Questioning objective truths and ethnocentrism

“In all my affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” – Bertrand Russell

“Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.” ― Albert Einstein, The World as I See It

So, we want to break down boundaries, and build up tasty dishes, but how? Can we maintain our identities when people are often saying choose this or that, or alternatively (on the extreme side) saying that one culture is best and all others should fall by the wayside? It seems that we can seek to understand the multiplicities and histories that we have been discussing, and we can question what we believe we know for sure.

Traditions are not inherent. Just like the cultures they exist within, they come to be through time, reinforcement and effort. Food products, methods and practices can become traditional when they are thought of as ordinary. As realities are negotiated and affirmed they come to be taken as “objectively true”. This is especially entrenched for those generations who were not direct witnesses to the creation of something, be it a belief, ideology, etc. (Berger and Luckman, 1991, p. 35), and so simply take it as The Truth. We often don’t question things that we know to be true, especially when we are young and we trust those who are giving us the information. For example, take Santa Claus (fitting for this time of year). Many children are taught to believe in an extremely jolly, immortal man who lives at the North Pole, with magical elves, and uses flying reindeer as transportation to deliver millions of gifts in a single night. No questions asked, just milk and cookies left out (and the occasional carrot – reindeers gotta eat too). No questions… that is until the “truth” we are told becomes so completely ridiculous to believe it is difficult to understand that we ever believed it. In the same way, perhaps the objective stance we often take towards cultural standards feeds us a completely ridiculous story, but on a much grander, more menacing, scale than we want to understand.

Thinking our own respective culture is objectively correct, where others are “wrong”, leads us to that problematic, nagging, global issue especially prevalent during colonialism…You know the one: ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is when one judges others’ cultures negatively, based solely on the context of one’s own culture. To some extent this is normal. Check out this Crash Course video from Post #3 for a thorough recap. We want to promote the beliefs and actions that we know work, based on our own experience. But don’t forget, these experiences are all subjective. But remember, it was thought that through interactions and engagement people would amalgamate into a “global village” (McLuhan qtd in Appadurai, 2008, p. 48), breaking down the strong boundaries we have. But considering our previous talk about the resiliency of ethnicities over the 20th century, we know that hierarchies of cultural value hasn’t been reduced and may even be encouraged in some circles. The way that we focus on our own cultures as “the best” is kind of how we’re programmed to survive. But (a huge but) this doesn’t mean that we must stick to our “Otherizations” of people. We can think that eating tripe is a bit strange, but we don’t have to label those who eat it as somehow “primitive” or “backwards” (it’s delicious and like a sauce sponge by the way). Instead, we could aim for adopting “cultural relativism” - objectively viewing other cultures, in their own context. This includes the history, politics, geography, religious beliefs and all the other values that set cultures apart from one another. Cultural relativism is useful to learn about other cultures, as well as possibly better or more efficient ways of doing things. It is a way to learn about the history of humans and what has brought different groups to their point in time. A sense of understanding rather than building up walls, who would’ve thought?

The "trick" about cultural relativism is that it does not come with that user’s manual of culture either – we cannot say that we have read French history and therefore understand what French food should be. We must take it in the context that the culture and its people live within. The real-world version of understanding, not just in theory. Food can symbolize different values and fit into different roles throughout different cultural groups. These differences can be experienced by different people. There will not be one globally homogenous culture, of food or anything else, as all peoples take up new aspects of culture alongside their existing ones.

When cultures become more and more combined this understanding becomes ordinary, and just a way of life – remember, cultures evolve! So, given the current era of how we are constantly mixing with people who have different food practices, whose place is it to stop this flow? Is this not just a rebranded form of ethnocentrism? It has been a long time that we (all humans) have been involved in a global food system, but it has been relatively recent that most people solely rely on local agricultural practices. By believing that each culture is set we are not only closing ourselves off to the wonderful opportunities that await us, but the very real way that the world has worked for thousands of years.

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References

Appadurai, A. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In J. X. Inda and R. Rosaldo (eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization (pp. 47-65). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1991). The Social Construction of Reality. London, UK: Clays LTD.

Crash Course. (2017). Cultures, Subcultures and Countercultures: Crash Course Sociology #11 [video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/RV50AV7-Iwc.