Ethnocentrism, Sam Stangl

I saw a lot of ethnocentrism in "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari" by Richard Lee. In the beginning of the article, Lee talks about wishing to learn the hunting and gathering ways of the !Kung, but explains how he has a 2-month supply of canned food that he must not share in order to get to see any hunting and gathering. He understands that they think of him as possibly stingy because of his unwillingness to share his food; however, it is still clear that he feels a sense of inequality between himself, his own culture, and the culture he is now living within. He calls it a "glaring disparity in wealth." Around the middle of the article, he buys an ox for the !Kung's Christmas feast, but the men constantly criticise his choice... Little did he know at first that this was only a joke. The "prank," if you will, continues to the point where Richard Lee is ready to leave the Kalahari for good, almost like he's ashamed. He decided to stick around and when the butchering went down, he saw that the beast was nothing but fatty, delicious meat. In confusion, he confronts one of the men only to learn that this entire thing about a boney, old ox that was unworthy of being eaten and would never fill the bellies of the tribe was only a joke. But more than a joke, it's a lesson and a practice within the tribe that teaches against arrogance. Lee uses ethnocentrism in his writing because he felt like they were all attacking him, though they were really just accepting them into their culture. Even by the end of the article, he still does not completely accept the fact that he thought he chose the biggest and best ox and wanted to be appreciated for it.

Napolean Chagnon used even more ethnocentrism in his article, especially in the beginning. He explains his first moments and the excitement building in him as he approached the village in which he would soon meet his first group of indigenous people. Then, when he sees them and is almost attacked by their bows and arrows, his opinion seems to altar. He sees how filthy they are, and when he says, "Your hands are dirty," they merely spit into their hands, fling some off, and whipe the rest through their hair. It can be implied from this that he finds the people of this culture possibly inferior to his own culture. Later, he would lie to them in order to keep them from stealing and/or eating his food. For example, he let them think that peanut butter was the feces of babies, which would even turn me away if I had never seen peanut butter. Chagnon told them that frankfurters were the penises of cattle, and cattle was an unfamiliar word to them as well. While reading this article, I found myself laughing at times because the author seemed to opinionated about the culture he was intent on taking on as his own and sometimes I could not tell if he was comparing his own culture to the Yanomamo or simply referring to them as less appropriate for his choice way of life. Like when he says, "The hardest thing to learn to live with was the incessant, passioned, and often aggresive demands they would make. It would become so unbearable at times that I would have to lock myself in my hut periodically just to escape from it. Privacy is one of our culture's most satisfying achievements, one you never think about until you have none," I see this as ethnocentrism because he finds privacy to be greater than the lack thereof, thus finding a reason to say his own culture is more desirable. But I also see this as his explanation of the appropriateness of a culture to its own people.

One example of a time that I have interpreted another culture in an ethnocentric way is when I watch a show called Bizzare Foods, as well as Man vs. Food (I like to watch all the crazy stuff they can eat!) and they go to all the mountain villages in remote parts of Asia, and people are living with nothing but their hut, their land, and their agriculture. They are dirty, missing teeth, cook meat in its own blood, and in some places they make an alcoholic beverage out of chewed up yuka root that is then spit into a bucket and left to ferment. Seafood is a major part of their diet in some places, and in other places it is mostly rice and vegetables, but either way I don't think that I could live among them for very long without missing Bojangles and Chilis. I couldn't live without running water, electricity, my toothbrush/hairbrush, and probably my laundry machine. It sounds vain of me but I think it is probably more ethnocentric. I just prefer the way of my own culture, I prefer to sit down to thanksgiving and appreciate a big turkey, that's been packaged and bought from the store, once a year, instead of snapping one's neck each day to sit down and have a meal on a bug-frenzied mountaintop. I will add, though, that I would love to live among primitive people at some point in my life, as I find them and their culture intriguing to an extent. I can't imagine they'd love me, because I couldn't eat meat boiled in blood, or bloody pig heart stuffed into the pig's intestine and then fried.. Anyone of you that would try this? I'm interested.