Ethnocentrism

It is only when different cultures come into contact with each other that the question of ethnocentrism actually arises. Ethnocentrism means judging the beliefs and behaviour of people from another culture by the standards of one's own culture, treating one's own values as the norm against which everyone else is measured -- and, usually, as superior to theirs. This bias is on stark display in colonial situations: Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Education for the East India Company, which called for creating a class of people 'Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,' is a textbook example of assuming one's own culture's tastes and values as the standard others should aspire to. Because sociology is meant to be an empirical discipline that studies societies as they are rather than ranking them by a preferred standard, ethnocentric judgement is something sociologists are trained to be alert to and to guard against. …