The Bahamas: Week 6 –Greta Saeger
Ethnocentrism is when a person or culture views another culture through the lens of their own culture. This means judging another culture with the norms, values, and rules of your own culture. This is opposed to cultural relativism, where one views another culture through its own context without using ones own culture as a bench mark or metric.
Eurocentrism is a sort of ethnocentrism that looks at and examines other cultures through the lens of European norms and values. This view includes American culture and Western European culture as the lens that views other cultures.
In Farish Noor’s Beyond Eurocentrism they describe the way eurocentrism has lead to western culture and people have come to see themselves as the center of the world. Noor clams that in order to go beyond Eurocentrism the west must except that other culture have a place in the world and are just as important as the wider western culture. If a mutual conversation is not possible then our hyper interconnected world will not be able to maintain its self.
In terms of ethnocentrism in the Bahamas, there is a serious stigma around Haitians that immigrated to the Bahamas. Haitians are stereotyped as being illegal, having poor education, and living in poverty. There is also a language barrier that Haitians face when trying to get a job. do to these reasons the native Bahamian people have a tendency to view Haitian immigrants through an ethnocentric leans while judging them with out seeing the full context.
This is not all that different from the way Mexican immigrants are often treated in the United States.
In regards to how the west views the Bahamas, particularly the United States. most Americans, if you ask them about the Bahamas they would probably talk about a place where rich people go on vacations and cruise ships. although these things do exist in the Bahamas, there is a lot more as well.
Fielding, W. J., Ballance, V., Scriven, C., McDonald, T., & Johnson, P. (2008). The stigma of being “Haitian” in the Bahamas. The International Journal of Bahamian Studies, 14, 38. https://doi.org/10.15362/ijbs.v14i0.97
Ch 3 Farish Noor Beyond Eurocentrism