Cultural Centrism as a Strategy for Being and Cognition

The article considers the widespread in contemporary socio-political and socio-humanitarian discourse the concept of cultural centrism, and the phenomenon it implies. The objects of study are the texts of Russian and foreign researchers that introduce this concept. The subject of our study is a set of values and status of cultural centrism. The research methods involve content analysis, hermeneutics, and comparative studies. The author examines cultural centrism from different perspectives: as a strategy of social being, as a research program, as the worldview principle. She also offers various interpretations of cultural centrism, and the positive and negative characteristics of the phenomena they denote. Besides, the paper emphasizes that cultural centrism should not be confused with cultural conservatism, cultural monism, cultural isolationism, totalitarian ideology, existential unification, methodological reductionism, ontological essentialism. In conclusion, the author states that the concept of cultural centrism can claim the status of meta-concept standing in one row with such meta-concepts as geocentrism, anthropocentrism, nature-centrism, socio-centrism. But it is possible only on the condition that the international intellectual community accepts it.