The
Other in anthropology and cultural studies
INTRODUCTION:
DISCOVERING THE OTHER
One
of the most common definitions of anthropology is that it is a discipline (or a
conglomerate of disciplines) that deals with the other. In presenting, describing,
analyzing and evaluating the other(s), anthropology constructs its own field of
study and defines itself. Thus,
anthropology owes its very existence to the existence (real or imagined, we
shall deal with that later) of alterity. For the purpose of this lecture, and
following George Marcus (1998), I will take the vast area of cultural studies
to be the example of the “postmodern” or “text-centered” approaches in
anthropology, so I shall actually deal with just one particular segment of the
cultural studies.
There
are numerous problems with this definition of anthropology (which I find the
best that exists so far for the discipline), but I would like to draw attention
to the one in particular: the notion of place or position from which one
postulates itself as “the authority” to judge others and to determine them as
others. This authority always involves a notion of universalism or universal
values, and is to a large extent dependent on the actual enforcing of one’s (dominant) values or ideologies as the “proper
ones.” In my case, I claim no authority — I am just presenting this as my
voice, my statement, or my narrative
(with all the connotations of these descriptions). When venturing into the origins or explanations I am interested
in the way(s) in which anthropology was (re)presenting the others.
However, apart from the concept of alterity
(which in itself is a very complex one, and includes gender, race, ethnicity,
age, etc.) it is important to note when is it that the other gains prominence
in the construction of “our,”
“civilized,” or “non-other” cultures. There exists a point in time and a point
in history when the question of the other (the concept isd probably as old as
the language itself) becomes important. The others existed and were recognized
as such before, but never before was their existence determining broad cultural
and historical constructs such as “civilization” or “race.” This is the main
reason why I will draw an (arbitrary, to be sure) line somewhere around Cristóbal Colón (or Columbus) reaching the
Antilles (1492), Vasco da Gama’s sailing around Africa to India (1498), and
Cabral’s “discovery” of Brazil (1500). Some forms of evaluation of the others
are as old as the human history (starting from The Histories of Herodotus in the 5th century BCE, if
not earlier), and they were present in various dominant discourses (primarily
in determining the others as “non-human” or “sub-human,” barbarians, savages,
Hyperboreans). However, the actual consequences of all these evaluating discourses
were never as globalizing and universalizing as their creators wished or hoped
for (this goes for the ancient Greeks and Alexander the Great, as well as for
the Roman Empire, or the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, or even Christianity and
Islam as they emerged on the world stage). For the “real” trends towards
universalization, one should look at the time after the epoch of the “great
discoveries.”
Numerous
anthropologists, such as my former advisor at Tulane University (New Orleans,
USA), Munro S. Edmonson, draw a connection between the first “great
discoveries” (the period of Western colonial expansion) and the origins of
anthropology. While anthropology as a discipline can be dated only to the 19th
century (and to Sir Edward Burnett Tylor as the first Professor of Anthropology
in particular), the idea of description and evaluation of others goes back at
least to the 15th century. The “discovery” of the New World, as well
as the debates that followed on the issue of slavery[1] permanently changed the Western world.
The encounter with “the other” brought shock and amazement along with large scale ethnocide and at the same time
ecocide, and it also altered intellectual horizons.[2]
On
a practical level, the “discovery” of other people (“Indians”) posed some
serious intellectual and cognitive problems: since there was nothing abouth
them written in the most authoritative texts of the time (like the Bible), who
were they? There was no point of reference for them, no point of comparison.
They looked human, but were they
human at all? Another issue that soon arose was the issue of their origin, so
in 1590 a Jesuit, José de Acosta, tried to prove that they actually came from
Mongolia – an interesting point of view taking into account the most popular
theory that the Americas were inhabited via the Bering strait, and a couple of
centuries before the Western world “discovered” the Beringia. This would have
put them in the context of ideas, cultural concepts and histories that existed
so far, but things got more complicated.
The
debates that arose immediately after the Spanish conquest of America are
primarily associated with the name and life of Bartolomé de las Casas
(1484-1566), traditionally regarded as a symbol (or at least, a figure of
immense importance) of the struggle for dignity of the American Indians (or, in
the current politically correct usage, Native Americans).[3] Actually, Las Casas can be seen (in a
historical context) as a continuation of the efforts of his fellow Dominicans,
Antonio de Montesinos and Pedro de Córdoba, who were already refusing to hear
the confessions of the Spanish settlers at Santo Domingo (Haiti), based on what
they have considered to be inhuman treatment of the native population. Las
Casas went a little further in asking for the abolition of encomiendas and repartimientos,[4] as something in itself evil and
immoral. In a letter to the King Carlos
V in
1516, he wrote that “it is better to lose all the lands overseas, than to allow
that such horrible injustices be done in the name of the king”. With the
support of the Dominican theologians from the University of Salamanca,[5] Las Casas eventually succeeded (with
great help of the Spanish royalty!) in arguing for laws that abolish encomiendas and that grant (at least formally, if not in practice) freedom to
the native population, in 1542.
However,
the theoretical question of the use of force in converting the native
population to the “true faith” and “true God” had already been raised by the
lawyer from Córdoba, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, in his treatise “Democrates alter sive de iustis belli causis” (Rome, 1535). Sepúlveda stressed the
fact that the Indians were, in his opinion, “infidels, barbarians, and slaves
by their very nature” — and all this led to the famous discussion between him
and Las Casas in 1548 at Valladolid in Spain. In this discussion, Las Casas
claimed that the differentiation of the civilized peoples and the barbarians
could not be based on ethnic, cultural and religious differences, but on the
fact that there were people who respected freedom and the natural rights of
others and people that do not respect these rights. Although the royal auditors never officially declared the outcome
of this debate, the fact that shortly after the debate (in 1552) Las Casas
published his Brevísima relación... ,
while Ginés de Sepúlveda never received permission to publish any of his
subsequent polemical works, speaks for itself.[6] However, this was one of the last
instances that voices and concerns of the other were so publicly respected in the
West European cultural and political discourse.[7] Another tradition, another way of
obtaining knowledge was about to impose itself as a master narrative (or
metanarrative) of the time. The burden of dealing (and answering to the
challenges of) the other had become too heavy.
The
other that was introduced to the Western world in the late 15th and
early 16th century were other worlds. Of course, the contacts and
the interchange between Western and non-Western cultures had a long history,
but it was always limited by sheer distance or in some cases simple cultural
incompatibility (mostly based on the premises of different religions or
different ideological systems). In the case of the Western European expansion
that started in late 15th and early 16th century, the
West put itself in a position of absolute domination and control, its master
narrative was to become a master narrative of the whole world that it wanted to
subjugate; it had appropriated (“discovered”) new worlds, and something had to
be done about it.
What
was done was essentially a rationalist revolution, initiated by René Descartes
in philosophy and Sir Isaac Newton in science. This revolution claimed the
separation between the mind and the body, it started to treat different systems
as always incompatible, different
systems of values as mutually exclusive,
and also it set up a standard (of the Western colonial powers in expansion —
although, to be clear, neither Descartes or Newton were particularly involved
or interested in the colonial expansion) that was to become the standard for
judging and evaluating all other (different) cultures. This stood in sharp
contrast to the humanist ideals of the Renaissance (in fact, Toulmin calls this
revolution “Retreat from the Renaissance” [1990: 30]), and it has made several
important breaks with the earlier tradition.[8]
First
of all, the emphasis shifts from the oral to the written, rhetoric losing its
position as a legitimate field of study, and the stress is put on the rational presentation of arguments, in the sense of producing proofs. Who presents the arguments, in
which context, to what audience, becomes totally irrelevant.
Decontextualization enters the West European science and humanities. Secondly,
there is a shift from the particular to the universal; in the world that was
becoming (colonially) globalized, particular cases and situations lost their
importance, the laws are set with universalist claims (primarily in the context
of raging religious wars in Europe).
If
respecting the other was implicit in the moral and philosophical theories of
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from the 17th century onwards,
this respect became irreconcilable with the strategies of domination, where the
other had to be subsumed under the General Law of Reason. There is an
important shift from the timely to the
timeless, closely associated with the new strategies. While in previous
centuries scholars paid much more attention to the context of specific
situations (following the advice from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics), this interest is lost in the rationalist
revolution. Finally, the shift in all the major theoretical debates (both in
the sciences and in the humanities) changes from the local to the general, all
in accordance with the new universalist claims.
Although
Toulmin looks at this break primarily from the perspective of the actual political and historical context of the 17th century Europe (which
led to the savage war that from 1618 until 1648 raged in Germany and Bohemia),
his arguments deal with the characteristics of Modernity itself, its emphasis
on rationalization, the pursuit of Truth, and the quest for certainty that
eventually became self-fulfilling. It is against this background of
universalist claims and the belief in
“objectively” existing knowledge (usually associated with the idea and
concept of Modernity [cf. Toulmin 1990, Bauman 1993, etc.]) that some
contemporary (“postmodern” or from the perspective of the “cultural studies”)
social scientists, humanists, and philosophers react. This kind of reaction
might be understood in terms of Rorty’s (1980, 1989) reference to the
“edifying” procedure of gaining knowledge; one that distrusts the notion of
essential rightness and single and universal logic, one that is open to
relativism and scepticism, one that is
situationalist and subjective, one that constantly doubts even its own
premises. This enters into the polemics modernism/postmodernism, since,
according to Zygmunt Bauman,
Modernity, by comparison, seems never to
have entertained similar doubts as to the universal grounding of its status.
The hierarchy of values imposed upon
the world administered by the north-western tip of the European peninsula was
so firm, and supported by powers so enormously
overwhelming, that for a couple of centuries it remained the baseline of
the world vision, rather than an overtly debated problem. Seldom brought to the
level of consciousness, it remained the all-powerful ‘taken-for-granted’ of the
era. It was evident to everybody except the blind and the ignorant that the West was superior to the East,
white to black, civilized to crude, cultured to uneducated, sane to insane,
healthy to sick, man to woman, normal to criminal, more to less, riches to
austerity, high productivity to low productivity, high culture to low culture. All these ‘evidences’ are now gone. Not a single one remains unchallenged.
What is more, we can see now that they did
not hold in separation from each other; they made sense together, as manifestations of the same
power complex, the same power structure
of the world, which retained credibility as long as the structure remained
intact, but were unlikely to survive its demise.
(Bauman
1993: 135-136)
The extent of this break with the earlier
tradition is becoming clear when the others are also able to voice their
concerns. In the second half of the 16th century, Montaigne’s Essais
discuss customs and rites of other peoples (including cannibalism),
different ethical and moral questions of the time, as well as the pleasures of everyday
life (including sex).[9] Only a century later such writings would
have been unimaginable.
From the 17th century onwards,
the prevalent belief was that there can be such a thing as universal knowledge
(or a universal way of achieving it). This belief was for the most part
prevalent in the French Enlightenment,[10] and it tended to influence all aspects
of Western European civilization as it
spread in attempt to appropriate and understand the other worlds. Knowledge became a magical catchword.
What could be known and by what means came to be the objective
that the most brilliant minds went after. The problem of the unknown, as well as the problem of objective limitations and
relativism of any knowledge was for the most part denied. As much as the defining narrative before the
“discovery” of other worlds has been the recognition of the differences between
different cultures and emphasis on the specific context, the dominating narrative since the rationalist revolution
has become a decontextualizing quest for certainty. This can be understood as a
form of “Enlightenment rationalist fundamentalism” or Enlightenment rationalism, with all of its neopositivistic
overtones.
Anthropologists are engaged in some form
of a post-colonial discourse whenever they step (professionally, of course)
into the world of a “strange” or “exotic” culture (the fact that it might be
their own culture does not affect this). “Step into” might not be the correct
expression, since one of the most important conditions for the understanding of
another culture (and the whole different set of values, norms, representations,
etc.) is being aware of the differences. Except in the cases where the
anthropologist/ethnographer is himself/herself a member of a certain community
(and sometimes even in those cases, but on a different plane), there is a
fundamental difference. Two worlds meet. Or, alternatively, two (or more) cultures, worlds (sometimes
literally centuries) apart.[11] This “stepping into” should not be taken
only in a literal sense, since it presupposes any form of communication about
or with a culture or a society (or group, individual, etc.) that is being
studied. Another thing that it presupposes is that there will be elements which
the anthropologist will find impossible to classify or explain (cf. Bourdieu
1977, 1990, 1991), so he/she should not try to force her/his preconceptions on
the culture, but to accept the potential unintelligibility of certain elements
of the studied culture as a fact, culture as a specific set of values for each
individual and distinctive community or group.
Of course, the question arises of the
objective (if there is such thing) validity of doing any research. It was as
far as in 1881, when one of the founding fathers of anthropology, Adolf
Bastian, remarked that
For
us, primitive societies (Naturvölker)
are ephemeral, that is, as regards our
knowledge of, and our relations with them, in fact, inasmuch as they exist for us at all. At the very instance they
become known to us they are doomed.
(quoted in Fabian 1991:
194)
The
image of other worlds is constantly being distorted and remodeled, based on
Western media assumptions, and it is mostly presented through the Western
media. In the globalized world, these distorted images then sift back even to
the ones that they are (were) supposed to represent (for examples related to
misrepresentations of Islam, see Ahmed 1992).[12]
WOMEN
AS OTHERS
In
a sense, women are the ultimate “others.” (I will present here just a few
general remarks – more about genderedness of the concept of the other in
Lecture 4.) They are an integral part of the world and at the same time have
been throughout history excluded (partially or completely) from full
participation in it (Riley 1988). Observed and studied
in “primitive” societies, they have
only recently become active participants in
“mainstream” sciences and humanities, adding a specific (or should I
say: gender specific) point of view. This opens numerous possibilities, as
summed up by Toni Flores:
What
is interesting, I think, is that because male culture is officially the valued
and powerful one, women come with some determination to grasp what we have been
denied — and from this realization come the various women’s movements. On the
other hand, because female culture, along with the feminine possibilities it
carries, is both devalued and disempowered, it is hard for men to recognize or
accept that they lack something, much less attempt actively to grasp what they
hardly know they want.
(Flores
1991: 143)
Of course, I
would not agree with phrases such as “male culture” or “female culture” — they
both seem to be too general and too universalizing and totalizing, trying to
subsume a great variety of different discourses under a common denominator.
However, based on my research in Macedonia and Slovenia, as well as on the
relevant ethnographic literature, it seem to me that in everyday life there
exists a sense of polarity and ambivalence when it comes to the issues dealing
with gender. Anthropology is no exception to this (Quinn 1977). The picture has
been distorted, people realize that and begin to wander what the “real” image
look like.
The extent to
which anthropology can (or even should) reshape this distorted picture remains
unclear, but anthropology as something standing outside the contemporary world,
in the realm of the “pure” science is a fiction.[13] It is my belief that anthropologists
have a duty and an obligation (both as human beings and as critical
intellectuals) to at least try to present “the others” in an acceptable way
(acceptable for the others in the first place!). Since they depend on their
existence (that is to say, the very existence of others is a prerequisite for their profession), it is in their
(existential) interest to assure that
the others are represented in an acceptable way and that the “natives”
are able both to represent and to express themselves in a ways that they find
most appropriate.[14] Whether one will call this expression
representation (Fabian 1990), evocation (Tyler 1986), invocation, or something
else (cf. Marcus and Clifford 1985; Geertz 1983 and 1988; Marcus 1989;
Strathern 1987a, 1987b, 1991; Haraway 1991), depends on the
context-specific cultural frame where the interaction is taking place. It also
depends on whether one believes that any kind of
representation/evocation/invocation/etc. is possible when one operates with
different (culture-specific, context-bound, experience-influenced, etc.) sets
of categories.
I do not
intend to fully develop here Asad’s (1979) thesis that what really matters in
terms of social change today is the movement of world capital and the
globalization of world economic processes (although I do believe that terms
like “market economy” are nonsense invented by the people in power in order to
retain and globalize this power[15]), but this thesis reflects a part of the
problem. If anthropology is to incorporate such a thesis, then anthropologists
should be actively involved in the processes of social change. The experience
of the reality “lived” can be more helpful than the experience of the reality
“theorized.” However, as academics, they usually claim (publicly, at least) no
allegiance to a particular political system or ideology. As scientists, they are supposed to be
“neutral.” Again, the idea that “neutrality” in a great post-romantic sense is
simply impossible in any science (including anthropology) is nothing new or
original. While most authors will claim that their interpretation of the data (and
their field notes) are reasonably (if not absolutely) “objective,” they are
well aware that others are not quite that “neutral” or “objective.”
Anthropologists need others (cf. Fabian 1990; Mason 1990, 1995), both in
ethnography and in theory,[16] even when others are actually their
fellow anthropologists (cf. Clifford 1988; Rapport 1994).
An
interesting situation also occurs when feminist authors (as “others”) write on
women (as “others” as well): are they “feminist” or radical enough (cf. Moore
1994b)? Where does feminism end and “pure” or “disengaged”
research start? Is it possible to be a feminist and do this kind of research on
feminist discourses or practices? Since others are “there” (and we are “here”)
— and there is no way to find out whether they have always been, or were just
constructed by ourselves — then, the main question for me is how to approach
this fact. What to do with the others?
The answer is
not as obvious as it seems. Obviously, one does not ignore others, although it
is relatively easy to pretend that they do not exist (since this is only
pretending, one is still aware of them and just makes a conscious effort to
avoid them). But this attempt at avoiding does not deny their existence! Even
if we bypass something, we implicitly
acknowledge the fact that there is something
out there (to be avoided). Others can be studied, but then the question might
arise from whose perspective and why. What gives the right (any right) to
anthropologists to go around and study various ethnic groups, and then
subsequently publish the most intimate details of their lives? From another
perspective, the dependence of anthropologists on their “informants” (the word
has a slightly Orwellian sound for me) is almost complete, and very rarely do
anthropologists question the data that they have obtained in the field. Very
rarely they assume that they might have been told something simply because the
“natives” wanted to please them or to avoid probing into the more intimate
aspects of their lives.[17] Questions relating to the privacy and
the actual wishes of the others (the “observed ones”) are increasingly becoming
paramount in any serious research project. Although the situation seems to be
most tricky with regard to the field work (positioning of oneself with his/her
“objects of study,” questions regarding even ethics of disclosure of certain
details, anthropologists’ personal life “in the field,” etc.), it is even worse
when one actually studies texts. The holy scriptures of anthropology reveal
more about their authors than about the actual people(s) studied (cf. Geertz
1988; Rapport 1994). The writings are irreparably tainted by the assumed
objectivity of the “facts,” and in most cases, the only author of these “facts”
is an anthropologist himself or herself.
In the world of the academic discipline where questions multiply and
dilemmas abound, one can opt for a way out by acknowledging that anthropology
as an academic discipline (the way it was concieved in the 19th and
early 20th century) is simply impossible. The study of man? The
study of culture? The study of social change and the related processes? Or all
of the above, or something else?
Of course,
admitting that I am engaged in something that is impossible places me in a
somewhat precarious position; I would be something like a double-agent working
from the inside on the destruction of something which would also bring my own
destruction (at least where most of my work and possible career is concerned).
There is
another way of looking at this, the way outlined in 1973 by Clifford Geertz,
who espoused the “semiotic concept of culture,” taking as a starting point a
view that anthropology (as “the analysis of culture”) should be “not an
experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of
meaning” (1973: 5). Anthropology can be attempted as a quest for meanings,
hidden, distorted, forgotten, or simply deconstructed.
This is where
the “post-structuralist,” “postmodern,” “literary,” or “text-centered”
approaches comes into play. These approaches (Fabian 1990, 1991 outlines them
as a single approach — which I find a bit too simplistic) are potentially
limited by the fact that (apart from some sharp disagreements on the approaches
themselves) studying culture as a text (or a set of texts) brings a potential
danger of reducing anthropology to ethnography (in the original ancient Greek
sense of the word, meaning simply written
description of other cultures) and
literary criticism, and practically excluding the fieldwork. For when one can
finish his/her work without ever going to the strange and exotic places where
“the others” dwell, why do it at all? (Except, of course, in the cases of
people that are naturally inclined towards travelling.)
Of course,
the relationship between these approaches and the study of gender is in no way
simple or straightforward, as noted by Marilyn Strathern:
[T]he
constant rediscovery that women are the Other in men’s accounts reminds women
that they must see men as the Other in relation to themselves. Creating a space
for women becomes creating a space for the self, an experience becomes an
instrument for knowing the self. Necessary to the construction of the feminist
self, then, is a nonfeminist Other. The Other is most generally conceived as
“patriarchy,” the institutions and persons who represent male domination, often
simply concretized as “men.”[Cf. Toni Flores, above.] Because the goal is to
restore to subjectivity a self dominated by the Other, there can be no shared
experience with persons who stand for the Other.
(Strathern
1987a: 288)
However, the questions relating to otherness and
identity lead to the ones on difference(s). The other is recognized as other
because it is different.[18]
But the others are also different among themselves — and this is a particular
aspect of contemporary approaches (characteristic for what Marcus [1998] labels
as “cultural studies”) where feminism can offer its insights for anthropology.
Several most prominent feminist authors in disciplines ranging from philosophy
(Bigwood 1991; Flax 1990) and cultural criticism (Butler 1990, 1993; De
Lauretis 1994) to anthropology (Haraway 1991; Moore 1994a, 1994b) and sociology
(McRobbie 1994) have given the concept of difference(s) a very prominent place
in their recent work. The notions of multiplicity and heterogeneity that come
along with the one of difference(s) are most obvious signs of the recognition
of approaches characteristic for the cultural studies in contemporary
anthropology.
To
conclude, while anthropology owes its very existence to the concept (and we might
even say the image) of the other, the
other has assumed a life of its own and sprouted in a variety of directions. If
anthropology is to retain the image that it has carefully been developing for
itself in the last century or so, it must cross into other disciplines (like
gender studies) or take some pointers from yet others (like what I refer to as
the cultural studies). The situation is far from clear and the choices might
look very tough indeed. But I believe that a wealth of information that new areas
of research are opening to us, as well as the mere amount of complexities of
the contemporary world, justify some radical decisions. For what are we all if
not others for some other observers, in other situations, under other points of
view, in other circumstances and other perspectives?
[1] It is a well known fact that before the 16th century, race was simply not an issue in the Western European art — and, although infrequently, representatives of other races were represented in sculpture or painting.
[2] I am not implying that this ethnocide and ecocide was a necessary or in any way justifiable price to be paid for thisaltering of intellectual horizons — I am just stating this as a fact.
[3] This brief account is based primarily on Boskovic 1990: 15-16; but cf. also Hanke 1959; Boskovic 1997 and (in a slightly “postmodern” context) Todorov 1984.
[4] Without getting into the detailed explanation of these important institutions, I will only say that they refer to a series of regulations that basically connected (tied) native inhabitants to the lands that were purchased by settlers or given away as gifts, thus keeping the native population practically as slaves.
[5] Among the most notable ones were Bartolomé de Carranza, Melchior Cano, and Domingo de Soto. They were trying to prove that Pope Alexander VI’s bull “Inter cætera” from 1494 was valid only in the spiritual sense — giving to the Spanish and the Portuguese the right to christianize native population in the territories that they discover, but not to treat these territories and their inhabitants as their own property. The Dominican General, Thomas de Caeta, wrote in his commentary to the edition of the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas that there are actually three kinds of infidels: 1/ the ones that are legally and factually subjects of the Christians and live in the Christian kingdoms (Moors, Jews); 2/ the ones that are legally but not factually Christian subjects because they seize Christian territories (Turks); and 3/ the ones that are neither legally nor factually Christian subjects (Indians). He concluded that the second kind (Turks) should be treated like enemies, but the third kind (Indians) are legal owners of their own lands, and cannot be subjected to force. These and similar statements were recognized in the bull of the Pope Paul III, “Sublimus Deus” of June 2, 1537: “Indians and all the peoples that are yet to be met by Christians, even if they live with no faith in Christ, should not be deprived of their freedom or their worldly possessions... They cannot be forced into slavery, and to the faith of Christ they should be introduced by the preaching of the Divine Word and the example of the decent life.”
[6] Of course, one should not forget that Las Casas on the theoretically similar grounds justified the slavery (and slave trade, which was becoming a profitable business venture) in Africa!
[7] For an excellent account of the Western “discovery” of the other related to America, see Mason 1990.
[8] In this section of the lecture, I am closely following Stephen Toulmin’s account, so I am not giving specific page references.
[9] Montaigne has been associated with the origins of feminism (Insdorf 1977).
[10] Cf. Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung?,” as well as Foucault’s answer to it.
[11] Of course, there are differences within specific cultures as well as differences between anthropologists/ethnographers and cultures they come from — I am just using these universal concepts here to illustrate my point.
[12] Another excellent example of how one great world tradition and culture, China, has been misrepresented and its image distorted beyond recognition (caricatured, even satiricized, in the writings that had most serious objectives) even in critical Western scholarship, and even by authors like Foucault (and probably also Derrida), is given in Longxi 1988.
[13] At least as much as the very concept that any science can be “pure,” “objective,” “disinterested,” or politically “neutral.”
[14] Of course, the question then arises (and I do not claim to know the answer to it): who decides what is an adequate representation of the other in a specific context and based on what criteria?
[15] To claim that any Third World country can just step into the “world economy” and there successfully compete with developed countries (much of whose development and stability was achieved at the expense of the Third World) is simply perverse.
[16] For the discussion of otherness that is very relevant for my research, cf. Herzfeld 1987: 13-16.
[17] Several years ago, a delegation from a South Pacific ethnic group came for a farewell visit to an anthropologist who did his field work there and was getting ready to leave with his wife. The delegation expressed their gratitude for the anthropologist’s stay in their village, because that presented them with an opportunity to observe the life of a white family! Participant observation at its best.
[18] However, see Baudrillard 1996 for the critique of this perception of Otherness.