LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 16:8 August 2016
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2016
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

A Study of the Ethnocentric Elements in
Leanne Howe’s Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

Dr. V. David Arputha Raj and S. Sindhu


Abstract

There are many diverse cultures in the world. Each culture has numerous ethnic groups within it. An ethnic group is a socially defined category of people who identify with each other based on common ancestry, social and cultural practices, homeland, religion, dialect, mythology and physical appearances. Each ethnic group has different traditions, behaviours, habits and habitat. When all these differences meet at a same place called society or country, there begins misunderstandings and hatreds among different societies or countries in the world. This hatred and misunderstanding arise primarily due to ethnocentric attitude. Ethnocentrism is the tendency of understanding the world only from the viewpoint of one’s own affiliation and assessing others strictly based on the terms of their own ethnicity. This paper attempts to analyse in detail ethnocentrism, its characteristics, types, causes and effects, through the Native American novel Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story by LeAnne Howe, which talks about Native American culture, its people, habits, habitats in detail and also the suppression of the Native Americans by the White Americans, in addition to highlighting the causes for all the problems with reference to selected novel.

Keywords:

Perceiving Cultural Patterns - Ethnocentrism

People perceive the world based on the cultural patterns that already exist in their minds and they tend to think and evaluate the rest of the world in the same way that they perceive. What people in one culture find to be natural and normal is found absurd by people of other cultures and at times, even disgusting. Moreover, these ideas, of what is right and wrong or good and bad, change over time and over cultures. This tendency to draw on one’s own personal experiences to understand others’ motivations is known as ‘ethnocentrism’. Ethnocentrism refers to the wide-ranging belief in the cultural superiority of one’s own ethnic group or an unusually high regard for one’s own ethnic, religious or cultural group. This method of using one’s own culture superior to all other cultures is called ethnocentrism. The term ‘ethnocentrism’ is derived from Greek words, viz. ‘ethnos’, which means for people or nation, and ‘kentrikos’, which means relating to the centre. From the origin of the term, it can be defined as the tendency to understand the world only from the point of one’s own unit of affiliation and evaluating all others strictly based on one’s own group. The term ethnocentrism was first coined by an American sociologist William Graham Sumner in 1906, to describe the view that one’s own culture can be considered as the central, while other cultures or religious traditions can be reduced to less prominent roles. In Folkways, Sumner defines ethnocentrism as “the technical name for this view of things in which one’s own group is the centre of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference with their own culture” (13).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. V. DAVID ARPUTHA RAJ
Assistant Professor (Guest Faculty)
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Bharathiar University
Coimbatore 641 046
Tamilnadu
India
dr.v.davidarputharaj@gmail.com

S. SINDHU
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Dr. NGP College of Arts and Science
Coimbatore
Tamilnadu
India
sindhu.english@gmail.com

Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.