ABSTRACT
A moderate dose of ethnocentrism is healthy, according to Herskovits, a pioneer of cultural anthropology:
Ethnocentrism is the point of view that one's own way of life is to be preferred to all others. Flowing logically from the process of early enculturation, it characterizes the way most individuals feel about their own culture, whether or not they verbalize their feeling
[1, p. 356]. Ethnocentrism does, however, become a problem when people from different cultures meet and interact. It prevents people from understanding the other, let alone taking the other seriously. The views of others are judged by standards of one's own culture. Keesing, in his handbook of cultural anthropology:To view other people's way of life in terms of our own cultural glasses is called ethnocentrism. Becoming conscious of, and analytic about, our own cultural glasses is a painful business .... Although we can never take our glasses off to find out what the world is 'really like', or try looking through anyone else's without our's on as well, we can at least learn a good deal about our own prescription. With some mental effort we can begin to become conscious of the codes which lie hidden beneath our everyday behavior
(2, P. 69] Spradley points out that there are many ethnocentric descriptions in anthropology. They make hardly any use of local language and ignore the meaning of the things they describe. They tend to use stereotypes [3, p. 22].