![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cultural Misunderstandings
May. 1st, 2016 03:47 pmSep 2015
The Voyages of Captain Cook - ed. Ernest Rhys - Wordsworth, 1999
* *
On a trip a couple of years ago, one of my fellow travellers introduced me to the term othering to describe the tendency of humans to categorise other humans as "us" or "them" based on cultural, racial, political, gender or sexual criteria. While disliking the neologism, I could see that it was better than the intuitive but somewhat racist word "tribalism" that I would have used for the same concept. Othering is a sadly common human trait, and its manifestation in the modern world is particularly noticeable in the political arguments over migration that are ongoing at the time of writing. But it is nothing new, as this book makes depressingly clear.
( Read more... )
The Voyages of Captain Cook - ed. Ernest Rhys - Wordsworth, 1999
* *
On a trip a couple of years ago, one of my fellow travellers introduced me to the term othering to describe the tendency of humans to categorise other humans as "us" or "them" based on cultural, racial, political, gender or sexual criteria. While disliking the neologism, I could see that it was better than the intuitive but somewhat racist word "tribalism" that I would have used for the same concept. Othering is a sadly common human trait, and its manifestation in the modern world is particularly noticeable in the political arguments over migration that are ongoing at the time of writing. But it is nothing new, as this book makes depressingly clear.
( Read more... )
