chapter4

	"NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NUDITY" Once while reading a local newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, I came across a review for a movie I had already seen called Medicine Man, which stars Sean Connery as a doctor conducting research in the Brazilian rain forest and Lorraine Bracco as his assistant. At the end of each review, the paper listed factors that made the movie appropriate for various audiences. The warning for Medicine Man read:

	Some strong language; moderate violence; national geographic nudity
	"National geographic nudity" apparently referred to the many more or less naked indigenous people who were constantly in the background of the film. But what did the phrase "national geographic nudity" communicate to the Louisville moviegoer? Did it mean that although the movie contained nudity, only the native people were nude? Was "national geographic nudity" meant as a warning or as an assurance? What if Sean Connery’s costar, Lorraine Bracco, had been as scantily clad as the natives were throughout the film? What might the warning have said then? Is nudity not really considered nudity when it is the customary "attire" of rain forest natives? Or is it not really nudity because those people are a natural part of the film’s location, like the trees and animals, and thus not the same as the British or American actors? Somehow the phrase "national geographic nudity" implies that the natives were not as present or as visible as the other people in the movie.

	In her poem that opens this chapter, Elizabeth Bishop recounts a childhood experience of sitting in a dentist’s office waiting room and passing the time by thumbing through a National Geographic magazine.

	My Aunt was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited I read the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs... A dead man slung on a pole —"Long Pig," the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it straight through. I was too shy to stop.
	Bishop’s memory of seeing the women in the National Geographic is punctuated by her memory of hearing her Aunt Consuelo’s brief "oh! of pain" from the dentist’s chair. The voice of her aunt, the strangers in the waiting room, and the pictures of the women in the magazine all combine, despite her shyness, to create a mysterious connection across the globe:

	What similarities boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts held us all together or made us all just one?
	Bishop’s poem and the newspaper warning about Medicine Man raise the central question of this chapter: what do we see when we encounter people different from ourselves? What do we see, and how do we respond, when confronted with otherness and difference? In Chapters 2 and 3, the selections considered how we come to be who we arethe forces that shape the self and the community and culture to which we feel we belong. This chapter is the first of two in which we will look at the other side of who we arethat is, who we are not. In fact, the two ideas are connected because there is a complementary relationship between who we are and who we are not. Our attempts to know and define ourselves inevitably involve defining others. In many cases, defining others means viewing them through the prejudice of a framework that casts them as the opposite or the antithesis of the defining perspective. When people rigidly define others as separate from or the opposite of a particular cultural identity, they are engaging in the construction of otherness.

	Not only is identity, as we saw earlier, shaped by all kinds of cultural influences (such as stories, family, and customs), but it is also shaped by how others perceive us. Although we experience such reactions in very personal terms, in a larger sense we also construct our sense of self partly on the messages we receive from our culture about other people who are different. As Stuart Hall puts it in his essay in this chapter:

	Thus, another critical thing about identity is that it is partly the relationship between you and the Other. Only when there is an Other can you know who you are. To discover that fact is to discover and unblock the whole enormous history of nationalism and of racism. Racism is a structure of discourse and representation that tries to expel the Other symbolicallyblot it out, put it over there...at the margin.
	By calling "racism" a structure of "discourse and representation," Hall notes that when we speak of constructions of "otherness," we mean not only an attitude or belief, but also the embodiment of that belief in language and images that make up the cultural environment.

	This chapter looks at how the idea of "otherness" is depicted in American culture in explicit, implicit, and sometimes very subtle ways. We will explore such images of otherness and difference and ask what force they have in our culture. How are they expressed? What have they to do with creating and maintaining individual, communal, and cultural identity?

	WHAT IS NORMAL? In his documentary exposé of conditions on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1890s, investigative journalist Jacob Riis writes that in Lower New York

	[o]ne may find for the asking an Italian, a German, a French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony. Even the Arab, who peddles "holy earth" from the Battery as a direct importation from Jerusalem, has his exclusive preserves at the lower end of Washington Street. The one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community.
	What, we might ask, in a nation of immigrants, is a distinctively American community? What kind of people is Riis looking for?

	Riis’s quest for a "distinctively American community" was recently echoed in a comment made by television personality Pat O’Brien. He complained jokingly that most of the Americans had been eliminated from the 1997 U.S. Open tennis tournament competition, saying, "I mean, this is the U.S. Open and there is only one player from the U.S. left in the tournamentand his name is Chang."

	Examining the two comments together is a useful way to raise the idea of "normative" assumptions that often underlie the construction of otherness. What is the operative definition in either Riis’s or O’Brien’s mind that makes an American an American? Why did Pat O’Brien not consider Chang an American namewhile he probably thought that O’Brien waseven though both the Changs and O’Briens had no doubt come to America as immigrants at some point. Jacob Riis himself had come from Denmark fewer than twenty years before his remark. One implication, to use a key word from the previous chapter, is that some people belong in America and others don’t. Another implication is that if everyone does belong in America, some people belong to the core of American society while others belong in some other wayperhaps as guests, as aliens, or as residents on the peripherybut forever outside the center.

	Implicit definitions of national identity are just one of the many often unspoken notions of what is normal that operate in the public rhetoric of our society. There are, of course, many other applications of normative behavior and appearance that also operate in our culture. Naturally, there are common ways of living in any culture that form the center of that culture; this is the way of most of the world’s cultures and societies. All cultures have certain norms, even if different cultures vary in their capacity to accommodate differences. This chapter examines the question of how difference is constructed as otherness in the United States. More specifically, it focuses on those aspects of American expression and thinking in which the dominant culture is used as the standard for labeling, judging, and treating people.

	We can find one of the longest-standing examples of this kind of thinking in American culture in the encounter between European explorers and the original inhabitants of the New World, particularly in the application of the "general term Indian" to all native peoples despite their differences. As Robert Berkhofer Jr. points out in his essay later in this chapter, no matter how much the Europeans learned about the differences among various tribes, the differences between "Indians" and "Europeans" were considered the most important. He notes that the general category of "Indian"—and all that the term implied about native peoples being the very opposite or negative of Europeanspersisted well into the twentieth century. "Americans and Africans appeared naked, and the former usually wore a feathered headdress and carried a bow and arrow. Europe, in brief, represented civilization and Christianity and learning confronting nature in America. The general terms heathen, barbarian, pagan, savage, and even Indian revealed these criteria of judgment at the same time that they validated the use of collective terms for the peoples of other continents." Berkhofer further argues:

	Another persistent theme in White imagery is the tendency to describe Indian life in terms of its lack of White ways rather than being described positively from within the framework of the specific culture under construction. Therefore, tribal Americans were usually described not as they were in their own eyes but from the viewpoint of outsiders, who often failed to understand their ideas and customs. Images of the Indian, accordingly, were (and are) usually what he was not or had not in White terms, rather than in terms of individual tribal cultures and social systems as modern anthropologists aim to do.
	Ever since the "discovery" of the so-called "New World," America has been defined by shifting sets of dichotomies between white/dark, civilized/savage, and cultured/primitive. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Native Americans were considered less of a threat, the dominant construction of otherness was projected onto African Americans, darker European immigrants, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and Latin American immigrants. Whichever racialized minorities were seen as somehow "outside" the core of American societyeither as an overt threat or as a necessary but marginalized underclassvaried according to region and period. But what is consistent in the worst of these instances is not just a sense of difference, but also a sense of otherness.

	When the construction of otherness occurs on top of a sense of difference, a seemingly impassable gulf between cultures will often also occur. In his essay titled "Makes Me Wanna Holler," Nathan McCall recounts his early childhood perceptions of the way racial difference structured his stepfather’s dealings with his "white" employers:

	It is difficult sometimes to pinpoint defining moments in a life. But I’m certain that that period marked my realization of something it seemed white folks had been trying to get across to me for most of my young lifethat there were two distinct worlds in America, and a different set of rules for each: The white one was full of possibilities of life. The dark one was just that--dark and limited.
	Although McCall strongly remembers getting a distinct message about "two worlds," sometimes the construction of otherness is not so clearly dichotomized or overtly negative. In part, this is Tara L. Masih’s point in her essay on the term exotic, which she says can mean a whole range of things in our language. When someone is told he or she looks exotic, or that some product is said to have a taste or appearance that is exotic, the word can mean, Masih says, anything from "foreign" to "strange" to "unusual" to "different." Even if such uses of exotic are meant as a compliment (and she implies that when she is told by men, for example, that they love her "exotic looks," they are giving a compliment), the implication is still that she is outside some cultural norm. And, in fact, as she points out, the word exotic comes from a Greek word meaning "outside."

	One of the questions raised in this chapter and throughout the book focuses on the relationship between otherness and difference. Is it possible to think of people as being different without thinking of them as being outside some cultural norm? Is it possible to have a culture with a sense of identity yet without a sense of cultural outsiders or others? Is it possible to recognize difference as diversity and not as otherness? At the end of her essay, Masih argues that it is necessary to move beyond dichotomies. She suggests, "Perhaps the real definition of exotic should be ‘[a] recognition of that which is especially unique to each culture.’" Such a suggestion seems reasonable enough, but what prevents people from looking at others as merely different?

	FEAR AND DIFFERENCE The answer to that question, which is both complex and sensitive, surely has much to do with a network of irrational beliefs and fears that are tied to a host of social, economic, and emotional factors. David Sibley puts it this way:

	Who is felt to belong and not to belong contributes in an important way to the shaping of social space. It is often the case that this kind of hostility to others is articulated as a concern about property values but certain kinds of difference, as they are culturally constructed, trigger anxieties and a wish on the part of those who feel threatened to distance themselves from others. This may, of course, have economic consequences.
	Feelings about others, people marked as different, may also be associated with places. Nervousness about walking down a street in a district which has been labelled as dangerous, nauseousness associated with particular smells, or conversely, excitement, exhilaration or a feeling of calm may be the kinds of sensations engendered by other environments. Repulsion and desire, fear and attraction, attach both to people and to places in complex ways.

	Peter Marin echoes Sibley’s ideas when he discusses some residents’ reactions to homeless people in his neighborhood. He claims that what affects our relation to homeless people is not a sense of danger per se, but rather a set of anxieties he labels the "Family of bourgeois fears." "Our response to the homeless," he says, "is fed by a complex set of cultural attitudes, habits of thought, and fantasies and fears so familiar to us, so common, that they have become a second nature and might as well be instinctive, for all the control we have over them. And it is by no means easy to untangle this snarl of responses. What does seem clear is that the homeless embody all that bourgeois culture has for centuries tried to eradicate and destroy."

	We can apply Marin’s observations about mainstream responses to the homeless to most attitudes about "otherness." People are considered "others" when they are perceived to be (through some "snarl of responses") in competition with or threatening to the very core of a culture’s sense of self-identity. What results, as several of the authors in this chapter imply, is a self-perpetuating cycle of positive cultural self-definition and negative representations of the "other." Whether examining the clear, racialized divisions drawn by Nathan McCall in his memories of growing up black in "white America," Art Spiegelman’s depiction of the strict dichotomies of Germans and Jews in Nazi Germany (by drawing the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats), or the more complicated and subtle conflicts of identity Adrienne Rich feels when rediscovering her family’s abandoned Judaism in the South, this chapter is about the representation of the border between people as a seemingly impassable barrier of otherness.