Other/Otherness

The ideas of the “other” and “otherness” have associations with psychoanalysis, structuralist and post-structuralist theory, and postcolonial studies. Many scholars of psychoanalysis take note of the work of the human brain, alongside its own internal divisions (often seen as the conscious mind and unconscious mind), in making some form of a basic distinction between the self and the beings outside. In what is termed object relations theory, it is posited that a person learns as a very young child to see herself or himself as unconnected to the mother—as a distinct being. The fears and terrors that this realization brings with it cause the child to displace her or his feelings onto others. Psychoanalytic theories suggest that the outside segment of the binaries—self/other and same/different—often is feared, loathed, or held as inferior. Thus, people often seek to expel, reject, abject, or exclude what is taken as other, outsider, or different, for instance, people who are out of place from where the mind's prevailing order wants them. The term othering often is used for these exclusionary processes. These processes never quite succeed, according to many psychoanalysts, leading to a perpetual struggle for most selves between repulsion from otherness and desire for otherness.

Along with this inner world that in many ways remains geography's last terrain for exploration, it seems to be a fairly basic step of taking this work of unsuccessful policing of separations between binaries of self/other or us/them outside of the head. Surely, one of human geography's most fundamental reasons for existence lies in helping people to sort out areal difference—which places are the same or similar and which places are different or other. Societies often seek to separate same from other, whether the dividing lines be based on race, class, gender, or other categories. Like the processes in our heads, these social processes of separation have ambivalent outcomes. People in one place, of course, can be construed as different from people in another place; otherwise, human geographers would not have much work to do. The problems that keep human geographers employed hinge on how those differences are constructed, manipulated, and deployed at differing levels of a society's power structure and on just how incomplete or unsuccessful the constructions, manipulations, or deployments are.

Cultural anthropology, like human geography, relies on the basic idea that people differ from one place to another for a significant portion of its raison d'être. Johannes Fabian's study, Time and the Other, suggested that modern anthropology needed to contend with a considerable history of othering its objects of study by a pronounced focus on those who many Westerners conceive of as exotic or primitive. In Fabian's view, the field, by essentializing culture—boiling down differences to these supposedly exotic or primitive traits—reinforced and extended stereotypes that debilitated efforts toward cultural understanding.

Postcolonial studies, however, has troubled any neat separation between self and other, or between us and them, common to conventional theories in cultural anthropology or earlier human geography. On the one hand, Edward Said's Orientalism opened a whole field of analysis of how othering tactics served the interests of colonialism and imperialism; indeed, therein lies the impetus for Fabian's work discussed previously. Similarly, the group of Indian historians known as the subaltern studies collective sought, in effect, to rewrite South Asian history from the point of view of the other, albeit articulated in their works as the subaltern or subordinate classes. For another example, in the work of Timothy Mitchell, it can be seen that colonial cities defined themselves by what they were not or what they excluded from their midst. There is an other side to every city in the colonial imagination. Yet things are not nearly so simple, post-colonial studies scholars suggest, and as Mitchell's work shows, the exclusions seldom (if ever) produced the binaries that were intended. In particular, cultural studies scholar Homi Bhabha stressed the ambivalence of colonialism and mimicry that took place on both sides, leaving scars on either end of the encounter. The very otherness of the other often proves as desirable and alluring as it is alien and disgusting.

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