Annexion et decentrement

Since the beginning of the twentieth-century, the issue of otherness has been central in the intellectual debate among ethnologists, linguists and philosophers. Communication can be seen as a form of translation of the Other, into the language of the Self, and a parallel can indeed be established between translation and the knowledge of others peoples and cultures. As a matter of fact, in order to provide a diligent translation one has to overcome both linguistic difficulties and psychological resistances. The first eighteenth-century adventures stories and travel accounts provided biased descriptions of foreign countries and their un-European habits. The western traveler tended in fact to absorb or ever force the inhabitants of others countries into his own idea of the â rightâ civilisation.. A new approach towards the issue of otherness begins with the work researchers such as Lévi-Strauss, who support the knowledge of â otherâ cultures only through systematic anthropological fieldwork.. Similarly, in linguistics , theorists such as Berman and Meschonnic focus on the need to know of the elements composing a text in order to perform a good translation of that text: there should be an â intimate distanceâ between the translator and his/her text, similar to the one existing, in psychoanalysis, between analyst and his/her patient. Paul RicÅ ur suggests the notion of linguistic hospitality, a notion that goes beyond problems of mere understanding. And the ethno-psychotherapist Marie Rose Moro proposes an approach to the Other that considers not only the biological, but also and mostly, the psychological dimensions of the individual, with a special emphasis on the issue of difference.