based ethnic conflict between the still unassimilated Asian communities in
Britain, or North African communities in France suggest the likely longevity
of ethnic politics even in the most economically advanced liberal democracies.
What may give ethnic politics an extra urgency is the increasing linkage of
ethnic identity amongst immigration-based groups in countries like the UK
with international radical political movements organized around versions of
Islamic fundamentalism. (See alsonationalism.)
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is a problem arising in much comparative research in the social
sciences, and in any study that involves more than one social culture. The
problem is one of the researcher, probably unknowingly, reading meanings
into the activities of those he is studying that are foreign to them, and which
cannot really be their motivation. Another way of putting this is to say that the
standards by which we judge and decide are heavily culture bound, and may
not be interchangeable between social contexts. One example that is often
cited is the tendency of some racial groups to perform badly on standard IQ
tests, not because they are in fact innately less intelligent than other races, but
because the sorts of questions asked, and the imaginary problems set, have little
or no meaning inside their subculture.
While an ethnocentric approach is probably always undesirable, there is in
fact a difference between the perhaps inevitable failure to grasp properly the
meaning of an action in a foreign culture, and the deliberate use of standards of
evaluation from one’s own context. An example of this has often been the
study of political development. In much of the earlierbehaviouralresearch on
political development the progress of a political system was often judged in
terms of its approximation to an ideal type of ‘developed’ system, when what
counted as being ‘developed’ meant simply ‘being like America’. Because, for
example, it is usual in technocratic Western societies to expect professional and
administrative decisions and appointments to be made on ‘universalistic’ or
‘achievement’ grounds, societies where familial relations and emotional links
were more important were judged less developed. While there may be a
possibility of arguing for the superiority of standards from one’s own culture, it
is necessary at least to realize that this is a value argument, and not, ethnocen-
trically, to see one’s standards as somehow universal. Similarly concepts cannot
be expected automatically to translate between political cultures, and thus the
very activity of comparative research, which involves at a minimum the
possibility of taxonomy, involves the danger of ethnocentrism.
For example, two institutions can appear to be equivalent, two pressure
groups say, and would be judged, ethnocentrically, to be examples of the same
political phenomenon. It might, however, be that in one country the emo-
Ethnocentrism