Post-China Entry 1

Before leaving for China, I found it interesting to study the reactions of those around me when they learned that I was traveling there for a field study class. Likewise, my friends and family have been far more inquisitive about the trip upon my return than they might have been had I simply been traveling in another state in the U.S.A. This got me thinking, even before we left, about the underlying perceived differences that become apparent from even these simple inquiries. Had I told people I was going to Mexico there might have been minor interest, and probably even less so if I had told them I was going to South Dakota. Why, then, should China be a much more fascinating destination?

There are several possible responses to this question, but they all have at their base an underlying, central answer. For one, China is a lot farther away than most of the other destinations to which I might conceivably be traveling. It is also not somewhere to which most Americans travel with great frequency, in part due to the aforementioned distance. There is also the perceived notion that China is very different from here, much more so than Mexico or South Dakota. This is the most direct clue that there is more to how people responded than simply the distance I was going to have to fly. The central assumption, the one in the back of everyone’s mind, is that China is drastically different, alien, and foreign to our sensibilities. This sentiment has been described in a number of ways, from Orientalism to Otherness to Alterity, but whether it is viewed through the lens of philosophy, anthropology, or sociology, it is the same phenomenon and combating it is the most important reason for a trip such as ours.

The concept of Otherness has a long and important history in philosophy and anthropology. Writings on Otherness in philosophy, also known as Alterity, can be traced back at least as far as the German idealist Hegel. For Hegel, the Other was a necessary and fundamental aspect of self-consciousness; put briefly, the appearance and recognition of another is part of what helps us to form an identity ourselves. Without the need to define another, we might never experience the need to define ourselves. Jean-Paul Sartre also wrote about the formative effects of Otherness on the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. The general concept of philosophical Alterity is that the mere act of recognizing something as an Other in part defines what you are, for if there were no Others at all, then you would conceivably be boundless and undefined.