Page 86 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

ETHNOCENTRISM

connotations. As such, ethnicity is centred on the commonality of cultural beliefs
and practices. The formation of ‘ethnic groups’ relies on shared cultural signifiers
that have developed under specific historical, social and political contexts and
which encourage a sense of belonging based, at least in part, on a common 63
mythological ancestry.
The anti-essentialist arguments of cultural studies suggest that ethnic groups are
not based on primordial ties or universal cultural characteristics possessed by a
specific group but are formed through discursive practices. That is, ethnicity is
formed by the way we speak about group identities and identify with the signs and
symbols that constitute ethnicity. Thus, ethnicity is a relational concept concerned
with categories of self-identification and social ascription. Here, what we think of
as our identity is dependent on what we think we are not so that, for example,
Serbians are not Croatians, Bosnians or Albanians. However, to suggest that
ethnicity is not about pre-given cultural difference but a process of boundary
formation and maintenance does not mean that such distinctiveness cannot be
socially constructed around signifiers that do connote universality, territory and
purity. For example, discourses of ethnicity often invoke metaphors of blood,
kinship and homeland.
The significance of the concept of ethnicity lies in its acknowledgment of the
place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and
identity. However, it does have some problems of usage and it remains a contested
term. For instance, white Anglo-Saxons frequently use the concept of ethnicity to
refer to other people, usually with different skin pigmentation, so that Asians,
Africans, Hispanics and African Americans are ethnic groups but the English or
white Anglo-Saxon Americans or Australians are not. In contrast, it is important to
maintain that white English, American or Australian people do constitute ethnic
groups. Thus the value of studying whiteness lies in making it strange rather than
taking it for granted as the universal touchstone of humanity.
Critics have also argued that the notion of ethnicity sidelines questions of power
and racism when it is used to suggest, as in some discussions about
multiculturalism, that a social formation operates through plurality and equality
rather than with hierarchical groups. Consequently, some writers prefer the concept
of ‘racialization’, not because it corresponds to any biological or cultural absolutes,
but because it connotes, and refers investigation to, issues of power.
Discourses of ethnic centrality and marginality are commonly articulated with
those of nationality so that history is littered with examples of how one ethnic
group has been defined as central and superior to a marginal ‘other’. While Nazi
Germany, apartheid South Africa and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia are clear-cut
examples, the use of ethnicity as a metaphor of superiority and subordination is also
applicable within contemporary Britain, America and Australia.
Links Difference, diaspora, hybridity, identity, national identity, race, representation

Ethnocentrism The general use of the term ethnocentrism refers to the process by
which values and ways of seeing the world that are founded in one culture are used