![A medieval manuscript illustration within a gold-bordered rectangular frame, featuring a Blemmyes, a mythical, headless human-like figure. Its face is depicted on its chest, with two large eyes, a prominent nose, and a small mouth. Its arms emerge from either side of its head-chest, with one hand raised and open, and the other resting on its hip. The legs are crossed as if walking or dancing. The figure's skin is pale, almost white. The background within the frame is a muted reddish-pink with four scattered gold circular accents. The overall style is characteristic of medieval illumination [gen AI description].](/media/blemmy.jpg)
Here be dragons, or just things that are different. A blemmy, a mythical race of headless people, in a European medieval illustration. Many societies' images of people in unknown lands depict them either as deficient or as inversions of what their societies considered normal.
In Ancient Greece, non-Greek speaking peoples were called barbarians after their language, which the Greeks could not understand, and considered to be just “bar bar bar bar,” that is, babbling nonsense. Barbarians did not live in a city-state. They had no language. In other words, the Greeks thought the barbarians were not just a different ethnos (nation), but that they lacked things which Greek culture possessed, and hence they were inferior (Levi-Strauss 1952: 11).
Like many cultures, Greek culture is highly ethnocentric. It considers itself to be a standard against which other cultures can be judged. Ethnocentrism is a way of thinking about cultural difference in which different cultures are ranked on a scale according to how closely they approximate the culture of the observer (Eriksen 2001: 6). For generations and still today European society described foreign societies based on terms such as primitive, savage, barbarian, traditional, civilized, and modern. The way they decided where other societies fell was by comparing them to European ways of life, which they assumed was the best. Chinese civilization has also developed its own form of ethnocentrism as a way of representing national minorities of China and peoples of Asia (Guldin 1994). In fact, in many other cultures, large and small, the foreigner is conceptualized as the exact opposite of oneself, which is the representative of humanity. If one is human, then people from other cultures are animal-like and inferior (Levi-Strauss 1952: 12).
Historically, Western or European traditions of scholarship on human diversity have had some kind of ethnocentric bias. In the 19th century, natural historians were very interested in explaining the origins of human societies and they thought about differences among societies in evolutionary terms, that is, in terms of a linear scale from primitive to civilized. But what was “civilized”? (And for that matter what is “modern”?) It was what the observers thought their own societies were. Anything different was less civilized and represented an earlier stage of development. In response to this paradigm, Boasian cultural anthropology has defined itself by its commitment to cultural relativism as an explanatory principle, and thus an antidote to the ethnocentrism of earlier generations and dominant common sense.
References
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2001. Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press.
Guldin, Gregory Eliyu. 1994. The Saga of Anthropology in China: From Malinowski to Moscow to Mao. London: Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Inc.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1952. Race and History. Paris: UNESCO. http://archive.org/details/racehistory00levi.