SOC 201 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Syphilis, Nahuatl, Ethnocentrism
Document Summary
The most difficult thing about doing sociology is examining people whose customs and traditions differ from our own. Each of us likes to believe that his or her own people"s customs and traditions are best. And when we encounter people whose ways of life are different, our tendency is to make a value judgment. More specifically, we generally do not see difference as merely difference, but as an indication of inferiority. The human tendency to judge others as inferior is very much evident in the written records of those who were the first to explore other countries and to encounter. When europeans first met africans, for example, they found african customs so different from european ones that they doubted that the africans were even human. It seems likely that the africans" first responses to the europeans were similar. To the ancient greeks, the language of foreigners sounded like nonsensical stammering, like bar-bar-bar.
