Always the other and otherness

I (we) tend to talk a lot about "the other" and "otherness" and tend to use this theme as a go-to when explaining anthropological matters. I've wondered a couple of times whether the same things on which a study or another focuses could be perfectly explained (and emphasizing the same causal explanation) not using the whole other narrative. But then the thought just passed slipped my mind, as the reading or writing I was engaged into was most probably required for an objective very "in the now".

Reading Marc Augé - who is a brilliant theoretician of postmodernity and redefined spatiality, by the way, so if you like works like Bauman and post-structuralists like Foucault you should really see some of his writings as well - I came across this interesting passage:


"The first of these concerns anthropological research: anthropological research deals in the present with the question of the other. The question of the other is not just a theme that anthropology encounters from time to time, it is its sole intellectual object, the basis on which different fields of investigation may be defined. It deals with the other in the present: that should be enough to distinguish it from history. And it deals with it simultaneously in several senses, thus distinguishing itself from the other social sciences.
It deals with all forms of the other: the exotic other defined in relation to a supposedly identical "we" (we French, we Europeans, we Westerners); the other of others, the ethnic or cultural other, defined in relation to a supposedly identical "they" usually embodied in the name of an ethnic group; the social other, the internal other used as the reference for a system of differences, starting with the division of the sexes but also defining everyone's situation in political, economic and family terms, so that it is not possible to mention a position in the system (elder, younger, next-born, boss, client, captive...) without referring to one or more others; and finally the private other - not to be confused with the last - which is present at the heart of all systems of thought and whose (universal) representation is a response to the fact that absolute individuality is unthinkable: heredity, heritage, lineage, resemblance, influence, are all categories through which we may discern an otherness that contributes to, and complements, all individuality. All the literature devoted to the notion of the self, interpretation of sickness and sorcery bears witness to the fact that one of the major questions posed by ethnology is also posed by those it studies: the question concerning what one might call essential or private otherness. Representations of private otherness, in the systems studied by ethnology, place the need for it at the very heart of individuality, at a stroke making it impossible to dissociate the question of collective identity from that of individual identity. This is a remarkable example of what the very content of the beliefs studied by the ethnologist can impose on the approach devised to register it: representation of the individual interests anthropology not just because it is a social construction, but also because any representation of the individual is also a representation of the social link consubstantial with him." (Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Bookmarque Ltd, 1995, pages 18-19)

I think in this excerpt the answer to my inner question was given. And I would also add that in this idea ("absolute individuality is unthinkable: heredity, heritage, lineage, resemblance, influence, are all categories through which we may discern an otherness that contributes to, and complements, all individuality"), Marc Augé has the brilliant intuition that otherness is actually, in its most general anthropological form, togetherness. :)