Auto-ethnocide

1981 May 22, Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon, page 163-164 (paperback 1987), Elsevier Social Science Of all the ethnic groups, castes are the only ones which, if given an opportunity, would commit “auto-ethnocide,” that is, which would gladly shed their separate identity and join the main body of the society whose culture they share.

In what amounted to an act of autoethnocide (which of course is why it has attracted so much anthropological attention), gods, chiefs, and men were desacralized, and men and women (as well as chiefs and commoners) were defined as equal within the framework of a disenchanted world.

1993 September 1, James M. Freeman, Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America, forward, page xiv, Usha Welaratna (author), Stanford University Press The author provides the cultural and historical background to enable the reader to comprehend the magnitude of this auto-ethnocide.

In China, totalitarianism led the Chinese people first into political indoctrination, then into social brutalization, and, finally, into alienation from their cultural heritage and auto-ethnocide.

Unintentionally, The Ugly American, seems to be a premonition of what would happen in Cambodia after 1970, when a neutral country became involved in proxy wars and fell victim to a policy of auto-ethnocide, long after the Americans had left.