Critics and Encounters in the Contemporary Social Structures

Abstract

In an environment where debates on Eurocentrism have rapidly started to increase and densify, it is possible to assert that Eurocentrism is constructed upon dichotomies. In its essence, Eurocentrism is a discursive attitude that tends to understand and explain non-European societies, as well as their histories and cultures, from a European perspective. The term was first offered by Samir Amin (2009) in his L’eurocentrisme: Critique d’une ideologie in 1988, but its implications and roots go far back in time. In particular, criticisms that have been flamed with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) created a strong ground in order to discuss Eurocentrism. Further back in time and on the path leading up to Said’s criticisms, the current political, economic, and social systems started to be questioned, which were formulated in line with the perspective and needs of colonialism in the 19th century in the process of decolonization and the establishment of nation states. These questionings activated leftist or nationalist academics and third-worldist intellectuals, including Amin, the author of Eurocentrism, against the universalist positivist social theory that came back within the frameworks of modernization theories in the 1950s. In this context, in a range of fields from economics to history and from sociology to religious studies, alternative suggestions started to gain shape against ways and methods of thinking which reflected European hegemony. In our day, many studies conducted within the fields of post-colonial studies and subaltern studies, Orientalism, and Eurocentrism have gained their shapes through these traditions of criticism. Today it is possible to talk about an emerging number of ways of comprehending these concepts in order to overcome Eurocentrism. Europe has not been provincialized yet, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) suggests, but the arrogant, self-interested and contemptuous evaluations have now lost their vanity.