1st Edition

Anthropology and Alterity Responding to the Other

Edited By Bernhard Leistle Copyright 2017
    324 Pages
    by Routledge

    324 Pages
    by Routledge

    Alterity or otherness is a central notion in cultural anthropology and philosophy, as well as in other disciplines. While anthropology, with its aim of understanding cultural difference, tends to take otherness as a fact, there have been vigorous attempts in contemporary philosophy, particularly in phenomenology, to answer the fundamental question: What is the Other? This book brings the two approaches to otherness – the hermeneutical pragmatics of anthropology, and the radical reflection of philosophy – together, with the goal of enriching one through the other. The philosophy of the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, up to now little known to anthropologists, has a central position in this undertaking. Waldenfels’s concept of a responsivity to the Other offers to cultural anthropology the possibility of a philosophical engagement with the Other that does not contradict the project of making sense of concrete empirical others. The book illustrates the fertility of this new approach to alterity through a broad spectrum of themes, ranging from reflections on theory formation, via discussions of race and human-animal relations, to personal meditations on experiences of alterity.

    Introduction: Alterity and Anthropology: Responding to the Other



    [Bernhard Leistle]





    1. The Emergence of the Radical Other in Phenomenology



    [Bernhard Leistle]







    2. Paradoxes of Representing the Alien in Ethnography





    [Bernhard Waldenfels]





    3. The Friendly Other



    [Vincent Crapanzano]





    4. "Haunted by the Aboriginal": Theory and its Other



    [Victor Li]





    5. The Other Otter: Relational Being at the Edge of Empire



    [Danielle DiNovelli-Lang]





    6. Otherness and Stigmatized Whiteness: Skin Whitening, Vitiligo, and Albinism



    [Amina Mire]







    7. The Alien and the Self



    [Thomas Fuchs]





    8. Intimate and Inaccessible: The Role of Asymmetry in Charismatic Christian Perceptions of God, Self, and Fellow Believers



    [Christopher Stephan]





    9. Pain and Otherness, the Otherness of Pain



    [C. Jason Throop]





    10. Otherness and the Underground: Buried Treasure in the Sierra Tarahumara



    [Frances Slaney]





    11. The Limits of Understanding: Empirical and Radical Otherness in the Andes



    [Marieka Sax]





    12. "The Order of the World": A Responsive Phenomenology of Schreber’s Memoirs



    [Bernhard Leistle]







    13. Photography Tears the Subject from Itself





    [Robert Desjarlais]

    Biography

    Bernhard Leistle is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University.