the.com/otherness
the line drawn around a stranger that always says more about the one holding the pen
means the quality of being perceived as fundamentally different from oneself or one's group, often in a way that sets someone apart as alien or outsider.
from A straightforward English build: "other" plus the noun-making suffix "-ness," which has been turning adjectives into abstract nouns since Old English (compare "goodness," "darkness"). "Other" itself is ancient, from Old English "oþer," with cousins across the Germanic languages and roots reaching back to Proto-Indo-European. The plain word is old, but "otherness" as a weighty term — the condition of being the Other — was sharpened by 20th-century philosophy and social theory, where thinkers used it to name how groups define themselves by deciding who doesn't belong.
- coined term
- philosophers call it alterity, the radical difference of others
- mirror effect
- defining the foreign first defines the familiar
- de Beauvoir
- argued woman was made the Other to man
- colonial tool
- empires invented exotic outsiders to justify ruling them
- infant skill
- babies grasp self versus other before they speak
the uncanny valley — roboticist masahiro mori's 1970 concept where near-human robots trigger discomfort by being almost but not quite human
the other in philosophy — levinas's concept of the irreducible alterity of another person that ethics responds to, foundational to postcolonial theory
orientalism — edward said's 1978 framework showing how the west constructed the east as exotic otherness to dominate it