Concentric dualism

In the 1950s , the French ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described an underlying orientation in the world views of traditional, non-industrialized cultures as concentric dualism . These small and isolated communities in terms of population develop comparatively closed worldviews with an internal logic that remains unquestioned within the community. Your worldview serves the community or society to confirm and justify your own path and actions. Linked to this is a strong self-centeredness of the group ( ethnocentrism ).

The dualism (dichotomy) consists in the distinction between ingroup and outgroup , concentricity (oriented towards a center point) consists in the fact that, starting from a center, the surrounding units are already assessed as different or even opposite. In the center of the community , which is dominated by the highest degree of order, the various interests of the community come together, for example the rules of law, unity or peace. The surrounding periphery, on the other hand, is populated by “deficient beings” or “underdeveloped” who do not belong to the core of society (for example the impoverished, pariah or slaves ). And beyond that, the unregulated chaos threatens beyond the village or area border (comparable to the “ barbarism ” of the ancient Greeks or Romans ).

The term concentric dualism is also used in current ethnology (ethnology), for example by the German ethnologist Christoph Antweiler in connection with discourse analyzes of ethnicization and ethnocentrism.

See also

• Wild thinking (after Claude Lévi-Strauss)

swell

• Bruno Illius : Worldview. In: Walter Hirschberg (Ed.): Dictionary of Ethnology. Reimer, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-496-02650-2 , p. 407.
• Bernhard Streck (Hrsg.): Dictionary of Ethnology. 2nd, expanded edition. Hammer, Wuppertal 2000, ISBN 3-87294-857-1 , p. 291 ff.

literature

• Christoph Antweiler : Concentric dualism as an obstacle to humanity. In: Same: Man and World Culture. For realistic cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization. Transcript, Bielefeld, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8376-1634-7 , pp. 141–162, Chapter 6 ( full text in the Google book search).
• Christoph Antweiler : Ethnization and Ethnocentrism. Concentric dualism as a ubiquitous tolerance barrier. In: Hamid Reza Yousefi , Klaus Fischer (ed.): Intercultural Orientation. Foundation of the tolerance dialogue, part I: methods and concepts. Traugott Bautz, Nordhausen 2004, ISBN 3-88309-134-0 , pp. 261-287.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Claude Lévi-Strauss : Are there dualistic organizations? In: Structural Anthropology I. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1967, pp. 148–180, here p. 168 (French original 1958).