FROM EUROCENTRISM TO HIBRIDITY

FROM EUROCENTRISM TO HIBRIDITY

OR FROM SINGULARITY TO PLURALITY

Titus Pop

Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania

Introduction

Since colonial times Europeans have perceived most of the world as open to conquest, control and domination. The population of the Third World has been perceived as weak or vicious, and as in need of being “civilized”. Whereas in classical European thinking, history and the past are the reference point for epistemology, in modern societies there appeared voices that have proposed a radical rethinking—an appropriation of the European thinking by a different discourse. In my paper I will refer to the thorny road from Eurocentrism to multiculturalism and hybridity. Beginning with a contrastive approach of Frantz Fanon’s and Mahatma Ghandhi’s visions of liberation, I will then point out the relevance of some scholars’ standpoints such as Said, Bhabha, or Bakhtin who have viewed cross-culturality as the possible ending point of an apparent endless human history of conquest and occupations. They recognize that the myth of purity or essence must be challenged and replaced byhybridity which, in turn, replaces a temporal linearity with a spatial plurality.

Eurocentrism or Singularity

Eurocentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European (and, generally, Western) concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. Eurocentrism often involved claiming cultures that were not white or European as being such, or denying their existence at all. Here are some examples of Eurocentric views.

First of all, the regional names around the world are named in honour of European travelers and are in orientation of a Eurocentric worldview. Middle East describes an area slightly east of Europe. The Orient or Far East is east of Europe, whereas the West is Western Europe and the Americas (although in modern geopolitical parlance the West also includes South Africa, Australia and can include Japan). The effects of Eurocentricism create a self-sustaining belief that Europe and Europeans are central and most important to all meaningful aspects of the world’s social values, and cultural heritage.

Secondly, World History taught in European and American schools frequently teaches only the history of Europe and the United States in detail, with only a brief mention of events in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Americas, Africa and Australasia are usually not mentioned in the timeline until they are colonized by Europeans, with no reference to the pre-conquest culture, civilization or technology.

Thirdly, the history of science and technology is often taught as having begun with the Greeks, then moving on with the Romans, then stopping during the Dark Ages, before continuing with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Less mention is made in European or American schools of the various achievements of Indian, Chinese, Ancient Egyptian, Moorish or other Muslim thinkers.

Another example of Eurocentrism are the Western accounts of the history of mathematics which are often considered Eurocentric in that they do not acknowledge major contributions of mathematics from other regions of the world such as Indian mathematics, Chinese mathematics and Islamic mathematics. At the same time, university courses on the history of human thought that cover Aristotle, Kant and Marx but neglect Confucius, Buddha, the Upanishads, for example, might also be regarded as Eurocentric.

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