ABSTRACT
Indigenous peasants in the Peruvian Andes describe abnormal and unsettling bodily experiences as encounters with place-based spirits. While community members expect they can make sense of their experience in terms of their own frameworks of understanding, in some instances neither this nor any other cultural rationality is enough to order what has happened. These types of situations can be analyzed in terms of alienness not simply because of the apparent presence of a spiritual entity, but because the cause, consequence and signifi cance of the event remain elusive, and in this sense strange, foreign and other to the individual. Drawing on the philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels, this chapter contrasts empirical otherness and radical otherness (or alienness) in ethnographic situations in the community of Kañaris. This distinction allows us to understand the observable Other not merely as different, but as in relation to something which cannot be brought into an order. Radical otherness provides a conceptual tool to understand an experiential event in terms of its affective strangeness rather than objects of perception. Waldenfels’ theory of alienness can be applied to sociocultural analysis because it provides an alternative account of why it is necessary to respond once one feels addressed by a situation, even when the origin of this feeling and the appropriate reply are unknown.
