ABSTRACT
It would be curious if ethnology remained untouched by the trends of philosophical and scientifi c research, not to mention the politically, economically and religiously determined appropriation of concepts and foreign cultures, with which it was closely interrelated from the very beginning. Yet this discipline owes its particular interest to the fact that, as a “science of the culturally alien” ( Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden , Kohl 1993), it has embraced a subject, which was not envisaged in the usual catalogue of the nomological and idiographic sciences. Alienness is a relational and occasional defi nition that is removed from the disjunction of universal laws or values and individual facts. If, beyond any other comparable projects, ethnology becomes entangled in paradoxes and dilemmas, this is not least attributable to such an unstable starting point that complicates, if not prohibits any normalization.
