Week Five

I like how the Holliday book defined four different parts of Othering. Othering is a term used when someone is trying to set apart someone/thing else, and typically has a negative connotation to it. There was story about a student who used the Culturalism concept of Othering to explain what a woman was doing. Just because Mrs. Smith was Amish, he would explain any of her habits by adding that she was Amish. The book explains, and I agree, that by that concept, she could just as well have doing everything she did because she is a woman, or married, or in America. Generalizing one concept to make a blanket statement that all of a person’s actions are directly related to that cultural identifier. As I posted last week, different identitites are based on different parts of a person’s life and are thus used in different parts of a person’s life. It is erroneous to think that just because a person is a woman she will wear a skirt, or that someone doesn’t drive a car because they are Amish. In large cities it can be economically and environmentally absurd to own/drive a car. Not all girls like skirts (for the record, I love them). Just because I’m bilingual does not make me a liberal pansy (liberal, who knows. But pansy I most certainly am not.).