Rising “ethnocentrism” is leading to conflict in our society. Assess this statement with appropriate reasons. (2021, 20 Marks)
William Graham Sumner coined ethnocentrism in Folkways (1906): the habit of taking one’s own in-group as the centre of everything and rating every out-group with reference to it. The statement asserts a causal chain — intensifying in-group preference producing conflict. Indian evidence supports the association, but ethnocentrism is better read as the idiom in which conflict is fought than as its cause.
Getting the concept right
Ethnocentrism must be separated from cultural relativism, its methodological antidote, which interprets a practice within its own cultural setting; from xenophobia, an affective fear of the outsider; and from communalism, which Bipan Chandra defined as the ideology that followers of a religion share common secular political interests. Sumner’s own point was that ethnocentrism is universal to group life — and something constant cannot by itself explain conflict that is episodic and locally concentrated.
The case for the statement
- Communal polarisation. Since official communal-violence data is no longer published regularly, independent monitoring must serve: one such study counted 59 communal riots in 2024 against 32 in 2023, with Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar worst affected.
- Nativism. Myron Weiner, in Sons of the Soil (1978), traced insider-outsider hostility in Indian cities; Dipankar Gupta‘s work on the Shiv Sena showed how a nativist party converts Marathi identity into a claim on Bombay. The idiom survives: Maharashtra withdrew its orders making Hindi a third language in primary schools in late June 2025 after Marathi mobilisation, and a joint Thackeray rally in Mumbai on 5 July 2025 celebrated the rollback.
- Ethnic conflict. The Manipur violence since 3 May 2023, following the Tribal Solidarity March against Scheduled Tribe status for the Meiteis, hardened the valley-hill boundary into near-total residential segregation, with roughly 60,000 displaced.
- Caste and the digital sphere. Endogamy, khap sanctions and “honour” crimes are ethnocentrism working at the level of the jati in-group, while algorithmic sorting online rewards in-group affirmation and reproduces Sumner’s boundary at scale.
Why the causal claim does not hold
- Instrumentalism. Paul R. Brass (Ethnicity and Nationalism, 1991) argued that ethnic identities are selected and mobilised by competing elites; Fredrik Barth (Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969) showed that what persists is the boundary, maintained through interaction, not a fixed cultural inventory. Boundaries are activated, not inherited.
- Material competition. Weiner’s nativism tracks the labour market, not cultural distance. Read this way, the Meitei demand for tribal status is a claim on hill land and reserved posts, and the Kuki-Zo demand for separate administration a claim on territory — distributive conflicts in cultural dress.
- Relative deprivation. Ted Robert Gurr located rebellion in the gap between expectation and attainment, not in cultural pride.
- Counter-evidence. Intense diversity coexists peacefully across most of India, and the Dravidian movement moved from secession to autonomy once federal accommodation arrived: sentiment stayed, conflict subsided.
What actually converts sentiment into conflict
Three conditions together: scarcity of land, jobs and state resources; a political entrepreneur who makes ethnicity the currency of claims, as Donald L. Horowitz and T. K. Oommen both stress; and institutional failure, above all a state perceived as partisan. The contrast is instructive — the Bodoland accord of January 2020 channelled Bodo assertion into Sixth Schedule autonomy, while in Manipur institutional breakdown produced President’s Rule in February 2025, revoked only in February 2026.
Conclusion
The statement is half true. What has risen is not ethnocentrism but its political salience: the returns to organising as an ethnic group have grown. Ethnocentrism supplies the boundary and the vocabulary; competition and mobilisation supply the conflict. The remedy therefore lies less in cultural exhortation than in credible institutions of sharing — autonomy, fair resource distribution and an impartial state.