Radical Otherness

Sociological and Theological Approaches

Lisa Isherwood, David Harris

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317546177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The problem of otherness is central to debates in both the social sciences and theology. To define the other – by colour, gender, politics, nationality, or religion – is to define the self. Othering has been used through history as a justification for boundary-setting, for conflict and for oppression. Radical Otherness presents a broad overview of otherness in both sociology and theology. The book reveals how social theory can illuminate many contemporary issues in theology, whilst the examination of theological methods can shed light on problematic issues in sociology. The discussion of issues in Radical Otherness moves from the personal to the political, to the hermeneutic, to the ultimate otherness of metaphysics. At each stage, discussion of theory is grounded in concrete examples. The book offers students of ethics, theology, and sociology of religion a clear and engaged assessment of otherness, and opens up new ways for investigating a concept central to the study of both religion and society.

1 OTHERNESS, OUTSIDERS AND LARGER TENTS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315729527-1

This chapter begins with some examples of mundane otherness and its role in interaction. The mechanism here that relates selves to others has been described by various symbolic interactionists. Charles Cooley (1972), for example, coined the phrase “looking-glass self” to describe ways in which our sense of self is clearly related to the perceptions and reciprocal actions of others; indeed, we develop a “social self” almost completely oriented to the real or imagined actions of others. George Herbert Mead developed a cluster of concepts, first splitting the “I” and the “me” (a more reflexive and more objective notion, respectively, of the self), and went on to describe the general mechanism for learning how to orient oneself to the actions of others. One “takes the role of the other” in imaginative play, assuming a reciprocity of perspectives so that if we can experience a situation in a particular way, we can assume it must be experienced like that for others too. Others with most contact with us (both quantitatively and qualitatively) can become “significant others” an idea that lives on in the currently fashionable talk of “role models”. As our experience grows, we can construct a “generalized other” to orient ourselves towards the actions of strangers: this, in turn, gets incorporated back into the “me”. It is easy to see functionalist assumptions here too that the levels and dimensions will be smoothly integrated.

Schutz's “Stranger”

Alfred Schutz’s (1971) famous essay on the stranger describes very well the disorientation that can arise when encountering others. All individuals have a stock of knowledge that guides their own action and helps to interpret the actions of others. These tend to be deeply established in particular communities, to such an extent that they are taken for granted, and they have been maintained over generations. Newcomers to those communities experience a double shock: their own stocks of knowledge and recipes seem inadequate for the first time, and the actions of those in the host communities become problematic for the first time. Schutz says that these problems do not present just as a matter of temporary social dislocation that can be fairly rapidly overcome after a period of suitable resocialization. What is involved is a whole problem of knowledge and how to reflect on it.

Considerable changes in orientation are required for immigrants. They have to abandon the “natural attitude” which has governed personal and social action unproblematically in the past, and adopt what looks much more like the “scientific attitude” a matter of attempting to become detached, to adopt an impersonal centre for the deployment of knowledge, and to be prepared to subject common sense to new tests of adequacy. Schutz is curiously unhelpful about how the shift from common sense to scientific attitude can take place, in fact, here and elsewhere in his work, and in this essay he seems to offer us only the metaphor of “a leap”.

Understanding is possible in the Schutzian framework, which draws upon Husserlian phenomenology. Strangers are likely to find themselves in social situations with individuals from the host community in which shared understandings can develop. Schutz insists on the importance of face-to-face communication here, since such encounters can deliver a sense of sharing subjective time or duration. As a result, each participant can see how typical chains of action are established, since participants can be observed responding to objects and a common environment, and the actions of the host individuals. Phenomenological processes are invoked, sharing objects in horizons and generating common thematizations based on them, while making reasonable inferences that if an individual appears to act like oneself then there is a suitable “reciprocity of perspectives”. As an aside, the process seems remarkably similar to what Ettinger describes as “matrixial” understandings (Ettinger 2007), although she emphasizes the presymbolic dimensions.

One application might have been the integrationist policy towards race relations that dominated post-war Britain. The idea was that by preventing segregation of jobs and housing by law, immigrants and hosts would be forced to mix and, eventually, share duration and develop intersubjective understandings. There are studies that suggest that this policy worked, and that face-to-face contact provided many more paths to understanding than, say, the indirect knowledge of immigrants that was available to residents of predominantly white areas, provided mostly by television coverage. It might be interesting to revisit the issue. However, social mixing is by no means easy to engineer from above. There have been, for example, attempts to engineer limited forms of contact such as sports facilities that permit the genders to share subjective time together. Here, a number of serious barriers appear to remain, including a number of sexist discourses or hegemonic-masculine ideologies and practices (see Elling et al. 2003).

For most of us, most of the time, we are drawing upon a stock of knowledge and a system of relevances of which we are barely aware. They serve, as we saw, as a set of recipes for action and interaction, or, to use a more modern analogy, programs. There are opportunities even in ordinary life for us to develop “we-relationships” or even “thou-relationships” where the other is treated as a fully developed subject. “We-relationships” in particular, develop in social relations of intimacy with a great deal of shared subjective experience.

However, most of the other apparent individuals in our social world are outside such relationships. They are “typifications” and here Schutz wants to refer deliberately to the work of Weber, who suggested that the “ideal type” was the basis of sociological method as well. The term has been much debated and discussed but we can characterize it as a theoretically informed model of the other person. Unlike the conventional, positivist sociological models, which are often statistical or empirical generalizations, though, Weber insisted on the “ideal” quality as well, referring to a theoretical and philosophical judgement about what is essential. Schutz (1972) actually has done a great deal to extend unclarified Weber’s conceptions of social action, using phenomenological terminology.

Returning to the personal level, however, individuals in the naturalistic attitude operate by allocating other places in sets radiating out from ourselves at the centre of our subjective world. The distance from ourselves reflects the degree of anonymity that we use in our typifications. Thus relatives might be understood in terms of fairly detailed typifications, while the postal service operative (to use one of Schutz’s actual examples) can be understood in terms of a basic minimal and undetailed form of typification: we only need enough to know about our postal service operative to be able to regulate the minimum interaction with them every morning.

Bourdieu’s more sociological contributions are in some ways more radical. For example, Bourdieu wants to refer to an unconscious “habitus” instead of Schutz’s sedimented stock of knowledge, implying definite social organization (see e.g. Bourdieu 1993, 2000). The habitus arises from initial socialization and manifests itself not only in thought but in typical ways of behaving and conceiving of bodies. One result is that it is extremely difficult to reflect upon the impact of the habitus in describing more conscious activities, principally, for Bourdieu (1986), matters of social “distinction” including and excluding others. These appear to be spontaneous, taken-for-granted, naturalized. Even the most acutely reflexive philosophers, such as Kant, have only rediscovered in thought categories based on these unconscious perceptions and judgments (ibid.). No doubt, if we wished to be more aggressive in this discussion with theology, we might suggest that the categories of theology are similarly grounded, and, no doubt, theologians would reply that this work is typically reductionist and “sociologistic”.

It is undoubtedly true that much traditional theology relies on a limited stock of (not even knowledge) belief. It is, after all, 150–170 years ago that methods were accepted for examining the Bible, methods that suggested that the words within it were not necessarily literally true. This is a very short period of time for the more conservative Christians, and those of a less conservative nature but who find that the world described within biblical literature serves their position and sense of themselves (usually white Western males), to wake up to new possibilities and realities. The claims of sociologists may appear reductionist but, when addressing certain types of theology, they have a truth in that traditional theology feels unable to move out of a tight circle of what it understands as revelation. As more contemporary theologies are demonstrating, these revelations have served the powerful more often and more completely than they have ever served the marginalized. Further, they have also served to create and expel “others” those whose only crime is that they ask questions of the revelation, those received knowledges and beliefs that may upset the solid, fossilized and power-laden structures that have sprung up from them. This has been demonstrated by many feminist and liberation theologians who examine the way in which religion has played a large and, at times, motivating role in colonization. There was never any intention of dialogue with the received knowledges and wisdoms of the colonized; their understandings were simply labelled primitive, marginalized, at times punishable by death, and wiped out.

Recent work by Marion Grau (2012) carefully outlines how this strategy was not simply one of ignorance, as has often been said, but was intimately tied in with economics and greed. Many indigenous religions had a high regard for the ecological resources of their lands and an intimate relationship with those resources and creatures. In order that capitalism, the bedfellow of colonizing religion, may exploit and abuse the world’s resources, those religions that protected them and gave humans a more realistic perception of their place in the world had to be marginalized and those “primitives” who followed them made to be “other” in the most grotesque ways (ibid.: 15). We know that in France, up to the 1960s, human zoos were a great attraction, with the “primitives” being on display for the civilized to be both thrilled and disgusted by them (Chrisafis 2011). It is becoming clearer in theology that the unconscious habitus therein has not always led to the redemption of the world but rather destruction of civilizations, religions and environments on a massive scale.

Feminist theology also has to guard itself from this trap. Having started life with very destabilizing and, therefore, apparently new questions based in different knowledge bases, that of lived experience and the body, there is always a danger of feminist theology falling back on received orthodoxies. The most obvious and constantly challenged one is essentialist in nature, when many feminist theologians argue for the unique experience and even nature of women. In the early days this assumed that woman was a single category but there is now recognition that such a stance, which underpinned the notion of global sisterhood, was at best naive. The tension, however, still remains as a category of women is needed in order to have a feminist critique, but one should always guard against this itself fossilizing into received wisdom. We discuss this issue in later chapters.

Bourdieu suggests that the contents of the stock of knowledge in question can be understood as functioning as if they were stocks of capital, hence the term “cultural capital”. This clearly introduces a dimension of social inequality, especially a notion of social class, since cultural capital is distributed as unequally as economic capital. Those from elite backgrounds acquire more, and far more useful, stocks of cultural capital.

In one of his most famous works, Bourdieu (1986) suggested that these stocks underpin organized systems of tastes and values, or “aesthetics”. To be very brief, the “popular” aesthetic judges the value of cultural activities on the basis of whether or not they deliver immediate emotional reward and permit immediate participation. It is no accident that the “high” aesthetic defines itself in opposition to these values, and stresses instead the delights of cool, detached and rather academic considerations of matters such as form rather than content. There are also correspondingly different stances towards the body and pleasures of the flesh. Bourdieu’s empirical work in France suggests that these two aesthetic dispositions are evident in the differing tastes expressed by people from different social classes in cultural areas such as diet, exercise, film, music and sport. There is a current study of modern Britain that attempts to replicate some of this work and has found problems (Bennett et al. 2008). The issue of the “cultural omnivore” able to cross boundaries, is also still much discussed (see Warde et al. 2007).

Bourdieu further suggests that these differences are played out in education as well, and that those from non-elite backgrounds are being judged against the high aesthetic and, hardly surprisingly, found wanting (Bourdieu 1988). The judgements in education turn on matters such as accent, written style and “bodily hexis” including the extent to which one feels comfortable in one’s body. This has obvious implications for the ways in which non-traditional students are treated as “others” by academic hierarchies. The process operates at the unconscious level so that structures of judgment underpin and inform in unrealized ways more formal systems of assessment and grading, for example. Bourdieu is also a pessimist about the possibilities of reform. The accumulation of cultural capital enabling one to move away from the popular aesthetic is inevitably a slow and painful business (Bourdieu 1986). Even those who have acquired some insights, say through university education, are liable to remain socially marginal, rather as in the figure of the autodidact; they can never deploy the high aesthetic fluently and apparently naturally, especially when new cultural developments require judgement. It is easy to see how judgements like this are connected to the reproduction of social class differences: there is a constant process of defining self against others in terms of social class, and social-class dynamics drive processes of othering, and constantly renew and energize them.

It is possible to see the same processes at work with the other main social divisions too. Much work suggests that masculine hegemony is constantly instantiated in all sorts of areas where the genders meet, especially, perhaps, in sport (see e.g. Burgess et al. 2003; Collins [2002] also shows how women can resist). Dana Berkowitz (2006) shows how both ultramasculine and ultrafeminine “fronts” are constructed in the rather extreme example of a sex shop as customers encounter each other. We might have an account of a relational process of local solidarity and exclusion, a micropolitics of otherness.

We can expect the process of differentiation to affect intercultural differences as well. Bourdieu himself began life as an anthropologist, trying to explain the dynamics of the Algerian or Kabylian habitus (actually, a cluster of habituses). One of his best examples turns on the understanding of the calendar for Kabylians, as a contrast with Western rational notions (Bourdieu 2000). The very “otherness” of this understanding confounded anthropological attempts to subdue it with academic categories.

Simmel's “Stranger”

Georg Simmel’s ([1908] 1950) essay on the stranger is only brief, but it encapsulates many of the issues raised so far. Simmel also refers to immigrants and their relations to host societies, referring to the Jews in Germany as examples. The social relations between immigrants and hosts are an interesting combination of “distance and nearness, indifference and involvement” (ibid.: 404). Rather like Schutz, Simmel points out that immigrants can never fully feel at home since they do not share the deeper cultural and social commitments and beliefs of their hosts, but they get much closer than visitors do. The good side of this situation is that strangers are able to pursue a more objective and detached stance, and this has economic benefits (e.g. permitting trade), and social benefits (e.g. being able to avoid partisan positions). The bad side arises from suspicions of lack of commitment, disloyalty, even subversion from within.

Simmel argues that these combinations of intimacy and distance are actually widespread in modern societies as well, although possibly to a lesser extent. Even lovers are aware that their relationship is both special and unique to themselves and also part of “something more general … [applying to] an indeterminate number of others” (ibid.: 408). There is a growing sense that the general is becoming more important than the special and unique. Simmel suggests that immigrants know this better than anyone else.

We discuss the issue of the modern asylum seeker later, but there is some sociological work on relative movements within social systems by “natives”. Earl Hopper (1981) examines the socially mobile, who have come from social class and status origins that mark them as other, and who now find themselves in closer contact with those from another social class or status group. It is not surprising to find that social mobility can bring a considerable number of tensions and social problems based around challenges to identity and belonging. Hopper noticed a feeling of “relative deprivation” and dissatisfaction, which was far more marked when individuals came into contact with members of adjacent social groups (ibid.). We do not commonly compare ourselves with the life and conditions of the aristocracy, for example, but find comparisons with similar professions much more likely to trigger dissatisfaction and discontent.

More recent studies of social mobility through higher education suggest similar findings. Diane Reay (2003) and others have found that female working-class students entering university exhibit considerable self-doubt and anxiety, feeling that they may have to leave one social class but never fully belong to another. This restricts their ambitions in their choice of university, and may explain the considerable self-doubt that affects many such students: the “impostor syndrome” where working-class students constantly worry that they will be “found out”.

The Context: Modernity

It is possible to go from here to briefly outline some of the themes that will be considered in later chapters. There are many social critics who argued that advanced capitalism or modernity seriously erodes a sense of self or identity. This might well provide the impulses to define oneself constantly against others in the micropolitical everyday activity we have been describing.

The links are clear in Simmel, for example...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Radical Otherness: a socio/theological investigation
• 1. Otherness, outsiders and larger tents
• 2. The politics of otherness
• 3. The hermeneutics of otherness
• 4. Consuming others
• 5. Otherness as a metatheoretical/physical problem: backgrounding the foreground
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index