ABSTRACT
Othering has been presented to you already in this book (it was introduced in Unit A2.1). However, it is helpful to analyse the term again. ‘Othering’ is used to describe the process that we undertake in ascribing identity to the Self through the often negative attribution of characteristics to the Other. Othering is a ‘culture first’ view of individuals. It is seen to be problematic by the authors of this book in that it does not allow for the agency of other persons to be a factor in their identity construction. It does not permit the negotiation of identity between people, but is often crudely reductive, and so it is typical of unskilled intercultural communication. As it does not allow for the true complexity of other people to be considered, it is fundamentally, therefore, a dehumanizing process. It is most obviously evident in the discourse of war, where the enemy is reduced to something uncomplicatedly and irredeemably evil, non-human and therefore not worthy of compassion. To illustrate this, the following piece of text comes from the British The War Illustrated, 19th May 1917, published in the middle of the First World War. It is from an article written by Mr Frederic William Wile, who for ten years was the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail: ‘the German Armies in the Field maintain Corpse Utilization Establishments (Kadaver-Verwertungs-Anstalten), where soldiers dead are “rendered down for lubricating oils, fats, and pig food”’. Another example is the Nationalist propaganda in the Spanish Civil War in which posters depicted Republicans as having red tails. Current similar examples are all too easy to find.
