Pontifications: The Other

Today I want to write about the concept of the Other - the sense we have that the world can be divided into groups into which we belong and into which we do not. The groups into which we belong are Us, and everything else is the Other.

The most fundamental question to me is always that of origin. Where do these groups come from? Ultimately, they are a side effect of how we construct our identities - or our identities are a side effect of how we construct our Others. Really, they're both the same thing. Every attribute you consider to be a part of your identity (I am male, I am American, I like science fiction) constitutes a line dividing the part of humanity that shares that attribute with you from the part that does not. And that line cannot be distinguished in any way from the one you draw when you use some attribute of another person to establish their difference from you (she is female, she is foreign, she dislikes sci-fi).

The idea that saying what you are and saying what someone else is are equivalent operations can be a bit hard to get your head around, but consider this how odd it would be for me to describe myself in the following way: "I am a human being. I live on the surface of the planet Earth and breathe air." The fact that no one constructs their identity using such characteristics is precisely because those characteristics are universal, and thus don't serve the basic purpose of an identity, which is to set up a boundary between what you are and what you are not.

The really interesting thing about all of these lines is that the ones we see and the ones we're blind to change constantly. In a crowd of female computer programmers, my maleness would constitute a clear difference separating me from the group, whereas if I were in a crowd of male and female theoretical physicists my gender would likely be unimportant but my education and profession would set me apart. Any number of factors, including simply what aspects of my own identity I consider particularly important, can have a huge impact on how I view my place within a group, and the reverse is equally true.

A society, being basically just a really big group, is no different, either in the arbitrary nature of the in-group's identity or the changes that identity can undergo - a few generations ago my "Irish" identity would have been seen as a basis for discrimination, today I am considered part of the "Caucasian" majority. Today, nationality has been constructed in many places as one of the most fundamental aspects of identity. We are encouraged to identify with hundreds of millions of other people whom we have never met and never will meet, regardless of significant differences between us that would otherwise preclude our ever considering ourselves members of the same in-group, because we share a nationality.

The senmin of Japan are fascinating to me precisely because of the purely arbitrary nature of the line that has been drawn between them and mainstream Japanese. They are labeled Other because they are seen as being different, and the basis of this perceived difference is the fact that they are labeled Other. The lack of any actual physical, linguistic or cultural difference between the burakumin and their non-burakumin contemporaries is as pure a form of discrimination as can exist, and thus it gives us a window into the purely arbitrary soul of human bigotry.