ABSTRACT
One of the better known anecdotes in hermeneutics is the famous dialogue on language between Heidegger and a Japanese friend. Heidegger concluded from that experience that the possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are really ‘other’ is constantly menaced by the Westernisation of the planet and human beings and that the result is a growing deceit that can destroy and silence in its origin whatever is not Western (see Vattimo 1991:151). A similar conclusion has made its mark on anthropology during the last two decades, crystallising in the proposal of interpretative anthropology against the Westernisation of difference through the use of science, and in favour of the preservation of alterity through the scientific deconstruction of the discipline. Although the success of the double approximation of hermeneutics and anthropology (see Rorty 1979; Geertz 1989) in defence of alterity and against the Westernisation of the world has been doubted,1 the truth is that it has uncovered an elemental fact: alterity is in danger of perishing in the face of the uncontrollable advance of capitalism and its cultural codes at the end of the millennium. The ideological constructions that support the definitive push of late capitalism have been grouped under the label postmodernism, one of whose principal characteristics is the homogenisation of the world and the elimination of all frontiers (e.g. Jameson 1984; Harvey 1990). In regard to historical knowledge, it is necessary to recognise that the West has negated non-Western forms by typologising them, differentiating them from history (history versus myth, history versus tradition), by establishing the supremacy of the written over the spoken, of the chronological and lineal over the non-chronological and circular, of what happened over what should have happened. In summary, it has established the supremacy of ‘societies with history’ over ‘societies without history’ (see Rappaport 1990:12). In the words of Lyotard (1994:56):
Scientists wonder about the validity of narrative [non-scientific] enunciates and corroborate that these are never subjected to argumentation or testing. They classify them as an other mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, behind the times, alienated, formed by opinions, customs, authority, prejudices, ignorance, ideologies. [For them] narrations are fables, myths, legends, good for women and children. In the best of cases they will try to shed light onto obscurantism, to civilise, to educate and to develop.
