attitudes toward nomadic peoples, especially those in Central Asia, considering
them little better than “savages” who lacked intellect and motivation. In some
instances, Muslim commentators held that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa
were mentally inferior to other people, and lacked any concept of civilization.
Ethnocentric bias is a trait that most, and perhaps all, societies share to some
degree, a fact that compounds the difficulties in building cross-cultural commu-
nication and understanding.
The influences of ethnocentrism in geography may be found throughout the dis-
cipline’s history. Studies using the philosophical framework ofenvironmental
determinismwere especially susceptible to such bias, and one can detect ele-
ments of implied cultural and racial superiority in the thinking of many scholars
of this school, as evidenced in some of geography’s earliest writings. Textbooks
on geography also were not immune to ethnocentric notions. Roswell Smith, the
author of a geography textbook published in the United States in the mid-1800s,
offered a typology of “civilization” that utilized the classifications of “barbarous,”
“half-civilized,” “civilized,” and “enlightened.” He meticulously placed countries
into the categories based on the characteristics of their inhabitants, and as to be
expected, his assessment of his own country was that it fell into the “enlightened”
column. In fact, most of the regions lying outside of Europe and North America,
accordingtoSmith,were“barbarous.”Morethan60yearslater,HendrickVan
Loon publishedVan Loon’s Geography: The Story of the World We Live In, a book
widely distributed in American schools and libraries. Van Loon’s portrayal of non-
Western cultures was strongly ethnocentric, nationalistic, and, in some cases,
overtly insulting, but his writing shaped the perspectives on the rest of the world
for a generation of Americans. Arnold Toynbee, an imminent historian who had
an enormous influence on social sciences outside his immediate discipline, includ-
ing cultural geography, argued that regions where the climate or environment
present few challenges had little incentive to develop “civilization.” According to
Toynbee, “the greater the ease of the environment, the weaker the stimulus
towards civilization.” The tropical latitudes, in Toynbee’s analysis, were regions
that lacked such stimulation.
Indeed, even in the 20th century some of the most influential writers and think-
ers in geography evinced an ethnocentric bent. Ellen Churchill Semple, one of the
foremost proponents of the environmental determinist perspective, argued that res-
idents of the highland regions of Europe lacked artistic talent, while those who
lived in river valleys and lowlands were superior writers, artists, and intellectuals.
But Semple failed to recognize that her analysis was laden with imposed and
biased cultural and personal value judgments, including her own definition of
“art” and “talent.” Many other geographers of her time made similar errors when
describing other peoples and places. A lesson that may be taken from the
Ethnocentrism 119