Journal entry 6 Valentina Đorđević 3354

Trying to put the whole country into one box is very difficult for me, but if I would
have to choose I would say that people in Serbia are quite ethnocentric. I believe that the
Serbs do think that our culture is superior to others. The cause for this may be the fact that
our country is standing still, not moving forward in any aspect, but moving more often
backward. So the only thing that we have to be proud of is our culture. More educated
people are certainly more aware and introduced to other cultures so they can appreciate
other cultures as well as their own. However, the less educated ones tend to take pride in
their own culture, even though they do not even try to understand other cultures. To put it
into Bennett’s DMIS words, I think that an average Serbian is somewhere in between
defense and minimization. People do not really engage into any deeper thinking about other
cultures, they sometimes do not even understand their own.

Other more developed countries are less ethnocentric. In my opinion the reason for
this can be the fact that there are a lot of different cultures in the more developed countries,
and when you are exposed to different cultures than yours for so long, you somehow, even
if you do not want to, start to understand it. For example the USA, there are a lot of
different cultures on their soil and every day, people from all over the world go to the
United States. So, they are exposed to other cultures every day and they can get to
understand other cultures better and become more ethnorelative. However, not everyone
wants to even try to understand others, they just choose to ignore it. I am not an expert but
I would say that countries like France, the UK and Germany are more ethnorelative than
some others like Serbia for example.

Considering the fact that I am not studying my native language but some other, I
would say that I am not that ethnocentric. I do not consider my culture as the most
important one and I do not avoid some people from other cultures because they are
different. Before I start judging, I like to get to know the culture more, even though it takes
a great amount of time to do that. I suppose that I was not ethnocentric even before I
started my studied, but now I think that I am really making progress in understanding other
cultures and their beliefs and values. In my opinion I am at the level of acceptance now.
Hopefully, after I finish my studies I will be even more developed in terms of intercultural
sensitivity.

My family is also, I would say, not ethnocentric. If they were, I would probably be
myself, because that all comes from your family, this is where you learn how to look at
things. Maybe they do not know that much about other cultures but they certainly think of
them as equally important as our own. They taught me never to look down on somebody
because there is always someone that can look down on me. My grandparents are the only
ones that do not think about other cultures because they never went out of Serbia, but they
certainly do not think that our culture is the “true” culture.