Transcript EXCLUSIONARY OTHERING

AND ITS GENOCIDAL CONSEQUENCES
By Simona Maria Ciot
•The term Other is conceptualized by Hegel in The
Phenomenology of Spirit as opposed to Self.
•Other becomes an ethical entity in Levinas` phenomenology,
being connected to infinity and the scriptural God, “The
Infinite Other”.
•“All societies create the self and the other with their own
set of categories” (Helen Fein)
•Each and every individual or group is at the same time
excluded and included, outsider and insider.
•“The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a nonallergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is
welcomed this conversation is a teaching.” (Emmanuel
Levinas)
•Social sciences display limited assertion of othering as a
positive and inclusive process, one that implies dialogue,
seeing the world from the perspective of another and erasing
dividing lines in an attempt to accomplish a sense of
community.
•Ever since Raphael Lemkin invented the term genocide and
defined it, othering as a process was gradually used more in
terms of defining exclusion than inclusion.
•In Axis Rule On Occupied Europe (1944), the term genocide
is first used, a combination between the Greek genos I
(people, race) and the Latin cidere (to kill).
•The legal definition of genocide is found in the 1948
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG).
•Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as
"any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such: killing members
of the group; causing serious bodily or mental
harm to members of the group; deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part; imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group."
•Case Study: Rwandan Genocide (1994).
•Death toll: almost 1 000 000 people.
•Duration: 100 days, from April until July 1994.
•Inclusionary Othering is the power within the relationship,
not from outside, that aspires to connect through
difference.
•Defining Self through difference from the Other in an
inclusive, empathic and empowering relationship that
cannot contend annihilation and destruction.