Читать книгу An Introduction to Intercultural Communication - Fred E. Jandt - Страница 19

Cannadine’s (2013) final form of identity is civilization. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee believed civilizations to be the most significant determinant of identity but also believed that civilizations were largely self-sufficient and sealed off from one another.

In the 19th century, the term culture was commonly used as a synonym for Western civilization. The British anthropologist Sir Edward B. Tylor (1871) popularized the idea that all societies pass through developmental stages, beginning with “savagery,” progressing to “barbarism,” and culminating in Western “civilization.” It’s easy to see that such a definition assumes that Western nations were considered superior. Both Western nations, beginning with ancient Greece, and Eastern nations, most notably imperial China, believed that their own way of life was superior.

In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington continued the position that civilizations were the most important form of human identity. In general, Huntington identified the world’s civilizations as Western, Latin American, sub-Saharan African, Eastern Orthodox (including the former Soviet Union), Islamic, Confucian, Hindu, and Japanese.