"History cannot be written as if it belonged to one group [of people] alone. Civilization has been gradually built up, now out of the contributions of one [group], now of another. When all civilization is ascribed to the [Europeans], the claim is the same one which any anthropologist can hear any day from primitive tribes - only they tell the story of themselves. They too believe that all that is important in the world begins and ends with them... We smile when such claims are made [by primitive tribes], but ridicule might just as well be turned against ourselves Provincialism may rewrite history and play up only the achievements of the historian's own group, but it remains provincialism."
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Sources
Ruth Benedict, quoted in John M. Hobson. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. New York: Bridge University Press, 2004.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Civilization
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Civilization
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