Rannie Abu-Lughod

This week, I found Abu-Lughod’s discussion of the self and other particularly interesting. The author brought up the dilemma that feminists and anthropologists often face when doing research on cultures and its relationship to self and other. I find the concept of other interesting because I believe that it not only serves to put distance between oneself and something else, but also to objectify and dehumanize that which is considered other. For example, research on violence, wars and aggression has repeatedly shown that people can commit atrocities when they employ certain psychological processes, like objectifying and dehumanizing the enemy. In this way, propaganda surrounding wars often serves to dehumanize the enemy, such as calling enemy soldiers rats and cockroaches. Framing the opposition like this can be seen as the ultimate form of othering and helps those involved behave in ways unacceptable towards the self (or others perceived to be similar to self).

The distinction between the self and other and this dehumanizing discourse can also be seen with violence in intimate relationships, which is often perpetrated by a man against a woman. Very commonly, we see a pattern of behavior which starts with verbal abuse which then escalates to physical violence. The verbal abuse can be seen as a step in the objectification and dehumanization of the woman, making her the ultimate other and therefore not worth respecting. Men’s othering of women could also happen in other ways, such as emphasizing difference between women and men in order to justify the submission of women.

The self is split, when it comes to positionality, audience and power inherent in making distinctions between self and others. Positionality refers to everything being seen from a certain point of view. Traditional notions of objectivity would suggest that there is only one way of seeing a problem or issue, which happens to be the patriarchal view. Who gets to decide who is self and who is other refers to their current position, who they are talking to and who has dominance in that situation. Putting women as self can therefore be seen as an act of defiance, of humanizing women and placing their experiences at the center, instead of being treated as objects for men to use.