What is the word for someone who doesn't appreciate their culture/heritage? [closed]

I met a person the other day who was overly critical about her culture/heritage when she described it. Is there a word to describe such a person or behaviour?


This behavior can be the result of cultural cringe or cultural alienation.

Cultural cringe, in cultural studies and social anthropology, is an internalized inferiority complex that causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. It can also be manifested in individuals in the form of cultural alienation.

The cultural cringe is tightly connected with "cultural alienation", that is, the process of devaluing or abandoning one's own culture or cultural background. A person who is culturally alienated places little value on their own or host culture, and instead hungers for that of a – sometimes imposed – colonising nation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_cringe

Explanation from TvTropes:

A person with a cultural cringe will tend to discount a lot of their own culture, and embrace another country's 'better' culture instead. In fact, it's common for people suffering from Cultural Cringe to disavow that there is a national culture at all.

This isn't necessarily the opposite of Patriotic Fervor, nor is it necessarily the same thing as Boomerang Bigot. Someone with the Cringe may love his/her country and national heritage despite its supposed inferiority. As one may put it, their own culture may suck, but it's still their culture.

Compare Internalized Categorism, where the character starts hating themselves for being a part of a culture perceived by others as "bad", rather then merely seeing their culture as inferior to other cultures.


While the term self-hating, standing alone, is ususally applied to a person who dislikes themselves (see, e.g., Collins) when combined with an ethnic reference, it is sometimes used to indicate a rejection of the group by an individual who generally would be considered a part of that group.

For example, the slang and pejorative term self-hating curry is defined as

An Indian person who is dissatisfied with their ancestry. [Urban Dictionary]

That entry also references the term self-hating Jew, which is discussed here. [Wikipedia]