"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."