A Dialogue on Eurocentrism

From World-L, March 1998

Now that English teachers have been given permission to comment on world history, I'd like to reply to Dr. Yedidag's posting. I think he was suggesting that Western commentators on the Balkan situation tend to favor a European side and ignore the non-European Turkish perspective. At any rate, Dr. Yedidag's posting, along with my reading of postings on the Slavic Usenet discussion groups and the more literary works of Serbian and Croatian writers like Andric, Krleza, and Pavic, suggest to me that terms like Eurocentric, which are problematic in any case, are particularly misleading in discussing areas where many cultures have overlapped for centuries. It seems to me that the same problem arose in discussions/accusations of Eurocentrism in responses to Victor O. Story's news postings.

Sample problems:

Does "non-eurocentric" mean providing another center (e.g. "afrocentric") or does it mean avoiding (as much as possible) reference from any particular national or cultural center? And then there's the oxymoronic "pan-centrism" implied by a multiculturalist approach.
Are Eurocentric approaches valid for cultures that are largely European (e.g. Switzerland) but invalid for cultures like the former Yugoslavia or Mexico, or Australia, in which western/non-western, northern/southern (or whatever bisection) influences coexist or merge?
Does one's nationality/ethnicity/religion/etc. determine one's particular "centrism"?
Perhaps there's a canon of non-eurocentrism that answers these questions, but the diversity of perspectives on this listserv suggests otherwise. I find this diversity invaluable in thinking about how I think about and teach world history.

Steven Hale
e-mail <shale@dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu>

The eurocentric/non-eurocentric question is, I believe, intrinsically mis-leading as long as we are talking about history as a product (at least in part) of higher education institutions which all (including China—I think of the Cornell-Nanjing project of about 1927) trace their worldview back to western institutions.

From an anthropological and world religions perspective on history, I would have to say that clearly non-eurocentric perspectives would preobably not see history as a linear process. Cyclical time, reference to events "in illo tempore", etc. might be diagnostic.

On a more important level, most supposedly non-eurocentric history takes for granted one of in fact many existing and possible coherent systems of logic. But squarely within most of what I see represented as non-eurocentric history sits Aristotle, or at least his either/or logic—aka the law of the excluded middle.

Is History in itself eurocentric? Is non-eurocentric history an oxymoron?

Finally, is the modern Mayan guerrillero still as likely to sacrifice a chicken on the steps outside the cathedral as he is to attend misa inside? Do the post-Hegelian (but still intrinsically aristotelean) rhetorical categories I see used to analyze and describe his plight have any real correspondence with his actual worldview?

Gordon C. Thomasson
World History Faculty
THOMASSON_G@SUNYBROOME.EDU