An Other Otherness
Ghassan Hage, Anthropology, University of Sydney
The cosmopolitan modes of defining what a racist or a non-racist attitude towards the other entails have become largely hegemonic. The definitions are made within the parameters set by well-known binaries: being open or being closed to otherness, tolerating or not tolerating otherness, appreciating or not appreciating otherness. In this paper I want to examine some of the ways in which non-cosmopolitan transnational Lebanese immigrants interact with cultural otherness. I will show that such attitudes cannot easily fit in the mode of classification defined by cosmopolitanism. More generally, comparing cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan attitudes to otherness gives us a deeper understanding of racism.
