Ethnocentrism and change

Ethnocentrism is the application of one's own cultural values in judging the behaviour and beliefs of people from other cultures, usually as inferior. It was plain in colonial situations.

• Thomas Babington Macaulay's Minute on Education (1835) to the East India Company said the British should form 'a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect'. This assumed English culture was superior.

Cosmopolitanism is the opposite: it values difference and does not try to judge or change other cultures. A cosmopolitan outlook welcomes ideas from other cultures and enriches its own by borrowing.

• English itself has absorbed many words from other languages. 'Hinglish', a mix of Hindi and English, has given words such as 'prepone' (bring forward), 'stepney' (spare tyre), 'airdash' and 'time-pass'.
• Hindi film music mixes Indian and Western styles. Borrowing like this does not make a culture lose its character; it keeps it alive.
• Example (new): a family in Chennai that makes pasta with curry leaves, watches Korean dramas and still celebrates Pongal with grandparents shows how borrowing and continuity sit together.

Cultural change is the way a society changes its patterns of culture.

• Causes can be internal (new ways of farming, or people changing their own beliefs) or external (contact with other cultures, conquest or colonisation).
• Changes in the natural environment can transform a culture. Forest-dwelling communities in India whose access to the forest was cut off, by legal restrictions or by the forest being cleared, have been among the worst affected.
• Evolutionary change is slow and gradual. Revolutionary change transforms a culture rapidly, as its values and meaning systems undergo radical change, through political action, technology or ecological change. The French Revolution, which ended the estates system and the monarchy, is an example.
• The expansion of media, from print to television and the internet, may be bringing about another such deep change in how we live and think.