The discourse on Romanization took a turn. Influential thoughts from Marxism, the Annales school, and the cliometrics revolution to poststructuralism and postcolonialism travelled and infiltrated Romanization studies. This not only helped to enrich the discourse, but it allowed the posing of meaningful questions. Applying contemporary studies on social structures, economic forces, and cultural politics, historians and archaeologists were able to gradually raise questions concerning the traditional models of parallel discourse, defensive imperialism, and civilizing Romanization. This chapter discusses key works of the Early Adopters, from Dyson, Finley, and Harris to Millett and Woolf to trace the course of postcolonial ideas that travelled to the Romanization discourse. It illustrates how the postwar generation of historians and archaeologists has enriched the Romanization discourse with social, economic, and cultural histories and started to question the imperialist epistemology upon which the discourse on Romanization was built.

This chapter focuses on the figure of the Cyclops and the use of ‘the animal’ in thinking human difference. It presents the animalizing of certain humans (the attribution of animal features to them) as a potent strategy to dehumanize and thus marginalize certain ways of being human. In the ethnographic imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, the margins of the known world are shown to coincide with the margins of the human. The chapter further illustrates that this spatial concept of the human did not remain restricted to the ancient world but carries on into the modern: The figure of the Cyclops, whose problematic humanity is in sharp contrast to the enlightened, educated, and cunning Odysseus, in many ways anticipates that of ‘the savage’ as the quintessential ‘other’ in the modern Western ethnographic literature. And yet the question arises as to whether the ancient story does not already expose the kind of hubris at play when we normalize certain ways of being human while dismissing others.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

Based on the theoretical foundations established in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 presents the book’s overall argument. In response to the research questions formulated in the Introduction it makes four key claims. First, that far from being the result of reignited religious culture wars, the surge of right-wing populism in the West has been driven by the emergence of a new identity cleavage between cosmopolitans and communitarians. Second, that to capitalise on this new divide, right-wing populists employ references to Christianity in the context of a new brand of white identity politics as a secularised cultural identity marker, but often remain distanced from Christian values, beliefs and institutions. Third, that this strategy tends to be most successful amongst irreligious voters or non-practising ‘cultural Christians’ whereas practising Christians often remain comparatively ‘immune’ to right-wing populist appeals. And fourth, that the existence and strength of this ‘religious immunity’ against the populist right critically depends on the availability of a ‘Christian alternative’ in the political landscape and on churches’ and faith leaders’ willingness and ability to create a social taboo around the populist right. These four claims constitute the theoretical cornerstones of this book’s overall argument and serve as an underlying structure for each empirical case study.

In this chapter, I address cross-cultural encounters of two (or more) sets of sensory scripts. These encounters are evident in the wider literature on colonialism, migration and other local–foreign interfaces. In doing so, it serves as an important reminder for one to take heed of multiple axes of sensory similarities and differences, in addition to a merely the East–West core axis of difference. I also turn the lens around by showing how local populations on the reverse, discern colonial or foreign communities through their sensory faculties as a counterpoint. The focus lies in demonstrating how sensory interfaces arising from these processes and movements of people are theorised using the notion of sensory transnationalism. I map this notion onto colonial–local sensory encounters and propose four modes of sensory engagement: reception, rejection, regulation, and reproduction. These modes collectively show how sensory encounters, stemming from contrasting power positions, lend a different understanding of empire and its everyday lived constructions, including how colonial impositions of modernity through sensory regulatory schemes are also met with resistance. Consequently, categories of colonisers and colonised are unsettled instead of being deployed as inherently asymmetrical categories.

Of all the ways in which humans have chosen to divide themselves, none has a history as problematic as race. This concept has significant implications for almost every aspect of contemporary human conduct, irrespective of what ‘race’ we identify with, or even are deemed to belong to. This is particularly so in the field of education.

This chapter will look at the complicated history of race as well as some of the current challenges being faced. In order to describe the complex issues within this important area, a wide range of interrelated terms are used. Probably the most important of these terms is the underpinning notion of ‘othering’ ߝ that is, thinking about a certain person or group as not ‘one of us’... as ‘the other’. This important concept is also very relevant to discussions of gender and sexualities, so it is discussed further in Chapter 3.

This chapter explores the use of clichés as argumentative strategies in online reception of political news items. It conceptualises clichés as strategies that draw on conventionalised inferable premises that warrant conclusion and link the argument with a claim, also known as topoi. Drawing on online commentaries in response to the same item of Brexit news across The Guardian, the Daily Mail and BBC News, the chapter explains how clichés as topoi operate as strategies to legitimise a position and to other members of a perceived out-group thereby allowing participatory media users to construe ideational and interpersonal meanings in the argumentation process.

Chapter 4 analyzes the psychological and physical effects of slavery. Here, it is argued that we continue to place trauma within existing psychological frameworks but fail to understand the effect of ownership and objectification, which presents unique challenges to survivors of slavery and has ramifications for the support structures that are put in place. The chapter argues that the need to bear witness, on both the part of the listener and the narrator, is crucial to meaningful growth in the light of current ill-suited support and allows an acknowledgment of the truth of survivors’ lives. This chapter in particular draws on autobiographies and my own interviews with survivors, mapping their journeys and experiences to the psychological literature on trauma, and exploring the need to bear witness as a powerful means of growth

This chapter explores the cleaners’ relationships and interactions within their microcosm. It examines how cleaners show little interest in defining themselves as one group and articulating common interests. Friendships and coalitions as well as divisions and strife characterize the cleaners’ microcosm. Cleaners form alliances and divisions as they seek to establish a status hierarchy, by creating and enforcing markers of difference. These markers range from age, gender and ethnicity to fashion, cultural tastes and educational backgrounds. Some are subtle, some are stark. But despite these differentiations, a sense of equivalence persists, posing a threat to any sense of specialness. It is a negative equivalence of belonging to a stigmatized group of “anyones”. Cleaners wish to believe that their work and their presence are on some level unique and valued as such, that they are not interchangeable and replaceable; and to fortify their sense of worth they resort to the creation and enforcement of status hierarchies. Such constructions all too often rest on the most fragile of foundations, and the risk of collapse plays no small role in cleaners’ dramas of dignity.

This chapter is about othering, i.e., using words to prejudice against certain social groups.

This chapter takes the popularity of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) as an opportunity to witness the power of tropes that politically and culturally juxtapose urban and regional concerns, and to explore critical regionalist alternatives to rhetorics of disconnection. It examines assumptions about regions that underly Vance’s “hillbilly” and the ethno-national difference between urban and regional spaces. Vance’s Appalachia had unfortunate resonance in a turbulent political season, spawning a subgenre “Trump Country” essays. A critical regionalist uses these characterizations as an occasion to affirm alternative versions of region. Moving quickly and collaboratively, a network of artists and scholars responded in diverse works, landmarked by What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia (2018), the documentary film hillbilly (2018), and the multigenre collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019). These works and the conversations they generated across media create a multivocal portrait of a place that must be understood from a perspective that does not see city and region as antithetical but maps interconnections of urban and rural spaces.

Inspired by the paradigms of feminist anthropology, the prologue situates the author’s trajectory and the book’s epistemological and methodological premises upon which data was collected and transformed into analysis. It sketches out the main sites of research and how exactly the body of empirical data was generated. It critically discusses the scientific desire for knowledge about sexual practices and same-sex cultures in particular and the place of the erotic in the history of anthroplogical fieldwork, in which erotic relationships, whether or not consummated sexually, have been epistemologically productive. Given the absence of a public language about “lesbianism,” the process of locating women who love women in Ghana was lengthy and difficult. By analyzing initial encounters with potential research respondents, the chapter illuminates how this process took shape through a series of constitutive misunderstandings that required the “unlearning” of pre-conceived notions of sexual identity.

This chapter introduces the mechanisms of deliberate or coincidental 'othering' of immigrants through law and the application of law. It starts by introducing what 'othering' means and then transplants the findings into the context of legislation and law. The chapter emphasizes the systemic 'otherness' of immigrants in a legal system defined by the nation state. Citizens are per definition in the in-group, whereas foreigners are per definition in the out-group. The chapter also addresses how the differentiation between foreigner and citizen is more complicated in the EU with its EU citizenship and free-movement rights. The chapter addresses the role of law as an amplifier of 'otherness' or as a tool for the inclusion of immigrants.

The reception of asylum seekers in Europe is a highly debated topic: while national governments oversee the implementation of reception conditions, European member states are bound by European directives on minimum standards. Asylum seekers in collective reception facilities should be provided with at least a minimum of reception standards, including housing, food, material reception standards, and legal assistance. However, reception practices not only largely differ across member states but also constantly draw boundaries between asylum seekers and the host society through geographical, architectural, and bureaucratic measures. Using case studies from Austria and Italy, this contribution investigates how, on the one hand, certain (minimum) standards are applied in relation to restrictive integration claims and discourses and how, on the other hand, resources (e.g. for integration measures or housing) are strictly bound to exclusive structures that complicate the inclusive partaking of refugees in host societies. It highlights the mechanisms whereby national reception practices amplify the ‘othering’ of migrants in the context of asylum seeking.

The Schengen Agreement was meant to create a 'borderless Europe'. Yet, from the outset, countries have had a very ambivalent relationship to what Schengen stood for politically – an enhancement of the economy – and what it meant in practice: not being able to properly monitor the movement of flows of people across intra-Schengen borders. Whereas there should be no borders for so-called bonafide, or trusted, travellers, the lack of border control was seen as problematic in keeping out the 'crimmigrant other': the irregular migrant, the criminal migrant, the terrorist migrant. By investing in various modalities of the policing of movement and mobility, one could say that the border is everywhere in an area that was meant to be borderless and that the process of 'othering' is central to its functioning. By bringing together the literature on 'othering' and 'bordering', this chapter considers the utility of borders not just as sites of enquiry in their own right but as ‘epistemological viewpoints’ from which to analyse the processes of differential 'othering' that are at the core of bordering practices in intra-Schengen border zones.

This chapter places the social process of 'othering' in the context or regulation of immigration and asylum. The chapter also introduces the structure and content of the individual parts of the book as well as their chapters.