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Article: How Eurocentric Is Your Day?
- Article from:
- The Palestine Chronicle (Mountlake Terrace, WA)
- Article date:
- November 8, 2009
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Al Bawaba (Middle East) Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By M. Shahid Alam
At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course -- on the history of the global economy -- this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.
This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West -- in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?
The ...