Provided for non-commercial research and educational use only. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. This article was originally published in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author’s benefit and for the benefit of the author’s institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution’s administrator. All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution’s website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier’s permissions site at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial Sundberg J. 2009. Eurocentrism. In Kitchin R, Thrift N (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume 3, pp. 638–643. Oxford: Elsevier. ISBN: 978-0-08-044911-1 © Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd. Author's personal copy Eurocentrism J. Sundberg, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Glossary Epistemology A theory about what constitutes valid or legitimate knowledge. Ontology The study of being or the nature of knowable things. Introduction Eurocentrism has been variously defined as an attitude, conceptual apparatus, or set of empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and architect of world history, the bearer of universal values and reason, and the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and development. In Eurocentric narratives, the superiority of Europe is evident in its achievements in economic and political systems, technologies, and the high quality of life enjoyed by its societies. Eurocentrism is more than banal ethnocentric prejudice, however, as it is intimately tied to and indeed constituted in the violence and asymmetry of colonial and imperial encounters. Eurocentrism is what makes this violence not only possible, but also acceptable or justifiable. As such, Eurocentrism is the condition of possibility for Orientalism, the discursive and institutional grid of power/knowledge integral to the production and domination of the Orient as Other. Significant critiques of Eurocentrism emerged in the context of post-World War II shifts in geopolitical power, including anticolonial and anti-imperial revolutionary movements. Even so, Eurocentric epistemologies continue to haunt the production of knowledge in geography in significant and disturbing ways. In conventional Eurocentric tellings, Europe is the engineer and architect of modern agricultural, cultural, economic, political, and scientific innovations, including capitalism, democracy, and industrial, medical, and green revolutions. Concepts like ‘the rise of Europe’ and ‘the European miracle’ exemplify Eurocentric models of history and development. Europe’s so-called rise is explained in terms of superior social and environmental qualities deemed internal to it: inventiveness, rationality, capacity for abstract thought, outward looking, freedom loving, along with advantageous climate and geographies. Many of these cultural traits are said to be inherited from the Bible lands and ancient Greece and Rome – framed as Europe’s ancestral hearths – though their highest development is said to have been achieved first in imperial England and then the United States of America – hence 638 the term ‘Euro-Americanism’. In these narratives, progress and development ride what James Blaut calls ‘the westbound Orient Express’. As a consequence of the perceived historical movement of the westbound express, ‘Europe’ has morphed into the ‘West’ and now the ‘Global North’. These fluid geographic imaginaries may refer to not only Europe and white settler societies like the United States, Canada, and Australia, but also Japan and any other region or group that envisions itself as the possessor or inheritor of European culture, values, and academic, political, and economic systems. At the same time, however, particular places within the West such as the United States are privileged as the source of universal theory, while others like New Zealand are framed as limited by their particularities. Latin America and the Caribbean were colonized by Europeans, but are rarely included in the West. In short, it may not always be clear to what exactly these geographical imaginaries refer, but they are used as though they correspond to a commonsensical external reality. Through their repetition in everyday speech and academic and institutional narratives, that reality is continuously brought into being. Eurocentrism in Action People the world over encounter Eurocentric images, attitudes, categories, and stories everyday. Whether glaringly obvious or mundane and unremarkable, Eurocentric expressions constitute the texture of daily life for many people. Indeed, it is difficult to encounter an arena of socioeconomic and political life that has escaped its hold. Although Eurocentrism is not a stable and transhistorical mindset, an archive of codes, categories, and conceptual structures has emerged over time from which historically and geographically situated social actors may draw. As individuals recite and reconfigure these elements in new yet similarly structured ways, they put Eurocentrism into action. In other words, Eurocentric narratives are also doings: they produce the cosmologies and conceptual orderings they purport to describe. Stories about history and human development are prime sites of Eurocentrism in action. Murals gracing the halls of many a government building in white settler societies are especially obvious examples. The small town of Magdalena in Sonora, Mexico hosts a vivid illustration. Magdalena is an important destination for religious pilgrims from northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, for it is where a beloved Italian Jesuit missionary, Author's personal copy Eurocentrism Father Eusebio Kino is buried. The mausoleum built around Father Kino’s grave in 1966 is adorned with a mural depicting his work in the region. A small plaque explains Father Kino’s life and describes his missionary efforts from 1687 to his death in 1711. Father Kino, the plaque indicates, founded 30 pueblos (settled communities of native peoples) and was a ‘‘defender of the indigenous peoples.’’ In addition: ‘‘He taught them to build homes and to carry out farming and herding.’’ The mural painted by Nereo de la Peña tells a classic Eurocentric story about history, development, and colonialism. In the segment pictured here, Father Kino is on the left, a Native American group on the right (see Figure 1). Each is portrayed prior to their encounter, which is depicted in the space between them. Father Kino is shown sitting on his horse, gazing into the distance, surveying the lands claimed by the Spanish Crown. The maps looming above Father Kino are indicative of his assignment as Royal Cartographer; as explained in the plaque, Father Kino was a ‘‘respected scientist who discovered that Baja California was a peninsula and not an island as the cartographers of the time erroneously believed.’’ Despite the heat of the Sonora Desert, Father Kino is fully clothed in heavy black robes. As evidenced by his solitary stance in the desert, Father Kino is a fearless explorer, missionary, and colonizer. To the far right of Father Kino is pictured a group of Native Americans – portrayed as a nuclear family – from Pimeria Alta, the Spanish colonists’ name for northern Sonora and southern Arizona. In contrast to Father Kino, the native people are representatives of their kind rather than individuals with names. They are scantily clad: the Figure 1 Father Kino’s mausoleum, Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico. 639 children are completely naked while the adults cover their genitals with rough skins; the woman’s prominent breasts are bare. Lying at the feet of this native group are the fruits of their technological achievements: baskets and pottery. Their agriculture is portrayed as a chaotic patch of maize stalks; they appear to have no other food. The man and boy hold small, rustic looking weapons. Directly above the adult male’s head is a native symbol (although it looks more like a brand once used to mark slaves and cattle as property). The encounter between them is pictured between these two sets of images. Here, Father Kino is portrayed as a teacher: he instructs a native man, now wearing pants, how to use a horse-drawn plow, a technology used in the Mediterranean. The result is a tidy, neatly arranged agricultural field. Through religious instruction and technological diffusion, the image suggests, Native Americans are civilized and transformed into orderly and productive individuals. In what ways does this mural represent Eurocentrism in action? In other words, how does this mural reflect and reproduce a Eurocentric story? First, the mural suggests that history and development are driven by Europe. America is nothing – naked and unorganized – until awoken by a European man. Like many of its kind, this Eurocentric story of development reflects gendered hierarchies: America is feminized, a Sleeping Beauty awaiting the touch and tutelage of her Prince. Second, Father Kino appears to explore and colonize alone, without the assistance or participation of native peoples as guides or allies. Hence, the cartographic knowledge he produces is portrayed as the solitary outcome of his explorations. Author's personal copy 640 Eurocentrism Europeans appear to be innately capable of conquest, colonization, and accurate cartography. Third, development is unidirectional: innovation flows from Europe to others. It is Father Kino who brings technology to the Americans, who only have baskets and pottery, which are associated with women’s work. In this way, native technologies are further feminized, while European technology is pictured as a horse-drawn plow driven by a man. Fourth, Europe gives, but is not transformed by the process. As the embodiment of European civilization, scientific knowledge, colonial power, and religious authority, Father Kino is already a fully formed individual. It is the naked, unnamed, and undeveloped native peoples who need formation. Through such framings, European and Indian become fixed identities, hierarchically organized racial categories that purport to tell the truth about their inner qualities. Fifth, the relationship between adult and child is used as a metaphor for development and mapped onto the racial categories of European and Indian. In the mural, native peoples are infantilized and pictured as Father Kino’s pupils; in religious terms, he is literally their father. Through his instruction, they are guided through the stages of growth to become mature adults. Finally, colonialism is pictured as a benevolent process and is about spreading the fruits of European knowledge and development. The violence of colonialism is concealed and rendered unimportant to the overall story of progress. The mural points to key elements of Eurocentrism. First, Eurocentric modes of representation produce polarized and hierarchical stories featuring the West and the Rest as the primary characters. Regions outside of Europe only come on the stage of world history when they are colonized by Europe; their cultural and technological achievements may be appropriated, but their contributions to modern formations are occluded. As a consequence of such representational practices, world regions and cultures appear as autonomous, bounded units, each with their own characteristics. The interconnections between them are rendered invisible or unimportant. Second, Eurocentric representations make the West the beacon of enlightenment and progress by concealing and denying the violence, genocide, and dispossession of colonialism. Western myths of modernity, Enrique Dussel argues, justify colonialism in terms of the gifts of enlightenment and civilization given to its victims. These elements of Eurocentrism are alive and well in schools and universities today. They are put into action through the continuing use of dualistic models that make Europe or the West the referents of analysis, the yardsticks by which to analyze and represent other peoples and places. In the nineteenth century, Western scholars deployed dualisms like civilized/barbaric or advanced/backward to organize the world’s people through reference to the racial superiority of Europeans. Since the mid-twentieth century, knowledge is organized through dualisms like modern/ traditional, developed/undeveloped, core/periphery, or developed/developing. These dualisms replace notions of racial difference with cultural conceptions of development and progress. However, the dualisms of the past are not so different from those commonly used today: both sets of configurations make the West the referent of analysis; both treat each side of the dualism as a bounded and discreet entity unto itself; both posit evolutionary schemas through which societies inevitably progress; and both have their genesis in colonial or imperial relations of power. The discursive formations may have shifted but the underlying presumption of a superior white Western self as referent of analysis remains the same. The continuing authority of these dualisms as valid tools to organize and understand the world pivots on the erasure of their provincial origins. In addition, the intersection between academia and geopolitical power means that Western scholarship defines the frames of reference with which others must engage to be intelligible/legible. European or Western theories, concepts, and models are held up as universally applicable and treated as valid tools with which to analyze the world in all times and places. Social scientists commonly deploy concepts like capital, class, and patriarchy as though they can be applied universally without a prior analysis of if and how they are constituted and given meaning in particular places. As a consequence, argues Dipesh Chakrabarty, European or Western thinkers are the only ones alive in the social sciences, no matter how long they have been dead. For Chakrabarty, this form of Eurocentrism is evident when scholars the world over must refer to European history and concepts to obtain international recognition, but Westerners are not obliged to reciprocate. In short, ignorance of the nonWestern world and its scholarship does not affect the quality, objectivity, or reception of Eurocentric work. Critiques of Eurocentrism and Their Limitations in Geography There have been critiques of colonialism and imperialism ever since there were colonial and imperial subjects. However, critical analyses of Eurocentrism as a totalizing meta-narrative about world history and development emerged in the era of anticolonial and anti-imperial revolutionary movements after World War II. Initially, these critiques were elaborated in the form of empirical debates about the privileged position of Europe in world history. The rise of Europe thesis postulates that Europe’s dominance on the world stage is the result of special qualities internal to it, which led it to catapult ahead of everyone else in the late 1400s by reaching the previously unknown continent now called America. Inspired by the revolutionary and anti-imperial sentiment of the day, non-European and European scholars alike drew on Author's personal copy Eurocentrism emergent empirical evidence to argue that Europe was not more progressive or technologically advanced than other societies in the 1400s and in fact, was on the margins of the world system at that time. Researchers also contested the argument that the Eurocentric capitalist world system is the result of European superiority and demonstrated how this system came into being through European colonial expansion and the systematic dispossession and underdevelopment of its colonies. Such studies treat the developed and underdeveloped regions, not as mutually exclusive and static categories, each with their own cultural traits, but as intimately linked in historical, politico-economical, and epistemological terms. Although these influential critiques have sparked new lines of inquiry in geography, Eurocentric versions of history and development continue to overshadow the discipline, structuring silences and limiting the kinds of questions that will be asked. In James Blaut’s view, the continued acceptance of Eurocentric interpretations must be understood in the context of the West’s powerful position in global geopolitics. Eurocentrism, Blaut argues, is simply ‘‘the colonizers model of the world.’’ As such, criticizing Eurocentrism on the grounds that it is built upon factual errors, untruthful beliefs, or ahistorical visions of development will not lead to its undoing. Contesting Eurocentrism and challenging its on-going hegemony in geography necessitates analyzing the discipline itself at institutional and epistemological levels. Eurocentrism and Geography’s Hallowed Halls Anthropology, geography, linguistics, and other social sciences were constituted in and through a colonial social order. Western academia speaks from this privileged position, a place of enunciation rooted in imperial power. Geography was instrumental in colonial and imperial exploration and mapping, as well as strategies of and justifications for dispossession. For instance, the Spanish Crown made the production of geographical knowledge integral to the consolidation of colonial power when it commissioned the Relaciones Geográficas in 1577. Spanish authorities obtained important knowledge about populations, languages, and physical terrain in New Spain, but they considered the maps they obtained to be useless failures because many reflected a native cosmology and therefore were deemed unintelligible. Geographical modes of looking at and representing the world, then, have been historically centered in and central to European colonialism; they also are Eurocentric. This history is key to the discipline’s formal incorporation into Western academic structures and the ethnic and gender composition of its practitioners. The continuing dominance of Western white men of elite or middle-class standing in geography departments is 641 evidence of this history. Indeed, geography as a discipline presumes and universalizes a white, Western masculine subject position as the norm, the frame of reference, and referent of analysis. Feminist geographers challenge geographical claims to universality on the grounds that they mask and protect very particular masculinist interests and perspectives; however, feminism has not been immune to Eurocentrism. Indeed, feminist geography has been accused of projecting a white, Western middle-class feminine subject as the frame of reference and referent of analysis. Moreover, institutional practices in graduate programs, tenure and promotion processes, publication review, as well as funding in Anglo-American geography tend to privilege Anglo-American scholarship and Eurocentric ways of knowing and writing. European or Western scholars are the mainstay of scholarship. Latin Americanist geographers, for instance, are not obliged to refer to Latin American scholarship to produce work that will be given the stamp of approval in the field. Geographers situated in other parts of the world, however, find that they must engage Western scholarship to be recognized as international. In Anglo-American institutions, international is a circumscribed imaginary. Publishing in Latin American journals, for example, will not be given the same intellectual weight by tenure and promotion committees or funding agencies as Anglo-American or European journals. In addition, the discipline of geography has difficulty attracting and retaining scholars of non-European descent. Indeed, individuals with established careers along with promising graduate students have left the discipline. As the dominant sociospatial experience in geography, whiteness distorts our intellectual production and ensures that Eurocentrism lives on in the discipline. Although geography is not alone in its disciplinary history, fields such as anthropology have made more systematic and systemic efforts to transform their institutional structures, the gender and ethnic composition of their departments, and therefore the kinds of knowledge produced. Eurocentric Epistemologies To comprehend the continuing power of Eurocentric ways of knowing and conceptual strategies in the discipline, geographers are increasingly pointing to the hegemony of specific epistemologies and the ontologies they enable. As a discipline built on Western philosophies, geography is structured by a set of ontological ruptures; specifically, the Cartesian split between mind and body, reason and material world, wherein rationality is framed as external to the body and embodied experience. In addition, this framework empties the body and material world of meaning and significance Author's personal copy 642 Eurocentrism while objectifying them as available for interrogation, measurement, and analysis. Given that Descartes positioned the mind in an instrumental relationship to the body and material world, this dualism also inscribes hierarchy and domination into the relationship between things. These ontological ruptures underwrite conventional notions of objective knowledge production as a de-corporealized and de-contextualized process. Claims to objectivity and therefore universality are founded in the assumption – as in the act of taking on and taking for granted – of an unmarked rational gaze that is stripped of and separated from the body, material social relations, and geographical location. The ‘geographer as objective observer’, then, is fashioned as surveying the world from an elevated vantage point that is out of reach for those seen as closer to the ground, caught up in the corporealities and banalities of daily life. This practice of selffashioning is built upon acts of exclusion: historically, only white Western men were deemed capable of bodily transcendence. Women and non-Western peoples have been constituted as incapable of transcending their bodies and therefore seen as incapable of rationality and knowledge production. Knowledge is framed as the exclusive property or expression of the geographer as objective observer rather than something that emerges from embodied interactions between geographers and other subjects or entities. These practices of self-fashioning in geography ensure the perpetuation of Eurocentrism. Claims about ‘what’ the world is like – and therefore who ‘we’ are – are increasingly understood as grounded in specific epistemologies. In geography, certain epistemologies are validated and given preference over others. D. P. Dixon and J. P. Jones III identify the epistemology of the grid as particularly important, for it is the procedure for segmenting a dynamic, complex, and interconnected social reality to capture, measure, and analyze it. Imposed upon the world as a way of knowing, this grid has become inseparable from the social order it is meant to describe and analyze. Reality has come to seem segmented; the ontological boundaries between, for example, mind and body, culture and nature, structure and agency, public and private appear natural to the social order, rather than the outcome of specific representational practices. Categories are treated as fixed and associated with specific characteristics. When privileged in geography, these epistemologies enable Eurocentric ontologies. When imposed upon other ways of knowing, they become tools of Eurocentric violence. Undoing Eurocentrism Undoing Eurocentrism in geography is no small task. The colonial order of things constitutes the present and therefore will surely inform the future. A wealth of geographical scholarship in the last decade has gone a long way in challenging Eurocentrism on empirical grounds. Rather than sustaining polarizing accounts that center on the West and the Rest, new research focuses on unearthing connections and co-productions between people and places. Geographers increasingly shed light on the dark side of modernity and illustrate how the everyday discourses and practices of colonialism are integral to the emergence of modern sociospatial formations. In short, efforts to decolonize knowledge are now widespread and may soon be mainstream. However, empirical efforts alone will not undo the prevalence of Eurocentrism in geography, for it is entrenched in our institutional structures and methodological frameworks. Although racial identity is not coterminous with a particular perspective, concerted efforts to transform the gender and ethnic composition of geographical institutions will create space for other experiences and interests. Following from this are strategies to de-colonize pedagogical conventions and content. Do curricula in geography at undergraduate and graduate levels perpetuate Eurocentric histories, geographies, ontologies, and epistemologies? Do we encourage learning about other ways of knowing and being? Do we teach students to see how the privileges of Eurocentrism and whiteness work to sanction ignorance of the ontological and epistemological pluralism that make up our world? To what extent do we insist that researchers engage with a diverse range of scholarship? Do our pedagogical practices police students’ writing styles in order to produce de-corporealized and de-subjectivized narratives wherein the geographer is everywhere and nowhere? Are diverse methodological approaches encouraged, so that instead of studies on, geographers might collaborate with others to co-produce knowledge? The subdiscipline wherein these questions are most actively engaged is feminist geography; women of color in particular push the discipline in new directions. Antiracist feminist research is built upon relational ontologies grounded in embodied epistemologies that move beyond the segmentation and hierarchy of the grid. In Katherine McKittrick’s work, for instance, black women’s geographies are treated as integral rather than marginal to regulatory systems of domination and classification. In addition, antiracist feminist geographers have spearheaded and institutionalized the notion of situated knowledge, which implies recognizing that knowledge comes from somewhere: geography, history, social position intersect to constitute knowledge that is necessarily partial, selective, and incomplete. As a methodological practice, situating knowledge enables the production of nongeneralizing knowledges that engage with and learn from other knowledges. To this end, antiracist feminist geographers also challenge the Author's personal copy Eurocentrism discipline to pursue alternative research methods that enable engagements with other ways of knowing. One such strategy is collaboration and a number of antiracist feminist geographers have produced innovative works that topple the geographers’ position of authority and create spaces for exchange and surprise. Collaboration across social, political, and economic boundaries breaks up alliances between whites (whether conscious or not) that historically have worked to sustain white hegemony in academia. Situating knowledges and collaborating are strategies for undoing the Eurocentrism symbolized by Father Kino, sitting on a horse, elevated and separated from his subjects, whose authority as a producer of knowledge is founded in his position as a colonizer. The notion of walking together, feet on the ground, offers a more humble, corporeal metaphor for geographical research and promises to enable rich and exciting engagements with the ontological and epistemological pluralism that constitutes our world. See also: Feminism/Feminist Geography; Green Revolution; Orientalism; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies; Whiteness. Further Reading Abu-Lughod, J. L. (1989). Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Amin, S. (1989). Eurocentrism (transl. Moore, R.). New York: Monthly Review Press. Blaut, J. M. (1993). The Colonizers Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: The Guilford Press. 643 Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coronil, F. (1996). Beyond occidentalism: Toward nonimperial geohistorical categories. Cultural Anthropology 11, 51--87. Dixon, D. P. and Jones, J. P. (1998). My dinner with Derrida, or spatial analysis and poststructuralism do lunch. Environment and Planning A 30, 247--260. Dussel, E. (1995). Eurocentrism and modernity. In Beverley, J., Aronna, M. & Oviedo, J. (eds.) The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, pp 65--76. Durham: Duke University Press. Landers, E. (2000). La Colonialidad del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Mahtani, M. (2004). Mapping race and gender in the academy: The experiences of women of colour faculty and graduate students in geography departments in Britain, the US and Canada. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 28, 91--99. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mignolo, W. (1995). The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Nagar, R. (2006). Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pulido, L. (2002). Reflections on a white discipline. The Professional Geographer 54, 42--49. Slater, D. (1992). On the borders of social-theory – learning from other regions. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 10, 307--327. Wolf, E. (1982). Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Relevant Website http://www.lib.utexas.edu Relaciones Geográficas Collection, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin.