Thursday, March 24, 2011

How does ethnnocentricity cause conflict?

Ethnocentricity causes conflict because the group of people only focus on their culture and judge other groups of people without understanding and accepting differences in their culture. In the movie, "The First Australians", British honored themselves as civilized settlers, while they described Aborginals as ferocious, barbarous savages because their skin was dark and they didn't wear clothes. Also, one of their reasons for taking over the land was since they were wild and clothless, the colonizers believed that the Aboriginals are animals and animals don't own land. The British puts their own culture in the center which leads the Aboriginals to be the abnormal ones. However the Aboriginals in this documentary were considered less ethnocentric because they didn't attempt to force the colonists to change their culture to the Aboriginal's. Also, In the book, "The Rabbits", the British polluted the land, the water and even stole the Aboriginal's children in order to make their future generation to have whiter skin. The Aboriginals fought back to keep their property, but the British used their advanced warfare skills and gained absolute control over the land. The British used the land for farming of their own crops and polluted the nature for their benefit. These impolite manners to Aboriginal's land was created by their ethnocentrism and not considering Aboriginal's life style in nature. This attitude of the colonists made the Aboriginals to think that the British people are dangerous and strange because they are not open and welcoming with new relationships for a long period of time. In the European culture at that time, colonization was common, however for the aboriginals, they were shocked with the British started taking over their land and transforming everything to their civilized culture. So, the difference in culture, also resulted conflicts. British colonists felt superior to the Aboriginals because they had the pride of civilized culture and started to over control Australia by force. If the British agreed to cooperate with the Aboriginals to understand their differences, the cultural settlement could have been less unfair.

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