is not easy to reconcile dominance by one culture with the equivalence of all. However, the mainstream view unrealistically generalized this European superiority during a limited period of time and at one (admittedly important) level to all periods and all levels. It saw Europe, and by extension the West, as exceptions. This exceptionalism was often expressed in the dictum ”the West and the rest.”
Many explanations have been given for why and when Europe started to diverge from ”the rest.” These explanations may be deterministic (seeking causes in race, climate, or geography) or historical (seeking causal factors in feudalism, capitalism, the urban bourgeoisie, maritime-military superiority, etc.). Questions of European uniqueness should not obfuscate, however, that non-European territories and pre-1500 Europe cannot be lumped together in one uniform residual category.
Level 5:”Non-Western history is too difficult and too embarrassing.” This didactic Eurocentrism concerns the ways of teaching about other cultures and naturally prevailed at schools. Undoubtedly, teaching about non-Western societies with their distinct modes of thinking entails specific didactical problems. However, these problems do not necessarily lead to confused or caricatured representations of history. When history teachers and authors of history textbooks prepare carefully, they should be able to illustrate historical mechanisms, processes, and structures with the support of non-Western examples.
Furthermore,it is certainly true that major parts of non-Western history are embarrassing stories of hunger, poverty, and injustice, and therefore painful episodes to deal with. The same can be said, however, about large portions of Western history. Besides, history should not be reduced to its embarrassing side only. History teaching is a historiographical genre reaching wide audiences; therefore, it is crucial that it presents balanced historical views.
In much of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries,the five forms of Eurocentrism described above were petrified by the doctrine of essentialism—the belief that cultures had a timeless kernel or essence that was more important than changing historical circumstances. Essentialism gradually evolved into racism—an attitude that attributed cultural differences to biological differences and transformed centrality and superiority into inherited characteristics. This led to the conviction that the European nations were elected peoples. Such was the case for large sectors of European and Western public opinion until 1945.
In the postwar decades, however, the decolonization and emergence of the third world enlarged the perception of the Western public. The popular and Eurocentric mainstream view of world history, although deeply engraved into mentalities, slowly disappeared—a process that is, in fact, still going on. Ethnocentrism as such, however, does not disappear—nor could it.
ORIGINS AND DOMINANCE OF THE MAINSTREAM VIEW OF HISTORY
Switching from future to past perspectives,it should be emphasized that the mainstream view of history has not always existed. At full strength, it prevailed between 1870 and 1970. It was the result of a very peculiar combination of at least three factors.
First, the Renaissance—a period in Europe (circa 1400s to 1600s) in which the roots of European tradition were relocated to antiquity—called into question medieval notions of continuity. Against this background, the newly discovered non-Western peoples in the Americas and elsewhere stimulated the evolutionary view that all peoples on earth found themselves in one of three stages of linear historical development: wild (representing ”primitive” hunters living close to nature), barbarian (representing nomadic but conquering peoples), or civilized (representing sedentary civilizations). Of course, this social evolutionism saw Europe as the leading continent.
Second,during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, this view was given a peculiar dynamic when it was linked with the ideas of progress and modernization. Scholars came to think that civilized Europe had already passed through its own wild and barbarian stages. The political and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth century encouraged this thinking in terms of progress: Such terms as wild and barbarian were replaced with ”equivalents” such as primitive, traditional, pagan, and premodern.
Third,around the same time, a series of archaeological discoveries greatly improved knowledge of the early Mediterranean cultures. A few decades later—under the influence of Romantic ideas—European historians were looking for links between their national state and old and glorious civilizations in order to build their national identity on a past to be proud of (the doctrine of historicism).
When European countriesfinally started their second wave of expansion around 1870, they combined evolutionary and historicist thinking into a unique vision of world history—the vision that this entry refers to as the mainstream view. During this new era of imperialism, this vision was exported and forced upon colonized and other peoples in the periphery of Western expansion. It led to a slow process of historiographical acculturation and worldwide convergence of historical thinking. Even where westernized styles of historical scholarship met with resistance and had to merge with preexisting indigenous modes of historical thought (especially in non-Western countries with strong written or oral historio-graphical traditions), they gradually exerted dominance almost everywhere.
In the early years or the twenty-first century,if only a minority of non-Western historians seems to lament this situation, it is because the mainstream vision has gradually given way to more plurality and because the core of Western historical scholarship—its scientific method—developed beyond its European roots and appears to possess universal value. This is proven by the fact that non-Western historians have relentlessly criticized Eurocentric works of their Western colleagues by using the latter’s own weapon: Western historical method. Indigenous historiography, where it still exists, is now seen as a valuable source of study.
In recent decades historians from all regions have exposed racist and ethnocentric features in historical writing—European and non-European. Modesty and relativism—perennial but secondary currents in the modes of thinking of European and non-European peoples—came to counterbalance earlier arrogance. Even currents that exaggerated and idealized historical achievements of non-Western peoples were observed. The circle of human beings who became included in the account of historians expanded to humanity at large. Today, many historians (though far from all) feel responsible for the whole of world history, which by definition cannot be written when non-Western history is omitted from the account.
INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
The next question,then, is whether people are really able to understand each other. Is there an unbridgeable gap of knowledge and understanding between cultures or can ethnocentrism be transcended, and if so, to what extent? The former view is called the insider perspective (members of culture x have monopolistic access to knowledge about x), whereas the latter is the outsider perspective (nonmembers of culture x have privileged access to knowledge about x). Table 1 gives an overview of these positions.
From Table 1,it may be concluded that both visions have advantages and disadvantages, and that, ideally, multiperspectivism is necessary for those scholars testing hypotheses and aspiring to complete knowledge. Weighing the positions of both parties, as is done in Table 1, is not enough: In addition, three facts should be pondered. The first is that radical “insiderism” leads to deadlock because all insiders are inevitably outsiders in relation to all others and therefore, on their own assumptions, are excluded from studying them.
The second fact is thatoutsiders do communicate their views about insiders and their culture, and these therefore merit study. In 1988 Mexican historian Luis Gonzalez calculated that there were approximately one thousand historians writing about Mexico: About half of them were non-Mexican. If that is true for Mexico, it is even more so for numerous countries with lesser historiographical traditions. Even when outsider views are not correct or not desired, it is worth asking why they are not, especially when the holders of these views are able to exert political or other power over insiders.
The last fact is that the essence of any scholarship is its claim to universality that presupposes the possibility of knowing others. Indeed, scholars—like moderate outsiders—maintain that truth is universal, whereas insiders call it relative and experience-dependent. Without this claim to universality, the sciences of history and anthropology—with their study subjects often outside one’s own time or space—would squarely come to an end, as American sociologist Robert Merton (1910— 2003) clearly saw: ”Taken seriously, the [Insider] doctrine puts in question the validity of just about all historical writing . . . If direct engagement in the life of a group is essential to understanding it, then the only authentic history is contemporary history, written in fragments by those most fully involved in making inevitably limited portions of it” (Merton 1973, p. 123).
CONCLUSION
The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908)has argued that a certain dose of lucid ethnocentrism is necessary to safeguard optimal cultural diversity: ”Humanity… will have to learn again that each real act of creativity implies a certain deafness to the appeal of other values and that these may be refused or even disregarded. For it is not possible at the same time to lose oneself in—and identify oneself with—the other and still remain different” (Levi-Strauss 1983, p. 47, quotation translated by Antoon De Baets).
This quotation also revealsthat the key concept in any discussion about ethnocentrism is cultural diversity. This concept should be understood accurately. Overdoses of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism endanger cultural diversity. Too much ethnocentrism may lead to racism, ethnocide, or genocide; too much cultural relativism may lead to isolation or infertile uniformity.
These are all forms of exaggeration thatthreaten cultural diversity either by freezing or eliminating it. Historical wisdom teaches people to restrain ethnocen-trism, not to eradicate it, and to encourage cultural relativism, not to exalt it. Such is the paradox: Cultures have to orient themselves toward each other, and, at the same time, stick to their own values. Both attitudes should remain in balance.
In the past,Eurocentrism, and especially its arrogant variants, was cultivated to aberrant heights, and therefore it is time to support cultural relativism today. Not to every price, however, because exchanging exalted Eurocentrism for exalted cultural relativism yields no progress. Czech author Milan Kundera (b. 1929) warned about such a risk in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting: ”Each interpreted the other’s words in his own way, and they lived in perfect harmony, the perfect solidarity of perfect mutual misunderstanding” (Kundera 1982, p. 227).
Theodor de Bry s late sixteenth-century engraving depicts coastal Indians trading with the British explorer Bartholomew Gosnold and his men. The Europeans trade knives and hats for strings of wampum.
Dr. Antoon De Baets
History Dept., Univ. of Groningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands
T: (+31.50) 363.60.31
E: a.h.m.de.baets@rug.nl
E: antoondebaets@concernedhistorians.org
W: http://www.concernedhistorians.org
