>>>Wilful ignorance? Rather, I think it is linked to a basic instinct: Our original brain was built to have personal relationships with approx. 150 others, to the max. An essential part of a meaningful relationship is an inventarisation of the degree to which the other can be trusted. There are millions of other people who, in theory, we could fall in love with. Nevertheless, we stick to the one we already found and skip all those theoretical others. We attach to a very limited number of people because that's how our brains work best. And that's the essence of ethnocentricism and dicrimination, AND of racism, I think.
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>>I'd buy that if it worked for cultures outside of the western circle the same way, but it doesn't.
>
>Please explain in other words. :)

Glad that you didn't say "in your own words", though I'm not that bad at inventing new words...

Such exclusion of, say, art or news of others is not so present in eastern cultures. Even in Russia, which is big enough to fill its cultural space with its own production, never did that.

For instance, take any 200 novels or anthologies of stories, and count the mentions of places, names, titles. Then compare. Or how many movies in foreign languages are distributed (in whichever medium - be it TV, screenings, disks) and how far do they get.