Face-to-face with the (animal) Other: An invitation to decolonize the anthropology of Pakistan
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The imperial underpinning of the early anthropology of Pakistan constituted “the other” as a subject of comprehension, categorization, and containment. Later, with the post-9/11 geopolitical backdrop, anthropologists focused on selected themes such as religious and ethnic disparity and political nationalism, eliding some topics or groups. What would it mean for the anthropology of Pakistan to consider alienated themes and groups while emphasizing the infinity of the Other? How would conceiving the Other beyond a political or religious other, or even beyond a human subject, create a possibility of decolonizing the anthropology of Pakistan while exploring multiple futures—emergent, imagined, and expected? Such an approach critically moots a reexamination of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological tenets and urges the discipline to engage with diverse lifeworlds. It brings the face of the Other face-to-face with anthropology beyond humanity to consider all beings, intersubjective and collaborative experiences, and shared values.
Key Questions
How does the Other enter into my world without being reduced to that world?
How does the face of the Other maintain its alterity, its isolated significance, in a face-to-face encounter with the “I” (the same, the self)?
Inspirational Texts
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign. Edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Vol. 1. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Inspirational Quotes:
“I remember something Levinas often says, namely that morality, ethics, begins with an “After you.” After you. The first sign of respect for the other is “after you.” … It means “I come after you,” and I come to myself, to my responsibility as an ego, in some sense, only from the other. The other is there before me, and I receive the order from the other who precedes me. … So I say “After you,” and it’s my first address to the other as other.”
“The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised”