The imaginary formation of cultural otherness

Starting from Michel de Certeau’s famous presumption that history is an emblematic form of heterology marked by a pathological effort to establish a relation with the dead and absent, this paper is aimed at questioning possible disciplinary convergences between history and imagology as exemplary discourses of/about Otherness. Following the idea of Paul Ricoeur, it may be stated that history and imagology share a common constitutive element – the image – whose readability and visibility is a key representational feature of temporal and spatial Otherness. Since both disciplines have a mediatory function with regard to the historical, social and cultural Other, the analytical focus will be on their epistemological premises, cognitive ranges and explanatory possibilities from the perspectives of tertiary paradigm, posthermeneutics and transdifference theory.

2004

en las Américas that took place in Vienna, Austria, in the summer of 2012. Researchers from all over the world gathered there to debate topics of interest, and Otherness was one of them. The Other as a topic of study, or rather, as a perspective of study, seemed to offer a great potential for new insights into the politics of identity and the evolution and dynamics of ethnic, racial, and gender relations. The outline of the book was further developed in November of the same year at the I Congreso de Temas Americanistas whose settingthe ancient city of Seville that served as the principal entry gate to Spanish America-provided an excellent environment for discussions about Otherness and the contents of this book. We would like to express our gratitude to the organizers of both events for making it possible for us to meet and discuss and develop the ideas presented in this book. We hope the readers will find at least some of these ideas stimulating and useful in their own research. The writing of this book would also not have been possible without the kind support of our universities and institutions to which we also express our gratitude. Most importantly, however, we would like to thank our families for all the support they provided us during the time we spend in research and writing. To them we dedicate this book

Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 2007

Individual and collective identities always develop in relation to the other as different, and in this process, the otherness is always subjected to the attempts of cultivation/domestication. In the history of European thought, we can recognize three metaphors which express the impossibility of seeing the other as different: the metaphors of The Leper, The Court Fool and The Noble Savage. They developed on the basis of the relationship between the difference and common rationality, which means that a more inclusive relationship to otherness as a conversational ideal could be formed if we were able shift the emphasis of ethical discourse from the universal concept of autonomy to respect for authenticity and to Levinas’s ethics of “the face of the other”. Such a step requires a radical change of discursive practices of all involved in the educational processes. That is why I propose the principle of observing the face of the other as different in both real-life experience and in expre...

Anthropology and Alterity: Responding to the Other (ed. Bernhard Leistle), 2017

Indigenous peasants in the Peruvian Andes describe abnormal and unsettling bodily experiences as encounters with place-based spirits. While community members expect they can make sense of their experience in terms of their own frameworks of understanding, in some instances neither this nor any other cultural rationality is enough to order what has happened. These types of situations can be analyzed in terms of alienness not simply because of the apparent presence of a spiritual entity, but because the cause, consequence, and significance of the event remain elusive, and in this sense strange, foreign, and other to the individual. Drawing on the philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels, this chapter contrasts empirical otherness and radical otherness (or alienness) in ethnographic situations in the community of Kañaris. This distinction allows us to understand the observable other as not merely different, but in relation to something which cannot be brought into an order. Radical otherness (or alienness) provides a conceptual tool to understand an experiential event in terms of its affective strangeness rather than objects of perception. Waldenfels’ theory of alienness can be applied to sociocultural analysis because it provides an alternative account of why it is necessary to respond once one feels addressed by a situation, even when the origin of this feeling and the appropriate reply are unknown.

Also published in Hercules Millas Nations and Identities, Bilgi, 2016, 2004

This is a study on how people identify themselves by reference to the Other. Both Greeks and Turks do that without being conscious what they do. In this case study the people when asked directly do not express themselves and they do that only when they are left to answer questions when asked indirectly

The concept and conceptualization of Nation is related to the identity profile of a community of people and it is based on common origins, language, traditions, territory, ethnicity and/or psychological characteristics expressed in and by a shared culture.

The Memory of the Other (cat. exhibition), Museo de Arte. Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá. , 2008

In spite of the negative aspects of the processes of homogenization that it has generated, globalization can be understood as a ‘machine’ or a ‘technology’ that helps to broaden our horizons by providing routes which connect us to other societies, other peoples, other ways of thought. It does so not only through the traditional or electronic media but through what Appadurai calls ‘mediated experiences’, ranging from travel and migration to experiences derived from dialogue, that is, ‘dialogical experiences’ . Therefore, globalization ceases to be an external, abstract, distant process which is always changing its coordinates and may even arouse fear, to become a vehicle – certainly with utopian elements – that broadens and projects horizons, expectations and local aspirations. It is then that we can speak of a ‘production of locality’, which is by no means innocent, and which may cause violent confrontations between the ‘two faces’ of globalization mentioned above. The local ceases to be something inert acted on by global forces to become something given which requires agency, purpose, vision, design: in Appadurai’s words, this is, more than anything else, a process and a project . We can then understand the local not as a spatial structure, but as a ‘structure of feeling’, as Appadurai proposes, following Raymond Williams , a critic known especially for his contribution to the ‘Marxism of subjectivity’. The equivalent of this subjectivity is, for Appadurai, the role granted to the imagination, which he describes as something more than an individual faculty or a mere mechanism to escape the real. ‘Imagination’ would, therefore, be a collective instrument to transform the real, to create multiple possible horizons. Hence the ‘production of locality’ should be considered as a work of imagination rather than as a social construction. “Of course locality has a spatial dimension, a scalar dimension, a material dimension and a kind of embodied dimension, but I want to infuse them with the idea that in the world in which we live the imagination can actually reach into multiple scales and spaces and forms and possibilities. These then can become part of the toolkit through which the structure of feeling can be produced locally. Locality, in the end, may still have something to do with scale and place, and with the body (and without that it loses all its meaning) – but with the difference that the horizons of globalism, through media and the work of the imagination and migration, can become part of the material through which specific groups of actors can envision, project, design and produce whatever kind of local feeling they wish to produce .

Nova Science Publishers, 2020

rom its inception, the capitalist system has been mainly oriented to the economic and limitary expansion. The adventures –if not challenges- to index over-seas territories was not only fraught of dangers and mysteries but also by the needs of colonizing other cultures, landscapes and territories (economies) to legitimate the European order inside and outside. The colonial authority, which was cemented on a much deeper technological revolution, developed, adopted and imposed ideological discourses for the local native to internalize the so-called inferiority. The importance of the figure of alterity in social science occupied a central position for the colonial expansion, without mentioning the decolonization process. For West, the figure of the “Other”, above all the Non-Western Other” was an object of curiosity, entertainment and fear. This book deals with 6 chapters which are organized in two parts. The first part deals with the problem of the “Other” from the lens of sociology (in the ink of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and William Thomas) while the second focuses on the problems of anthropology to situate the natives as a mirror of pre-modern Europe (in Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss & Marc Auge). In a moment when the world goes through a sentiment of extreme radicalization, where the “Other” is considered an enemy –or at the best as “an undesired guest” living within-, the present editorial project, at least it is the main objective of the authors, interrogates furtherly on the conflictive figure of “Otherness” in the epistemological pillars of Western humanism and social sciences. Each chapter may be read independently but –once lumped together- they share a common-thread argumentation which traces back on the problem of alterity for the Western rationality -from colonialism to the post-modern capitalism-. Doubtless, the founding parents of anthropology and sociology offer a fertile ground to expand the current understanding of past and present times.