ABSTRACT
At the end of the last chapter I suggested that there may be something ethnocentric about Marvin Harris’s cost-benet explanation of the origins of cow-love in India, and, more generally, something ethnocentric about any explanation that is based on the assumption that human beings choose to adopt, modify, or reject cultural practices according to whether or the extent to which these practices are consistent with their material needs. is suggestion reects a salutary awareness on the part of at least some Western social scientists since the 1960s that their theoretical categories-the concepts they employ to account for the behavior of people in other cultures-are not necessarily universal or objective but rather might in fact merely be abstract expressions of the particular values of the specically Western culture to which the social scientists belong. If this were the case, then their supposedly “scientic” explanations of the behavior of other peoples would have to be judged to be a form of conceptual imperialism, an ethnocentric imposition of the values of the West on (what the West all too frequently describes as) the Rest. To their credit, many social scientists in general and political scientists in particular are alert to this danger, and have forcefully criticized ethnocentric explanations for their failure to recognize just how dierent dierent cultures really are.
