Diversity and Otherness

Transcultural Insights into Norms, Practices, Negotiations

Lisa Gaupp, Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer, Lisa Gaupp, Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer

• Publisher: De Gruyter Open Poland
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9788366675308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book critically examines multiple ways in which cultural diversity is represented and handled in a variety of contexts, from the artistic to the scientific, from the political to the theatrical, in media, fashion and everyday life, today as well as in the past. By drawing from the observation that specific socio-cultural features are made relevant to create asymmetries and hierarchies between individuals, groups and cultural resources, the volume questions, on the one hand, contingent processes of regulation, standardization, and homogenization of diversity. It points at contradictory processes of in- and exclusion related to the construction of differences between the Self and the Other in processes of doing culture. On the other hand, it recognizes and emphasizes the fluidity of cultural entanglements by adopting a transcultural perspective, which unifies the variety of the topics and of the contexts covered by the chapters, as well as their inter- and transdisciplinarity. While processes such as globalization, decolonization, migration, and mediatization have contributed to place diversity at the centre-stage of both scholarly and non-scholarly debates, this book invites to re-think norms, practices and negotiations of diversity and otherness through a variety of narrations, standardizations, imaginations, and negotiations. By emphasizing the contrast between emancipatory vs. standardizing approaches to diversity and otherness it also invites to "transculturalize" the study and the politics of culture.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Contributing Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Re-thinking Diversity and Transculturality: Introduction
• 2 Epistemologies of Diversity and Otherness
• 3 Un/Doing Differences. The Contingency of Social Affiliations
• 4 The “Cultural Turn” of Postmigrant Conviviality. A Historical Case Study on Practices and Discourses of (Multi)Cultural Diversity in Switzerland, 1970s–1990s
• 5 Promoting a Hygienic Dress That Transcends Cultural Life-Worlds: Some Remarks on the Rejection of Western Clothes by a Chinese Minister to the United States in the Early Twentieth Century
• 6 Spaces of Otherness and Desire. Ballets Russes—Artist-Animators—Ethnographic Enquiry
• 7 ORLAN’s Hybridizations: From Virtual to Literal Cyborg // From Mortal to Immortal Being
• 8 Transculturally Speaking: Linguistic Diversity, Otherness and the Transformation of Public Spheres
• 9 Style, Sense and Senses: The Iconic and Transcultural Language of Italian Fashion
• 10 Encounters with Alterity: Romani on the Contemporary Italian Stage
• 11 Negotiating Gender in Germany—Normalizing Trans*Imaginations. On Aspects of Belonging to and Resisting the Normative Binary Gender Order
• 12 How to Curate Diversity and Otherness in Global Performance Art
• 13 Diversity in Scientific Communities: The Case of European-Japanese Cooperation at Fusion for Energy
• 14 Decolonizing Otherness Through a Transcultural Lens: Conclusion
• Academic Biographies
• List of Figures
• Index