Alterity

ROGER BEGRICH
University of California, Berkeley, United States

“Alterity” refers to otherness. The term, from the Latin alter (meaning “other”), is an
antonym of “identity.” Alterity is thus first and foremost a relational term—an aspect of
the relationship between self and other.
Alterity and the relationship between self and other have been central concerns for
philosophy and social theory. For Hegel, alterity is constitutive of self-consciousness,
both epistemologically—without being conscious of an other, I cannot be conscious
of my self—and ontologically—the self is what the other is not. For Levinas, alterity is
ethical: the presence of the other requires the self to respond, and the relationship to the
other as well as the obligation to respond are prior to any ethical norms. Early feminist
theory has shown how women are rendered men’s other rather than as human, and
Lacanian psychoanalysis locates the other both within and beyond the self. Throughout
these various concerns weaves the fundamental question of whether the other can be
known or represented at all.
For anthropology, alterity is foundational as a disciplinary orientation, a basic epis-
temological condition, an object of investigation, and both ground for and limit of the
discipline’s methodology. Anthropology developed as a science of the (human) other:
researchers from the metropole investigating the periphery (colonized people, non-
literate societies, and so-called primitives or savages). Implied in this configuration
was that rational, modern subjects were studying others—that is, savages constituted
as objects of civilized knowledge. While anthropologists no longer exclusively study
the exotic or distant other, alterity remains a fundamental premise of anthropology’s
analytical approach. Often, anthropology proceeds by making other realities knowable
with rational concepts and universal terminologies, and sometimes this analytical move
is preceded by rendering the familiar unfamiliar—othering objects of investigation to
make them amenable to anthropological analysis. Early twenty-first-century contribu-
tions aim to alter this premise: rather than using Enlightenment concepts to render
local realities intelligible, analytical claims are based on vernacular ontologies, inviting
anthropological analyses to radically other worlds of knowing (e.g., Kohn 2013). Critics
argue, however, that such an ontological approach places conditions of alterity on what
is to be studied, thus reifying the alterity of alterities rather than analyzing the life of
difference (Bessire and Bond 2014).
The dyad self/other is a fundamental condition of modernity: the imagination of
what is modern always requires an opposite, an other that is not modern. Alterity
is thus also a premise for the logic of colonialism, which is fueled by the binary
opposition between imperial selves and colonized others. In contemporary societies
(and states), alterities are constituted both within and without, based on (for example)
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2214
2 A LTERITY

phenotypical, religious, and sexual differences or on conditions such as homelessness

or immigration. Such alterities can be construed as disturbances of normalcy or
appropriated as integral aspects of a collective self-conscious. Anthropologists study
the work of such processes of othering as well as their implications; for example,
when indigenous peoples, in order to be recognized as bearing rights, are required to
conform with specific expectations of alterity, which means that they can neither be
too similar to settlers nor free in choosing the terms of their difference (Povinelli 2002).
Anthropology as a discipline may be premised on an unattainable possibility—of
making alterity, the otherness of the other, knowable, legible, and representable.
Ethnography, as method, is the striving for legibility of the (ontological) other in full
awareness of this (epistemological) unattainability, and the (ethical) readiness of the
ethnographer to be responsive to and transformed by the alterity of the other.

SEE ALSO: Argentina, Anthropology in; Caste; Class and Identity; Colonialism and the
Museum; Diplomacy and International Relations; Empiricism; Gender, Colonialism,
and the Colonial Gaze; Identity in Anthropology; Indigeneity in Anthropology; Lan-
guage and Identity; Liberalism; Mexico, Anthropology in; Mimesis; Modernity; Philo-
sophical Anthropology; Postcolonial Theory and Feminism; Race and Racisms; Spirit
Possession; Utopias and Dystopias, Anthropology and

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Bessire, Lucas, and David Bond. 2014. “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique.”
American Ethnologist 41 (3): 440–56. doi:10.1111/amet.12083.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of
Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.