Defining the Other

"Everything is what is not." --G. W. F. Hegel I Throughout human history, we find a continuous struggle to define the other, the foreigner, the unknown, the opposite of we or I. And, as the above quote from Hegel indicates, what they are, that we are not, helps define the frontiers of personal and group identity. In the earliest written accounts, in ancient civilizations like Sumer, Akkad, Egypt, China, India, Mexico, we find stories of battles, of fighting "other" people, as well as accounts of commerce and marriage with people from "other lands." Through this interaction with the other, with the stranger, humans have gradually defined themselves, assigning to both themselves and others distinguishing and unique racial, cultural, and socio-political characteristics They are further distinguished from one another by language, art and religion. Over time, such concepts as race, ethnicity, community, nationalism--among many others--emerged to explain certain aspects of our obsessive concern with the other. These concepts have been used to explain the "sense of belonging" we see in groups, in neighborhoods, in institutions, in primitive tribes, in nations. Sometimes these concepts have also been utilized to explain or foster legitimacy and identity among individuals and/or groups, and sometimes to create divisions and conflict. Christianity inherited the structure of classical antiquity of defining other peoples by a rank of valuation based on its geographical proximity to a center of civilization such as Rome, Athens, Constantinople or Alexandria. For the "civilized" groups of the ancient Roman world, the closer or contiguous "others" were considered "barbarians," because they spoke a language that sounded like "bar-bar" to the Romans. But while not considered quite human, these barbarians were still identifiable through their engagement in such social exchanges as commerce and war. Beyond the land of the barbarians, lived the unknown "monstrous races." As we can see in drawings from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, they were depicted as people with their faces in their belly, with many arms or legs, with only one eye on the forehead, or, in general, with features very close to those of animals. With the triumph of Constantine as sole emperor of Rome in the fourth century A.D., Christianity became the official religion of the late Roman Empire, and the Roman trichotomy of civilized, barbarians, and monstrous humans was transformed gradually to the religious trichotomy of the faithful (that is, the Christians), the unredeemed, and the unredeemable. Muslims--many Islamic societies until the 17th and 18th centuries were as developed or more than European nations--Slavs, Vikings, Franks, and Germans, were considered heretic but redeemable. That is, their acceptance of the word of God would upgrade their category to faithful or Christian, because members of the unredeemed category had a soul and thus could be transformed. This was not the case for the category of monsters, now the unredeemable. Members of this category of religious otherness were not fully human simply because they lacked a soul and could not be converted into Christianity. It was applied to the horseback people that invaded Christendom from the east, such as Mongols, Huns, and Tartars. In fact, the conquests and raids dating from late antiquity up to the time of Gengis Khan and his descendants, were considered by the Christians of the Middle Ages as attacks on the faithful by evil forces. Interpretation of events at that time was based solely on biblical grounds. Thus, these evil strangers were associated with the descendants of Cain, or of Noah's son Ham who had sinned against his father and against God. Within this unredeemable, monster-like category were also inserted black Africans. The medieval belief that they had no soul constituted one of the key reasons why there was little resistance to black slavery until much later. …