What is some examples of ethnocentrism in America?

Answer 1

In nursing we are taught that ethnocentrism is basically believing that your culture is superior to any other culture and when you are ethnocentric you tend to care for patients from your cultural beliefs instead of others.

An example could be (not necessarily in nursing) that when a Muslim person is buried they are buried in a coffin with no regard to where Mecca is located. This would be ethnocentric because first off I don't believe they like to be buried in coffins but rather wrapped in a white sheet and secondly they are supposed to be buried facing Mecca.

Another example would be that you feed a Jewish person something containing pig without telling them that it is an ingredient in their food. Or rather they need a heart valve transplant and you give them a pig valve. These would be disregarding their culture because you believe that what you are doing is better for them with no regard for what they believe.

Answer 2

I would argue there are three forms, not two. Xenophobia which means "an intense, irrational dislike of people from other countries or cultures." Cultural superiority, the belief that one culture is more enlightened, advanced, civilized, or intelligent than another." Tacit ethnocentrism is "the assumption that one's own way of life is just normal, not culture."

Answer 3

When I was in college I was taking an introductory course in anthropology and this is where I first came familiar with the term ethnocentrism. In order to illustrate to our class just exactly what ethnocentrism is and how it worked he described to the class a tribe in Africa where the weather is so hot, the land so arid, the food so coarse and dry there is no real nutritional value in the food during it's first ingestion. So, as my professor explained it, this tribe would ingest the food, digest the food, pick through their feces and, presumably after cleaning it, would eat the food again in order to get the nutrition necessary. When he described this to the class the general reaction was one of ICK!!!!! and seemed to be a quite proper response to such a story, but our professor declared that reaction ethnocentrism, explaining that we are suffering from a sort of cultural cognitive dissonance where we can't understand the perfectly acceptable behavior of picking through your own feces for food because of our own cultural upbringing. My guess is that all the intelligent people in that tribe described by my professor left for more fertile soil long before any anthropologist came along and ever since that class I couldn't help but see ethnocentrism as just another word for not all that willing to swallow a load of crap!.

Great answer James, but in deference to the question, the biggest example that i can think of, would be the Klu Klux Klan.