Sunday, March 27, 2011

How does ethnnocentricity cause conflict?

The ethnocentric views of the British towards the First Australians caused conflict between the two because the British didn’t understand the aboriginie’s lifestyle. When the first few British people arrived, the colonizers didn’t have any knowledge about the culture and were very shocked about how they acted. When the two met for the first time, there wasn’t any conflict as they both met with positivity. The Aboriginals welcomed the British with open arms, but the British still thought that the Aboriginals were animals who can’t own land. But the British had to colonize Australia somehow, so they had to build a relationship with the Aboriginies. They brought a few Aborginies back to England but when they refused to stay, they travelled back to Australia to continue their lifestyle. One of the British government officials wrote in their obituary, constantly calling them savages and barbarians. After this, the conflict between the British and the Aboriginals started. The British grabbed as much farmland as they could, ruining all of the Aboriginal’s crops. The British tried to get rid of the Aboriginal population targeting the primary source - the women and their children. The aboriginals were considered as ‘uncivilised’ people that needed to be taken care of. Ethnocentricity drives you to not even try to understand other people’s culture. Because the British were so absorbed in their own country, they labelled the aboriginies as people that weren’t people just because they lived in different surroundings.

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