The Conceptual Roots of Otherness in the West
The conceptual foundations of “otherness” can be traced to its deep roots within Western thought, often emerging from a binary
Biblical and Mythological Foundations
The very structure of the Genesis creation narrative in the Bible has been analyzed as a form of defining identity through distinction.
Scholars note that this text, likely composed during the 6th century BC and drawing from earlier Mesopotamian myths like the Enuma Elish, represents a critique of polytheistic neighbors.
By establishing a monotheistic creation story, it inherently defines a belief in one God against the beliefs of others, creating a theological boundary .
Early Christian Discourse
As Christianity developed, its intellectuals grappled with articulating their identity in a multilingual (aka Multicultural) world. Greek and Latin writers, in particular, developed a “rhetoric of alienation” towards speakers of foreign languages, framing them as the alloglottic (foreign-speaking) “Other.”
This was especially pronounced in the Greek milieu, which inherited a deep-rooted sense of cultural superiority over “barbarians” .
A Distinct American Pattern
In the context of the United States, the process of othering Native peoples took a unique form. Unlike immigrant groups who faced pressures to assimilate, Native Americans were treated as separate nations.
Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1831 ruling described their relation to the U.S. as “perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence” .
This legal “otherness” was used to justify specific policies: the federal government dealt with tribes through treaties, established the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a unique bureaucracy for a single minority, and enforced measures like land removal and boarding schools designed to destroy tribal cultures .
This illustrates how othering is not just a social attitude but a structural tool for land and resource acquisition.
Biology of otherness
our behavior as humans is determined by a wide landscape of entangled factors and structures. at the nexus of biology and evolution, social behavior and structures, and psychology, Robert sapolsky articulates the entanglemnts of which “otherness” is emergent:
Humans invent “Us” and “Them” groups wherever they look, whether it’s on the basis of sex, race, nationality, class, age, religion, hair color—there’s nothing we won’t discriminate against, and we do it within a twentieth of a second of seeing someone. Are they an “Us” or are they a “Them”? The flaw in this hardwired thinking reflex is also its silver lining: it is ridiculously easy to manipulate. A racial bias can be duped by something so simple as putting a cap with your favorite sports team’s logo on someone’s head, for example. You can overthrow your brain’s most primal reactions in this way but, as history shows, other people can also get in your head and manipulate the Us versus Them reflex to tragic and catastrophic results.
“Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context—who you are, your environment, and who that person is.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst