Anthropology and Alterity

<p>Alterity or otherness is a central notion in cultural anthropology and philosophy as well as in other disciplines. While anthropology with its aim of understanding cultural difference tends to take otherness as a fact there have been vigorous attempts in contemporary philosophy particularly in phenomenology to answer the fundamental question: What is the Other? This book brings the two approaches to otherness – the hermeneutical pragmatics of anthropology and the radical reflection of philosophy – together with the goal of enriching one through the other. The philosophy of the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels up to now little known to anthropologists has a central position in this undertaking. Waldenfels’s concept of a responsivity to the Other offers to cultural anthropology the possibility of a philosophical engagement with the Other that does not contradict the project of making sense of concrete empirical others. The book illustrates the fertility of this new approach to alterity through a broad spectrum of themes ranging from reflections on theory formation via discussions of race and human-animal relations to personal meditations on experiences of alterity.</p>