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Sociology vocabulary · Society and Culture

Ethnocentrism

Meaning in sociology, with examples

/ˌeθnəʊˈsentrɪzəm/nounCommon term

In sociology, ethnocentrism means: Judging other cultures by the standards of your own and treating your own group's way of life as normal or superior.

In Turkish: etnosentrizm, etnik merkezcilik, kendi kültürünü merkeze alma

How it is used

Used in anthropology, sociology and methods courses, often as a warning to researchers. The term was popularised by William Graham Sumner in 1906 and is usually contrasted with cultural relativism. The adjective is ethnocentric.

Example sentences

  1. Early travel writers often described other societies with obvious ethnocentrism.

  2. Calling another group's food habits 'strange' can be a sign of ethnocentrism.

Common collocations

  • avoid ethnocentrism
  • ethnocentric bias
  • Western ethnocentrism
  • cultural relativismThe principle that a culture's beliefs and practices should be understood in their own context rather than judged by the standards of another culture.
  • cultureThe shared beliefs, values, norms, language, practices and material objects that a group of people learn and pass on from one generation to the next.
  • stereotypeA simplified and fixed belief about the characteristics of all members of a group, which ignores individual differences and is often negative.
  • ethnographyA research approach in which the researcher spends a long time with a group, observing and taking part in its daily life, in order to describe its culture from the inside.

More terms: Society and Culture

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