ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Foucault's concept of 'heterotopia', as defined by Kevin Hetherington, names a continuing thread which links the first Quakers with those in Britain today. It argues that instead of an overarching belief, it is the sense of being 'other' and living out an 'alternate ordering' that is one of the key ways in which 21st-century Friends obtain a sense of identity and unity. The chapter provides a significant alternate ordering, the heterotopic would have to be simultaneously marginal and embedded in the prevailing social order. Heterotopias, or sites of Otherness, express their alternate ordering of society directly through the society which they seek to be different from. Quakerism emerged during a time of enormous upheaval, political, religious and social. The inclusivists, the bulk of the Britain Yearly Meeting, consist of those who hold to the mainstream traditions and adhere to a 'behavioural creed', which permits enormous flexibility of belief while constraining the performance of Quaker identity.
