Abstract
In this introductory chapter Jos Platenkamp presents the main tenets of the reports written by an international group of professional anthropologists with research experience in societies of the Canadian Arctic, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Southern Europe. They all address the question how as ‘strangers by vocation’ they were received by the people among whom they lived and worked. Platenkamp emphasises that, the profound distinctions between them notwithstanding, these societies share some core ideas about the status and values assigned to the stranger. In doing so these societies offer a critical comparative perspective on the various ‘Western’ perceptions in this respect.
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Notes
- 1.
Conference‚ Integrating Others—Perspectives from Elsewhere’, Münster University, 1–2 December 2016. I am indebted to Almut Schneider, Andre Gingrich and Meta Henneke for their perceptive comments on an earlier version of this text.
- 2.
Gaği denotes a single female non-Sinti person, gağe is the plural, non-gendered form.
- 3.
Unless stipulated otherwise, all quotations in this chapter are from the contributions discussed.
- 4.
Whereas in Germany the term kanak is a highly derogatory and racist label employed by extreme right-wing people to refer to ‘coloured’ persons of foreign origin, in New Caledonia Kanak is an autonym adopted by the indigenous people following the anti-French uprisings.
- 5.
Elsewhere Elisabeth Tauber has described (Tauber 2018) how Sinti may ‘think the world into existence’ on behalf of non-Sinti people, too, thus suggesting that there is a valuable reciprocity characterising their interrelationship. But whether the Sinti community conceives to be dependent on such relationships with strangers remains a moot point.
- 6.
Current moral discourses on the ‘colonialist’ nature of social anthropological research tend to reduce the societies under study to impotent victims of the actions of the so-called Western Other. The present contributions show how such ‘post-colonialist’ discourses may ignore the autonomy, sovereignty and empowerment that these societies have displayed and still display in their contacts and interactions with such ‘others’.
- 7.
Cp. Platenkamp (2014).
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Platenkamp, J.D.M. (2019). Introduction. In: Platenkamp, J., Schneider, A. (eds) Integrating Strangers in Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16703-5_1
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