Eurocentrism

Eurocentrism is a worldview that, in its most basic form, places Europe at the center of everything.

As an intellectual space promoting a cultural bias, the beginning of its prominence has been traced to the elites of the Renaissance, becoming a set of universalist and evolutionary social theories that defended a leading role for Europe to conquer the world.

Eurocentrism (like other forms of ethnocentrism) has been considered a cognitive and cultural prejudice, which supposes the existence of linear historical experiences moved by fixed cultural schemes, corresponding to those provided by European history, considering non-European trajectories as incomplete or deformed formations.

Introduction

Eurocentrism refers more specifically to the view of the world from the Western European experience, where the advantages or benefits for Europeans and their descendants are achieved at the expense of other cultures, justifying this action with paradigms or ethical norms. One speaks then of a "specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that becomes hegemonic by colonizing and superimposing all the others, previous or different, and their respective specific knowledge, both in Europe and in the rest of the world." In this way, it is concluded that ethnocentrism as an intellectual tradition, as a method of analysis of dominant and dominated cultures or as a hegemonic idea of superiority (as in Eurocentrism) must be the constant object of criticism in the academy by various disciplines, to the extent in which the impositions given by the cultural hegemonies considered of higher rank distort the world cultural and social reality, ignoring or suppressing a plurality of cultures that want to be a copy of the dominant culture.

Academic abandonment of Eurocentrism

Enrique Dussel explains that in the 18th century, modern and "barbarian" a linear historical trajectory between Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and modern Europe, which has been used ever since as the basic ideological framework of the historical account.

This European-centric conception of history has not abandoned Western historiography or sociology to this day, despite the efforts that historians have made, especially since the XX, to understand and comprehend the full human experience. Modern historians were able to establish that Chinese technology between the 14th and 15th centuries had made advances that they had previously been considered European creations. Thus paper, the compass, gunpowder, the ancestor of the modern printing press, and cast-iron foundry began in China long before Europe. Research in the late 20th century clearly established that even during the Modern Age, Asia was the economically dominant continent in the world.. Around 1500, the Middle East, India and China concentrated about 60% of world production, and shortly before 1800 80% of it. During the 18th century, textiles from India were extensively exported to France and England. And plenty of Chinese industrial products were present both in colonial America from the 17th century century and in Europe. It is estimated that 75% of the silver extracted by the Spanish in America ended up in China in exchange for the purchase of products manufactured in China. Only the European Industrial Revolution altered this balance, and through military conquest much of Asia passed to be controlled by European powers.

Although Eurocentrism is not a majority position in the academic world today, numerous intellectuals and even academics continue to hold positions that partially repeat Eurocentric arguments. For example, the vision of the clash of civilizations, widely criticized by other academics, extensively defended by Samuel P. Huntington. to