students oblivious to merit in present-day societies other than our own. To
conclude that other cultures have achieved little about which we need to know
is a natural side effect of believing our society the most progressive.
Anthropology professors despair of the severe ethnocentrism shown by many
first-year college students. William A. Haviland, author of a popular
anthropology textbook, says that in his experience the possibility that “some of
the things that we aspire to today—equal treatment of men and women, to cite
but one example—have in fact been achieved by some other peoples simply
has never occurred to the average beginning undergraduate.”^55 Few high
schools offer anthropology courses, and fewer than one American in ten ever
takes a college anthropology course, so we can hardly count on anthropology
to reduce ethnocentrism. High school history and social studies courses could
help open students to ideas from other cultures. That does not happen,
however, because the idea of progress saturates these courses from Columbus
to their final words. Therefore, they can only promote, not diminish,
ethnocentrism. Yet ethnocentric faith in progress in Western culture has had
disastrous consequences. People who believed in their society as the vanguard
of the future, the most progressive on earth, have been all too likely to indulge
in such excessive cruelties as the Pequot massacre, Stalin’s purges, the
Holocaust, or the Great Leap Forward.
Rather than assuming that our ways must be best, textbook authors would do
well to challenge students to think about practices from the American way of
birth to the American way of death. Some elements of modern medicine, for
instance, are inarguably more effective and based on far better theory than
previous medicines. On the other hand, our “scientific” antigravity way of
birth, which dominated delivery rooms in the United States from about 1930 to
at least 1970, shows the influence of the idea of progress at its most laughable.
The analogy for childbirth was an operation: the doctor anesthetized the mother
and removed the anesthetized infant like a gall bladder.^56 Even as late as 1992,
only half of all women who gave birth in U.S. hospitals breast-fed their babies,
even though we now know, as “primitive” societies never forgot, that human
milk, not bovine milk or “formula,” is designed for human babies.^57 If history
textbooks relinquished their blind devotion to the archetype of progress, they
could invite readers to assess technologies as to which have truly been
progressive. Defining progress would itself become problematic. Alternative
forms of social organization, made possible or perhaps even necessary by