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Accepted Paper:
The "Self" and The "Other": Analysing the Politics of the Epistemic Categories in Anthropological History and Present
Magna Mohapatra
(UW Madison)
To speak of the Other is to speak of colonialism, power, Western hegemony and knowledge production. The Other is the epistemic category through which the ethnographic subject is studied. This paper gives a history of the anthropologist Self and its making and remaking of the anthropological Other.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on how meanings of the categories of Self and the Other have emerged, morphed and continually transform in the disciplinary history of anthropology. In this context, these categories do not have fixed epistemical lineage and the paper will show the trajectory of the anthropological construction of the Other. Classical anthropology is filled with the object of study of the ‘Native’, ‘Savage’, and ‘Primitive’ which are the terms and more general ways of studying and perceiving what/who we know as the ‘Other’. However, in contemporary anthropology, the connotation of the Other is radically transformed and reoriented. I intend to argue that the anthropological gaze on race, class, gender, question of who is the native, etc all fall into this reorientation of the category of the Other. The paper begins with an examination of the ways in which this anthropological Other is analyzed as the object of study and how who becomes the Other and then I turn to an exploration of the ways in which the category of the ‘Other’ is critically looked at and dissolved into the decolonial conceptions of the anthropological subject beyond its inherent (original colonial gaze) of Othering but also in many ways continues to Other through its neocolonial-neoliberal-neofeudal gaze.