Week 2 Discussion

Ethnocentrism is another way of saying ethnic-ego; that is, ethnocentrism is the fundamental
belief that one’s own cultural values, beliefs, and systems are primary concerning other cultures.
Cultural relativism takes ethnocentrism another step forward because cultural relativism implies
that one’s enculturation determine one’s morals (morals might be considered an abstract system
of character-constraints in which one judges the worth of their life in accordance with what
others have previously determined to be right and/or wrong regarding one’s thoughts, actions,
and reactions). While cultures can certainly instill, inculcate, indoctrinate, or suggest morals,
one’s cultural environment cannot ubiquitously determine one’s seemingly moralistic or
amoralistic drives. Morals are subjective to individuals and their communities, including their
community’s systems of government, religious traditions, and economic exchange. For example,
in Reel Bad Arabs, I didn’t quite realize that some people perceived Arabic people as barbaric,
savage, violent, or conniving. My initial intrigue was concerning the title: I asked myself if
“Reel” is meant to be both an imperative and an adjective describing the medium of
communicating the stereotype of Arabic people. The Disney clip from Aladdin illustrates the
interconnected, dichotomous nature of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism (at least,
subjectively, from the point of view of someone born in suburban Georgia, just outside of
Atlanta, in the early 1990s) because at the time of the film’s release (and still today), women in
the South in United States were sometimes expected to be submissive to their husbands, to fall in
love and get married and have children and pets and homeowner’s associations, to learn to
become educated and economically independent individuals within an oppressive societal and
governmental system. I’d suggest that Arabic women like Jasmine in Aladdin experienced some
of the same challenges and prejudices in addition to others. In Aladdin, ethnocentrism lies within
conflicts of marriage and economics, and American viewers of Aladdin, probably primarily
children, might already have been enculturated to such a degree that they think that Jasmine’s
flirtatiousness, free-spirited nature, and proclivity for adventure are scandalous attributes that
might one day have the popular girls whispering cruel gossip to her peers. Just because Jasmine
might not have had the same upbringing in her childhood doesn’t mean that she’s going to be a
deviant as an adult, but cultural comparisons regarding society’s perception of women might
suggest that while we know this to be true, cultural relativism has a subtle way of suggesting that
people who live differently than we do somehow have different values placed upon their lives
because of an imagined perception of moral differences. In cases like these, it might be advisable
to consider the wisdom within the adage, “Seek first to understand rather than to be understood.”