The Fifth Other

Anthropology and its Referents Contemporary anthropologists have problematized ethnography as the method of anthropology. James Clifford, for example, argued that ethnographic representations are always ‘partial truths;’ yet, these partial truths are also ‘positioned truths’ (Abu-Lughod, 1991: 142). Ethnographers (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1973) are, according to Elspeth Probyn, still “united in their use of ethnography as a means of constructing a fundamental similarity of the world’s cultures which is firmly based in the referent of the West” (1993: 78). Here, this ‘referent of the West’ is at stake, together with its diverse modes of reinstalling itself as the center and the ‘other’ as ‘lacking’ (relative to the West). The concept of ‘the Other.’ which is also at stake here, is derived from the works of Luce Irigaray (e.g., Irigaray 1985; Irigary & Guynn, 1995) and Stuart Hall (e.g., 1997). Irigaray writes, from a feminist perspective, on the “fundamental model of the human” which is “one, singular, solitary, historically masculine, the paradigmatic Western adult male, rational, capable. [. . .] The model of the subject thus remained singular and the ‘others’ represented less ideal examples hierarchized with respect to the singular subject” (Irigaray & Guynn, 1995: 7). Stuart Hall shifts this perspective slightly, describing a form of racialized knowledge of ‘the Other’ with reference to Edward Said (1978) and Franz Fanon (1986) who, using the concept of ‘Orientalism,’ have shown how the hegemonic construction of the white subject is always based on the construction of another non-white model: ‘the Other.’ The fifth other as it emerges in the combination of both sexualizing and racializing processes reflects these mechanisms. Psychoanalytical and anthropological discourses, and their intrinsic evolutionary framework in nineteenth-century sexology construed the homosexual and/or the hermaphrodite as an abnormal ‘invert’ (with regard to sexual dimorphism as the achievement of civilization). The construction of this sexually

abnormal invert is analogous to racialized discourses that position non-Western cultures as primitive and less developed. The heritage of these discourses in anthropology, and how they merge into cross-cultural intersexualization still persists at the end of the twentieth century. I see the process of intersexualization as the quest for a scientifically verifiable distinction between men and women. Intersexualization is, therefore, at the core of the process of the construction of a dichotomously sexed_gendered society. Historically, the category of intersexuality has been, and continues to be, formulated as a distinction between male and female and masculinity and femininity (e.g, Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Holmes, 2000; Kessler, 1998), and as a distinction between homo-and heterosexuality (e.g., Adkins, 1999; Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1980). Yet, in the case of crosscultural intersexualization, we find another distinction mediated through gender and sexuality-the distinction between the civilized and the primitive. In crosscultural intersexualization, the ‘immaturity’ of the intersexualized body-the other to the two sexes_genders-stands for the ‘immaturity’ of the ‘other’ culture. The terms applied in this twofold othering process vary, yet the notion of development and maturity-concerning the psyche, the body, and a specific culture as a whole is ingrained in the discourses that produce cross-cultural intersexualization.