Page "Ethnology" Paragraph 7

The 15th century exploration of America by European explorers had an important role in formulating new notions of the Occidental, such as, the notion of the " Other ".

This term was used in conjunction with " savages ", which was either seen as a brutal barbarian, or alternatively, as " noble savage ".

Thus, civilization was opposed in a dualist manner to barbary, a classic opposition constitutive of the even more commonly-shared ethnocentrism.

The progress of ethnology, for example with Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, led to the criticism of conceptions of a linear progress, or the pseudo-opposition between " societies with histories " and " societies without histories ", judged too dependent on a limited view of history as constituted by accumulative growth.