English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In many parts of the globe, some urban dwellers have stereotypes about the villagers being stupid, rude, uneducated, uncivilized, poor, etc. In worst cases, this amounts to a feeling of superiority similar to racism. Is there a word for such kind of discrimination?
Example sentence:
Calling people uneducated and uncivilized just because they come from small villages is nothing more than {this type of discrimination}.
I think the word you are looking for is "elitism". According to wikipedia it is defined as:
the belief or attitude that individuals who form an elite—a select group of people with a certain ancestry, intrinsic quality, high intellect, wealth, specialized training, experience, distinctive attributes, whose influence or authority is greater than that of others, whose views on a matter are to be taken more seriously, whose views or actions are more likely to be constructive to society as a whole, or whose extraordinary skills, abilities, or wisdom render them especially fit to govern. In America, the term "elitism" often refers to the concentration of power on the Northeast Corridor and West Coast, where the typical American elite - lawyers, doctors, high-level civil servants (such as White House aides), businesspeople, university lecturers, entrepreneurs and financial advisors in the quarternary sector - reside, often in the university towns they graduated from.
A word similar to elitism is classism:
the belief that people from certain social or economic classes are superior to others
English Oxford (living) Dictionaries:Prejudice against people belonging to a particular social class.
Merriam-Webster:
‘they are told to be on watch against the evils of classism’prejudice or discrimination based on class
Dictionary.com:
- a biased or discriminatory attitude based on distinctions made between social or economic classes.
- the viewing of society as being composed of distinct classes.
I have puzzled about this, having experienced comments which reveal inaccurate views of rural life, since I grew up in a particular rural community.
The beliefs regarding urbanism associated with "intrinsic quality, high intellect, wealth, specialized training, experience, distinctive attributes, whose influence or authority is greater than that of others, whose views on a matter are to be taken more seriously, whose views or actions are more likely to be constructive to society as a whole, or whose extraordinary skills, abilities, or wisdom render them especially fit to govern" also apply to people from rural backgrounds: The lifestyle and economy of much rural life requires novel problem-solving intellect and specialized knowledge, most particularly, the traditional knowledge systems from thousands of years of experience regarding community-building and governance, especially the management of complex environments in order to produce food and other essential materials for the nation. These specialized knowledge systems are passed down to each generation, and those who hold this knowledge have a kind of (often unrecognized) power, influence and authority over others. There are countless examples of men who believe they have heirarchical kinds of power and authority over rural communities, and who impose new laws or requirements, and then are eventually shown that those extractive systems ignore wisdom and knowledge regarding basic resources at their own peril, and are not sustainable.
I don't believe there is one word to describe a prejudicial set of stereotypes which have to do with the deeply-ingrained, largely unconscious and unrecognized patriarchal way of thinking vs. the totally different way of viewing the world, community and basic resources that is a more communitarian, traditional knowledge-based way of life. We could start using the word "ruralism". In your sentence this would be
nothing more than ruralist
And a definition of ruralism given here says:
the motivations for exalting country above city living
Most people could probably infer the meaning of "ruralism" by listing the contrasting distortions and stereotypes of "urbanism". Except, of course, for the misunderstanding and confusion that is based on the unconscious, deeply-ingrained "rightness" and positive view of being "urbane."
Village Idiot: "The village idiot in strict terms is a person locally known for ignorance or stupidity, but is also a common term for a stereotypically silly or nonsensical person". (wikipedia)
