Ethnozentrismus und die Rationalität traditionaler Gesellschaften

Abstract

Ethnocentrism has dominated the attitude towards alien cultures throughout the ages. This attitude changed when the economic development of the Western hemisphere needed a twofold negative image of non-European societies. On the one hand the image of savages to be developed in exchange for natural resources and on the other hand the image of Oriental despotism that Montesquieu used against Physiocratism and late French absolutism. French bourgeois Liberalism of the 18th and German Idealism of the 19th century, as well as British Social Anthropology and American Cultural Anthropology regarded alien cultures as objects for philosophy, for anthropological documentation and not as realities ’sui generis’ . If one regards alien cultures from their point of view and through their own rational one gains knowledge about the self-definition, the ends and self-determined limits of an autochthonus society. If we take myths of archaic societies, we can see how social life is determined by them, preventing the divine cosmology to be altered by changing the traditional technologies and values leading to social change. The history of technology and civilization in traditional China shows that the world view of Taoism is able to integrate new scientific knowledge concerning technological development, but every change must be for the welfare of the state, i. e. the state concept of general equality under the rule of central governmental power. These two examples show that real ethnocentrism stagnates in its own limits when one considers the rationales of traditional cosmology. Only the less ethnocentric Western world view evoked a paradigm of action-oriented rationales, using alien cultures as resources for its own constant technological and social change.