Othering and Otherness

DEVIKA CHAWLA
Ohio University, USA

Self and Other

Othering and otherness are crucial in the study of contemporary human identity and
culture. In order to engage these two terms and the relationship between them, it is
necessary to begin by understanding how the “Other” has been encountered in social
thought. Tracing the cultural and social etymology of the word Other is a complex and
wide-ranging endeavor; therefore, the discussion of Other in this essay is limited to a
brief historical and cross-disciplinary sketch engaging philosophers and thinkers who
continue to be relevant to the field of communication studies.
Linguistically, as a word in the English language, the synonyms of Other include
words such as “alternative,” “auxiliary,” “another,” “spare,” “supplementary,” “extra,”
and so on. Other is, simply, something “other than.” All these synonyms position the
Other as a foil to what “is”—that is, Other is consistently defined as the opposite of
what exists. A common and received understanding of the Other emerges in theories
of the “self” across many social disciplines. Different strands of philosophy have, over
many centuries, attempted to define the Other. For instance, in phenomenology, the
systematic study of experience and consciousness, the Other is an important element
in the constitution of the self. This self in phenomenological thought is composed of
two elements—the Other and the Constitutive Other. The Other is understood as both
a part of as well as opposite to the self, which means that for a self to exist, the existence
of the Other is critical.
The philosopher Hegel is credited with placing the concept of Other as an essential
component of one’s self-consciousness and with formulating the Master–Slave dialectic
that became critical to understanding the Other (Hegel, 1977). The phenomenologist
Edmund Husserl placed the Other as a condition of the existence of intersubjectivity,
which he considered central to the psychological relations among people. In Being and
Nothingness (1956), existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre extends the dialectic of
intersubjectivity, proposing that a human being’s world is altered upon the appearance
of an Other person, that the world seems oriented to that Other person as opposed to
the self, but that the appearance of the Other is not a radical threat to the self, just a
normalized phenomenon that occurs during our life course. The psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas are credited with more contemporane-
ous understandings of the Other as a radical counterpart to the self. For instance, in his
work Otherwise than Being (1998), Levinas argues for the Other as a supernatural deity

The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication.

Young Yun Kim (General Editor), Kelly L. McKay-Semmler (Associate Editor).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118783665.ieicc0230
2 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S

of scripture and tradition, thereby suggesting that the Other is both superior and prior
to the self.
In the early 20th century, the crucial relationship of the Other to the self was
addressed by social behaviorists of the Chicago School who are considered founders
of the American pragmatist tradition. In his classic series of lectures, Mind, Self, and
Society, George Herbert Mead proposed that the self existed as an intersubjective
relationship and a social process, which consisted of both “I” and “Me.” The “Me” is
the social self that emerges as a consequence of our interactions with and taking on
the attitudes of others, and the “I” is the response of the individual to “Me,” or in other
words, the attitudes of others. More simply, the “I” is the subjective self, while the “Me”
is the objective self. What is necessary to understand here is that the self is imbricated
in the Other and, in fact, is not a self without it (Mead, 1967).
Conceptualizations of a social and intersubjective self are visible also in the work of
dialogue theorists such as Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin. Buber’s influential work
I and Thou is a commentary on authenticity; and how existence, being, and self are best
realized when we choose I–Thou versus I–It relationships (1971). An I–It relationship
defines a world of sensation and experience, while I–Thou is an expression of a world of
authentic relations. In terms of social and cultural thinking, an I–It relationship engages
the Other as an object, while the I–Thou relationship engages the Other as an equal
partner in an ongoing dialogue. The literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s
(1984) work can be interpreted in a similar vein. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,
Bakhtin argues:

I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through
another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are
determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou). Separation, dissocia-
tion, enclosure within the self is the main reason for the loss of one’s self. The very being of man is
the deep set communion. … To be means to be for another, through the other, for oneself. (1984,
p. 287)

It is clear from this discussion that the reality, presence, and existence of the Other
is entwined with processes of self-creation; a self could not “become” an active living
presence without the existence of the Other.

Othering and otherness: A genealogical discussion

In general, across the Western world, the Other has been projected as being an intrinsic
part of both human identity and human relations. The process of Othering, or what
might be defined as the process of disassociating the self from another, can be an
internal existential process, but has, in the last few centuries, been used to separate
human beings into different identity categories based on geography, nationality, reli-
gion, and ethnicity. Othering is, quite simply, a process of separation, one that creates
hierarchies among the human species. These hierarchies are realized in terms of gender
(woman as Other), sexuality (nonheterosexual as Other), immigrant (nonnative as
 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S 3

Other), and so on. In this entry, however, I focus more broadly on the emergence of
the racial and colonial Other in European thought.
In contemporary parlance, the Other is associated with the “colonized” of later Euro-
pean colonization. However, as the postcolonial scholar Ania Loomba notes in her book
Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2008), the Other is not simply a “product of modern col-
onization” but rather a persistent idea across Western philosophy (p. 92). Therefore, it
is important to get a sense of a genealogy of Othering in the Western world to under-
stand how Othering and racial stereotyping preceded late European colonization. This
can be achieved by tracing the ways that human beings were “Othered” by the Greeks
and Romans, by medieval thinkers, by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, to the
modern moment where the Other has taken on a pejoratively political location in con-
temporaneous anthropological understandings of identity.
In her book Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) writes that
notions of Othering and difference existed in Greek and Roman philosophy “as ways
of rationalizing the essential characteristics and obligations of slaves” (p. 45). From
here on, Othering in the medieval world took on a different, even distinct dimension.
Medieval literature and art, notes Smith (1999), represented “fabulous monsters and
half-human, half-animal creatures from far-off places” (p. 45). That is, all Others were
viewed as nonhuman or subhuman or not fully human. Loomba (2008) argues that the
Greek and Roman periods provided “some abiding templates for subsequent European
images of ‘barbarians’ and outsiders” (p. 92). Moreover, she asserts that the Greek and
Roman templates for the Other were reworked in medieval and early modern Europe
wherein Christianity became the lens through which the world was framed. However,
medieval scholars found themselves in a quandary because, according to the Bible, God
was the creator of all creatures and “all human beings were brothers descended from the
same parents,” and therefore “the presence of ‘savages’ and ‘monsters’ was not easy to
explain” (Loomba, 2008, p. 92). To smooth this contradiction, medievalists began to
locate these particular Others/savages as creatures who had incurred God’s wrath, a
thinking that led to yet another conceptual problem:

If there was a single origin for all humanity, then presumably these fallen people could be brought
back into the fold, and converted to Christian ways. But could racial difference be so easily shed? In
early modern times, aphorisms such as the impossibility of “washing the Ethiope white” were com-
monly used to indicate the biological basis and hence the immutability of race and colour. (Loomba,
2008, p. 92)

Thus, in medieval and early modern Europe, the idea of Christian identity existed
because an opposition to it was constructed. Christian identity was considered
“normal” human identity and all those belonging to faiths such as Judaism, Islam,
heathenism, and others were constructed as Other. In this way, religious differences
were used to cultivate and enhance racial, national, cultural, and ethnic differences.
After the medieval period and with the advent of the Renaissance and Enlightenment,
the focus on what constituted self and Other shifted, but Othering and Otherness
remained consistent.
4 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S

The African philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (2001) provides a related expla-
nation for Western philosophy’s—especially that of Descartes, Kant, and Hume—focus
on the definition of self and man:
The challenge for understanding the meaning and significance of racial varieties was a major factor
motivating the interest in determining the “essential” nature of the human person—as opposed
to a person’s accidental qualities. The philosophers were certainly influenced by the Renaissance
discovery of the Greek cultures, but they also made another discovery: the discovery of the savage.
(p. 10)

The periods of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment changed the definition of sav-
age/Other. Eze argues that the medieval “savage” was a theoretical and imaginative
idea wherein the Other was positioned as a speculative monstrosity that existed in the
non-Christian worlds of Africa, Asia, and so on. With the advent of the Renaissance and
increased travel, it was found that these “monstrosities” were a figment of the medieval
imagination, and the people who lived across the oceans were indeed human. So, even
though an “us” versus “them” mentality remained, the new wave of world travel (Euro-
pean colonization) gave rise to categories based on skin color and phenotypes. Or rather,
in an effort to keep the self/Other binary intact, new ways of categorizing the world were
devised. Therefore, it might be correct to note that from the Greeks and Romans, to the
medieval era, to the Enlightenment, the meaning of Other shifted from the slave-Other
and the non-Christian Other to a post-Renaissance Other based on scientific discovery.
Instead of being equalizing and democratizing phases in European history, the peri-
ods of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment generated new philosophies (via travel,
invention, and scientific discoveries) about human hierarchy. These new theories relied
on the animal husbandry perspective, which hypothesized that “physical characteris-
tics predict behavior, temperament, and capability,” and scientists of the era began to
“identify and rank perceived variations among human beings” (Allen, 2011, p. 70). This
method of “sorting” would lead to the segmenting of the Other in new ways via racial
categories that would become stabilized over centuries. Most cultural studies scholars
would agree that the racial typologies in use today are rooted in the periods of European
exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. Allen (2011) explains:

Scientific concern with human differences seems to have arisen only after Europeans encountered
people during their travels who looked and acted differently from them. … European scientists
and philosophers developed prejudiced theories of European superiority over non-Europeans. The
concept of race helped to establish Europe as the center of the world and to justify European capi-
talist expansion … contrived categories of race helped to rationalize oppressive treatment of native
peoples as well as the institution of slavery. Later, the concept justified similar mistreatment of other
groups who immigrated to the United States. (p. 70)

“Othering” under the scientific approach led philosophers to claim that human beings
of different races had evolved separately without a common lineage. It is important
to note that this claim was diametrically opposed to the claims of the medievalist era.
This new claim of separate lineage was an effort by European scientists to emphasize
the superiority of their own race. The first classification system developed by French
and German scientists proposed a social hierarchy of race with Caucasian at the top
as the ideal and the best. This created an “ideology of race that placed whites in the
 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S 5

supreme position” (Allen, 2011, p. 70). The other races included Yellow, Black, and Red,
associated with Asian, African, and Native American people, respectively.
Much of European scientific research on race focused its efforts on proving both
how and why people of European descent were of superior stock, which in turn led
to the creation of superior cultures. Among some of the techniques used, scientists
measured various body parts of “native” bodies such as brains, skulls, lips, and limbs
against those of apes to prove native inferiority. These studies resulted in no conclusive
evidence or findings, yet the efforts to keep nonwhite races subjugated and separate
continued. Moreover, qualities came to be attached to “natives” who were not fully
human. Loomba (2008) elaborates: “despite the enormous differences between the colo-
nial enterprises of various European nations, they seem to generate similar stereotypes
about ‘outsiders’—both those outsiders who roamed far away on the edges of the world,
and those who (like the Irish) lurked uncomfortably nearer home” (p. 93). These stereo-
types included traits like laziness, aggression, bestiality, promiscuity, greed, innocence,
irrationality, and violence, among others. Such stereotypes were held by the English,
Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists about persons such as the Africans,
Turks, Jews, Indians, Irish, and Native Americans. Having established qualities that
linked these disparate Others together, scientists began new efforts to segment and
define the negative characteristics of each separate group to show how they were also
distinct from each other. In short, Others were being “sorted” and classified like the
animal species. Such activities in turn led to many different ways that Otherness came
to be identified.

Colonial and racial otherness

Otherness can be loosely defined as the characteristic/s along which the “Other as
object” resides. These characteristics are abstract, arbitrary, and created by those
who have the power to control the subject/Other. Some Others, as Loomba (2008)
asserts, have sustained Otherness no matter the era. For instance, Islam was considered
“the predominant binary and opposite of and threat to Christianity,” so much so
that even the term “Moors,” which was associated with Arab Muslims (some of
whom were white-skinned), came to be linked with blackness, “as is evident from the
term ‘blackmoors’” (Loomba, 2008, p. 93). This kind of Otherness was rooted in a
persistent prejudice against Islamic populations and nonwhite Others. Consolidating
the connection between race and religion amplified the prejudice against the Islamic
community thereby keeping them tightly confined to the category of Other. This
association of Islam with Otherness continues in our present moment and has indeed
been the reason for much of the geopolitical conflict between the East and West.
Closer to home, Christopher Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas (which
he mistook for India) led to a whole different set of groupings of Native American
people. Columbus divided Indians into two categories based upon arbitrarily observed
temperamental qualities—the canibales and the indios. The Otherness of the canibales
was re/presented as violent and brutish, while the indios were characterized as gentle
6 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S

and civil. However, both categories were still recognized as inferior to white Europeans
(Loomba, 2008).
In the continent of Africa, on the other hand, people were sorted more by color and
often referred to as chimpanzees/nonhuman. European Others such as the Irish pre-
sented yet another conundrum for the colonists, who considered the Irish a separate
race, but could not fit them into the “dark” races. This dilemma was resolved by likening
the Irish to white chimpanzees (since they were white-skinned), thus, in a way, equal-
izing them to their African counterparts in “volatile” temperaments and nonhuman
characteristics.
To understand the persistent, but mutable nature of the category of Other, especially
a racial Other, it is illuminating to chart how race was performed in census documents
over a period of two centuries in the United States. Racial hierarchies here came about
via the advent of Columbus’s encounter with the continent followed by about 400 years
of slavery. The transformation of racial categories in the United States dates back to
the first census in 1790 in which, interestingly, there was no category for race. How-
ever, since this census was taken when slavery was still legal, it can be argued that
an official distinction already existed between black slaves and white people (Allen,
2011). Census takers of the 19th century identified black by the percentage of African
blood. Allen (2011) explains the specificity that this process entailed: “A person with
one black and one white parent was typed as mullatto; quadroon and octoroon were
used for one-quarter and one-eighth black lineage” (p. 71). Otherness, in this case, was
quantified by blood.
By the 1900s, race had become an explicit category on the census and census tak-
ers made a decision about the racial and color categories in a particular household by
checking off white, black, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian (Native American). Color was
used as a category marker from 1830 to 1940. It was dropped in 1950, and reinstituted in
1960 and 1970. It is important to note that decisions about identification were left to the
discretion of the census takers, who decided on their classification by visual cues. Allen
(2011) states that, “across the twentieth century, census forms listed twenty-six differ-
ent schemes to categorize race and color” (p. 71). In the year 2000, people were allowed
to check more than one racial identity with which to identify themselves. The mutabil-
ity of racial categories across 100 years of the US census shows that racial Otherness
was anything but biological, an idea that has been scientifically proven by the Human
Genome Project that definitively negates any biological basis for race. The classifications
depended on the whims of persons in power, who have historically always been people
of white, Western, and European descent. In fact, until 1966, interracial marriages were
illegal in half the states in the USA, in an effort to “preserve racial purity” and prevent
“racial mongrelism” (Allen, 2011, p. 72).
Other government legislation reinforced this ideology of white supremacy and legis-
lated Otherness in distinct ways (Allen, 2011). In 1789, when the US constitution took
effect, native-born whites were automatically granted citizenship, while blacks were
classified as three-fifths human (Allen, 2011). In 1790, a Naturalization Law reserved
citizenship for free white immigrants. It was not until 1868 that blacks were eligible to
become citizens. Exclusion extended beyond black and white communities. In 1882, the
Chinese Exclusion act became the “first immigration law to specify race, and to prohibit
 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S 7

immigrants from entering the country on the basis of nationality” (Allen, 2011, p. 73).
Native Americans, the original inhabitants of the United States, were only granted cit-
izenship in 1924. It was not until 1952 that Asians were given permission apply for US
citizenship.
While racial Otherness was performed, officiated, and legitimized in different ways
across Europe and the United States, the other, more abiding process of Othering and
Otherness was the production of the East/Them/Other in the West via intellectual pro-
cesses of knowledge production by Western scholars. In his influential work Orientalism
(1978), Edward Said argued, via a Foucauldian analysis, that knowledge was deeply
linked with operations of power. Orientalism examined how the “formal study of the
‘Orient’ (what is today referred to as the Middle East), along with key literary and cul-
tural texts, consolidated certain ways of seeing and thinking which in turn contributed
to the functioning of colonial power” (Loomba, 2008, p. 42). Said (1978) argued:

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made
between the “Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers,
among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial
administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between the East and West as the starting
point of elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the
Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. …
My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse, one cannot possibly under-
stand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—even
produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imagina-
tively during the post-Enlightenment period. (pp. 2–3)

Orientalism was not about non-Western cultures, but about the Western representa-
tion of these cultures, particularly in the scholarly discipline called orientalism. Said’s
basic thesis is that the study of the Orient (orientalism) was ultimately a political vision
of reality whose structure promoted a binary opposition between the familiar (Europe,
West, “Us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “Them”). Loomba (2008) clarifies that
this opposition was crucial to European self-conception because it strengthened multi-
ple binary forms of thinking about Self/Other, Master/Slave, Colonizer/Colonized with
the following logics: (a) The colonized were produced as irrational, therefore Europeans
were rational; (b) the colonized were barbaric, sensual, and lazy, thus making Europeans
the epitome of the civilized, who kept their sexual appetites under control and had a
strong work ethic; (c) the Orient was static and fixed, while Europe was developing
and marching ahead; (d) the Orient was feminine, so that Europe could be masculine.
Or, as Said (1978) states, “The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West
is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior” (p. 109). The
West/Occident needed to produce the East/Orient in binary opposition to reinforce its
Westernness and remain the West.
Ultimately, orientalism reinforced a crucial idea—that a most enduring form of Oth-
erness of the East was sustained in literary and travel writings about the Orient and,
in doing so, the Occident/West came to recognize itself as different from the Other.
The idea that the West came to recognize and name itself the West through intellectual
processes had already been under discussion in literary movements such as negritude
8 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S

in Europe and the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. Said’s Orientalism, how-
ever, formalized the existence and production of intellectual Otherness that sustains the
persistent Us versus Them binary, which continues to shape global-cultural discourses
about othering and otherness.

SEE ALSO: Borderlands; Cosmopolitanism; Cosmopolitanism, Critical-Postcolonial

Perspective; Critical Race Theory; Critical Theory; Eurocentrism; Identity Politics;
Orientalism; Postcolonial Approaches to Intercultural Communication; Stereotypes;
Transnationalism

References

Allen, B. (2011). Difference matters: Communicating social identity (2nd ed.). Longrove, IL: Wave-
land Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Ed. and trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Buber, M. (1971). I and thou. Trans. R. G. Smith. Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark.
Eze, E. C. (2001). Achieving our humanity: The idea of a postracial future. New York, NY: Rout-
ledge.
Hegel, G. W. H. (1977). The phenomenology of spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. London, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being: Or beyond essence. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University
Press.
Loomba, A. (2008). Colonialism/postcolonialism (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge.
Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. H.
Barnes. New York, NY: Philosophical Library.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London, UK:
Zed Books.

Further readings

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture: London, UK: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Rout-
ledge.
Césaire, A. (1972). Discourse on colonialism. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press.
Minh-ha. T. T. (1989). Woman native other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press.
Shome, R., & Hegde, R. S. (2002). Postcolonial approaches to communication: Charting
the terrain, engaging the intersections. Communication Theory, 3, 249–270. doi:10.1111/
j.1468-2885.2002.tb00269.x
 OT H E R I N G AND OT H E R N E S S 9

Devika Chawla is professor in the School of Communication Studies, Ohio Univer-

sity. Dr. Chawla’s work focuses upon communicative, performative, and narrative
approaches to studying home, travel, and identity. Broadly, she is interested in theories
of affect and mobility as well as transnationalism and postcolonialism. Her most recent
book, Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition (2014), is a cross-generational
oral history account of refugees in India’s Partition. Her recent coedited anthology,
Storying Home: Identity, Places, and Exile, was published in 2015.