Conceptualising Otherness

Johannes Fabian (1990) suggests within anthropology, the other is engaged primarily through ethnographic writing. This can inadvertently contribute to their objectification and can overlook their subjective experiences and viewpoints. Furthermore, Fabian points out that anthropology’s representation of the other has often been historically tied to power dynamics, with the other becoming subject to intellectual and political oppression. In essence, anthropological writing can be seen as a praxis of representation in a context of power, with power relations influencing the way the other is portrayed and understood. Additionally, Fabian critiques the tendency within anthropology to emphasize representation over presence, suggesting that this focus may limit the discipline’s ability to capture the subjective experiences and agency of the other.

What is it then, about the nature of being that complicates, in one aspect, the way we interact not only with ourselves but those we consider our other? The traditional conceptualisation of the other within anthropology is based on ethnocentricity, where the “self” is positioned as superior and the “other” as inferior (Said, 1978). The ‘other’ here is the subject of encounter, they are people to be studied, people whose beings are theorised about, written about, as though they are not people, they become objects, they are oriented against the researcher to produce subjects. For (Smith, 1999) the indigenous other is contrasted against the knowing Western researcher. The indigenous person is subjected to the research and is subjected to becomes complicated because they are not dominant. The indigenous person is the other, the indigenous person is not the centre. This goes in hand with how Sarukkai (1997), argues for an ethics within anthropology when anthropologists deal with what they understand as the other, we cannot just take without understating our ethical responsibility without objectifying the other.  However, this ethic also poses certain epistemological problems, because it is only through a critique of Western epistemological thought, that otherness can come into conversation with our every day, and move closer to the question of being. Through an engagement away from the ethnographic material of the traditional anthropological other, we can centre identities of those othered, and posit what might it mean, to be in the world, when one’s identity is central to this notion of otherness.

How does identity figure into this understanding of otherness?

Our identities place us in this world. They exist not in isolation from our being but rather complicate our relation to the world we are in. The creation of the other is not only a question for anthropology, of the researcher and the research subject. It is a question of being, one that is addressed in one sense by Amin Maalouf, in his work In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, where war and violence that erupt during times of conflict are created due to a different perception of the other, where identities are pitted against each other, where seemingly normal upstanding citizens turn out to be killers in the name of identity. In this sense, one’s identity, for example, a Palestinian and an Israeli, or a Kuki and a Meitei, is created under certain conditions that make for the dominating and oppressive community to be able to conduct an ethnic cleansing. The other here is created, is made to be without citizenship, and deemed as not human, when one is stripped of their humanity and their citizenship, they can then be massacred.  What would it then mean to belong in the world? To be in this world as a Kuki, as a Palestinian, as a Kashmiri Muslim? It is to centre the identities of those made to be othered, those made to be stateless, those made to be seen akin to animals[i]. To liken the human body and mind to that of an animal, removing even the possibility of thinking that our existence is relational, that we are all beings, and we exist in a state of being. To begin with othering, as a defence mechanism, because of a perceived threat between different identities, denies the possibility that the other is a feeling other, an ‘other’ that is, an ‘other’ that encompasses a process of being in the world. They are an ‘other’ created and made to not be, another made to be eliminated and dehumanised. So, if we take for example the Heideggerian philosophy of being with (mitsein) or of only being or existence (dasein), there is a way in which our identities shape who we can be-with, in the sense that being with others is a process of mutual recognition, or of being-with where there is a disregard of the other, whereby their existence in the world is not recognised, from which we have an other that is stripped of their humanness.

To think of being in the world alongside this conceptualisation of the other is for us to mark clearly how we are embedded within each other, within our ecosystem. The aspect of being in the world, our own aspects of being, live within a variation of contradictions. We constantly have to understand how power and positionality mark themselves for us to end up creating the ‘other’.  I say this because even within human-animal relationships the aspects of otherness are quite complicated. We are in a constant tussle. We have what can be said to be a love-hate relationship with them, we may form bonds with animals, we may eat them, sacrifice them, worship them, and slaughter other humans on the suspicion of eating them. What I propose then here is that the construction of the other within our socio-cultural reality hints at how there is an ontological site of who can and cannot be seen as “being in this world” because they need to be taken out of it. When we need to sanitise, to cleanse ethnically, through violence, this act of othering, of creating the other leads us into troubling territories one where someone’s difference is a perceived threat to our way of being.

What is interesting about this is how there is a need to reconcile this notion of the other. How we need the ethno-fascists within us to stop influencing how we see people not like us, or unlike us. How we construct our relationship with being through the other. Otherness here is also a site that begins from how someone senses themselves in relation to one another, such that our senses lead to affect, which is a pre-emotion, and then to emotion. It is something that is embodied in our behaviour. It is this movement from the pre to the existent that eventually comes to a place where we feel otherness as something embodied within us. In how we behave, act, or perceive people who are othered by us, we end up misrecognising or do not recognise what is in essence another person’s right to exist. Where they cannot claim, their being, because we have superimposed onto them what is being in this world and how when we do not lay stake to the same claims of being, they are in fact not being-with but rather being-against something.

Emotion and Otherness

Can otherness be a feeling, a mode of navigating the world? Does it lead us somewhere? If I take, for example, an affect of otherness, what does being othered make us feel? What does being have to do with feeling, to reach this notion of otherness. In the sense that, otherness, is alien, it is how we respond to or respond against. If otherness, is a felt emotion, then do social cultural practices affect the other (Ahmed, 2013)?

To explore this emotion relating to otherness, I want to draw upon Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work on affective economies. Otherness, here, is produced within the sensations of our bodies. To say that, otherness exists through creating certain emotions about the other that it is reproduced through emotions like fear, love, and hatred. So, when the other is designated to invoke within certain culturally hegemonic groups to feel emotions like fear and hate, what we have left is the construction of the other through certain feelings, in which otherness is a site through which hate and fear gets produced and reproduced. In this sense, Ahmed explores this construction through an analysis of affective responses, primarily emotions, circulating among individuals and groups. If we take Ahmed’s example of the Aryan nation, the love as an affect is what creates the nationalist and the other, the one who stands to threaten this white nationalist love. Because emotions work either to align with or align against, the role of emotion in the construction of the other, of the “dangerous black man”, the immigrant stealing jobs, or the Muslim terrorist, comes with varying consequences for people who are black, or immigrants, or Muslim. Through othering, we come to how hate circulates our identification of the other, it is not possible to locate hate in one body, so it is transferred onto bodies. How then is this transferred onto bodies? This is done through the way we sense fear, as in how fear or anxiety, surfaces onto us through the body of the other.

If I ask the question, who is the object of fear, and how do they become fearsome? We could look at how the black body becomes fearsome, not because of the specificities of race, but because of how that race has been constructed to be seen as fearful. It invokes, in our senses, a moral panic, where moral panics have historically been grounds through which other non-dominant bodies have been violated. This transference of hatred from our bodies to the bodies of others is what allows for and validates the violation of the other. Thought detaching our bodies from that of who we hate, to detach the bodies that receive hate from their humanity, from their own being, allows us, to be onlookers to genocidal actions done on the premise of “securing” a sentiment, a culture, or even a nationalist imperialist structure.

In this, while I try to root otherness to an emotion, it is often an emotion that is acted upon by a structure that aims to secure itself against the other. Otherness is a feeling that those of us who become the other, who become the threat to culture, have to endure. It is transgender people being denied access to washrooms, it is black and indigenous people being murdered by carceral agents. It is how Muslims, Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan, indigenous people, and people from other marginalised identities in India have had harrowing experiences in the Indian nation-state. When state-sponsored violence against people in conflict zones happens, there is a nation-state that fears this other, who decides that they do not have a being. They become suspicious, their very existence is rooted in whether or not they threaten the hegemony of the nation-state, and if in case they do, then these affective economies, contribute to how they are seen, and remove the very nature of being from their bodies.

If, we were to be in this world, in its truest sense, then would it not mean that we are free from violence? Would it mean that we are free from a propaganda machine that furthers this creation of the enemy, the ethnic/ religious/ linguistic/ national other (Herman and Chomsky, 1989) And can we be free from this? From being fed narratives that certain people do not deserve to exist; that they need to be cleansed from this earth. I propose here that otherness complicates notions of being in the world because otherness is in opposition to forms of domination, the indigenous other versus the non-indigenous researcher, the Black other versus the white nationalist, the Muslim other and the rest of the non-Muslim world, the Palestinian other and the Israeli settler colonist. This otherness that is there cannot rage against the powers of domination, the powers that use certain emotions to suppress them. If in otherness, there is no aspect to be able to just be, or that being in the world or even just the aspect of being without violence is reserved only for socially privileged people. Otherness, therefore, asks us to read into what we have created, and how might being in the world complicate these existing notions of otherness that we have.

References:

Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22(2), 117-139.

Ahmed, S. (2013). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge.

Fabian, J. (1990). Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing. Critical Inquiry, 16(4), 753-772.

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2021). Manufacturing Consent. In Power and Inequality (pp. 198-206). Routledge.

Leistle, B. (2015). Otherness as a Paradigm in Anthropology. Semiotica, 204: 291-313.

LeVine, M. (2023). Trump Calls Political Enemies ‘Vermin’, Echoing Dictators Hitler, Mussolini. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/.

Maalouf, A. (2001). In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. Arcade Publishing.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient. Nueva York: Pantheon.

Sarukkai, S. (1997). The ‘Other’ in Anthropology and Philosophy. Economic and Political Weekly, 1406-1409.

Smith, L T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.

The Wire Staff. (2023). “Congress Files Complaint against Amit Shah for Provocative Statements, Promoting Enmity.” The Wire. April 27, 2023. https://thewire.in/politics/congress-files-complaint-against-amit-shah-for-provocative-statements-promoting-enmity.

[i] Take for example how Amit Shah, has referred to “illegal” immigrants as termites. Or how Donald Trump also used similar speech to argue for building the wall to keep immigrants out of it, by terming them as vermin. And how using the term vermin to refer to people was a strategic way of dehumanising people, used also by Hitler and Mussolini that effectively allowed for a state sanctioned extermination of “the other”.

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Sapphira Beth Diengdoh has completed her Master’s in Sociology from South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi.