ABSTRACT
In historical terms, inter-civilizational contacts inevitably created a notion of otherness between different peoples and civilizations. There is a sense in which any society with a more or less coherent cultural boundary, especially a linguistic boundary, acting as an inclusive feature of solidarity, must automatically have an exclusionary notion of the outside world and hence of difference and otherness. The more inclusive the notion of social membership, the more intense the notion of an exterior contrasting world. This idea of an outside and an inside social world is the basic truism of almost every general theory of society. Take for example Mary Douglas’s notion of group and grid as the basic structure of any community with a strong sense of pollution (Douglas 1973). In pre-modern or tribal societies, the depth of group identity and the closure of society against the outside world produce an intense sense of membership which was classically defined by Emile Durkheim (1960) as ‘mechanical solidarity’ involving low individualism, rituals of inclusion and shared values. It is for this reason that Native American tribes simply referred to themselves as The People. While one might suspect that globalization has produced a system of societies with porous boundaries and open hospitable attitudes towards outsiders, I argue on the contrary that contemporary globalization has compressed the spatial relations between societies and the problems of otherness and difference have been magnified by modern systems of global communication, transportation and migration. There is therefore a paradoxical relationship between the growing hybridity, interconnectedness and interdependency of the world and the contrasting notion of otherness in politics, philosophy and culture. The emergence of the politics of difference as themes of inter-civilizational conflict should not, however, be seen as simply an evolutionary progression, marching in tandem with modernization. The divisive question of otherness was closely associated with the rise of world religions, the emergence of imperial powers and the history of colonialism and post-colonialism.
