FANTASY 33 and religious or quasi-religious contexts, whereby colonising and invading forces have assumed non-white and/or non-Christian cultures to be barbaric, 'heathen', or, in some instances, not human. Ethnocentrist attitudes thus transform relative difference between cultures into value judgments mobilised by an ideology of hierarchical identification and comparison in which questions of race also figure exten-sively. As a corrective to ethnocentric tendencies, cultural relativism has stressed that cultures can not be evaluated for their merits or faults in comparison with other cultures; rather, a structural approach to ethnic cultural analysis has emerged which seeks to identify the various constituent elements and their interrelations within a culture which gives a particular culture its identity. However, such an approach is still not free from the problematic of ethnocentrism in-asmuch as the act of analysis and the epistemological frame-works that generate analysis can still be marked invisibly by cultural assumptions. Ethnography—Systematic and organised recording and classifi-cation of human cultures. Existentialism—A philosophical movement that involves the study of individual existence in an infinite, unfathomable universe. Existentialism devotes particular attention to the individual's notion of free will and interpersonal responsi-bility without any concrete knowledge of what constitutes right and wrong. A variety of twentieth-century thinkers and writers have explored the possibilities of existentialism, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. False consciousness—Illusory or mistaken beliefs, the term is used in marxist theories to designate the beliefs of groups with whom one disagrees or who are in need of liberation and enlightenment; otherwise, the belief on the part of the middle classes which insists that class-based interests are not posi-tioned ideologically but are universal. Fantasy—In everyday language, fantasy refers simply to the workings of the imagination, but in different theoretical
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