4.1 Leistle 2016 Responsivity and Some Other Approaches To Alterity

Article
Anthropological Theory
2016, Vol. 16(1) 4874
Responsivity and ! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499616628761
approaches to alterity ant.sagepub.com
Bernhard Leistle
Carleton University, Canada
Abstract
Building on recent efforts in this direction, this essay provides arguments in support of
the concept of responsivity, developed by the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, and its
importance in anthropological theorizing. Responsivity is a way of thinking about rela-
tions between self and Other, structure and agency, universality and particularity that
escapes the dichotomy which usually characterizes such conceptual pairings. By defining
responding as a relationship to the Other as other, and by defining the Other as what
we respond to, Waldenfels concept enables anthropologists to theoretically overcome
the contradiction between radical and empirical alterity. This potential is illustrated in a
discussion of the responsive aspects of other approaches to empirical otherness: the
sociology of the stranger, psychoanalysis and semiotics. Through comparisons that
stress points of contact and compatibility, the notion of responsivity is thrown into
sharper relief. At the same time, familiar anthropological approaches to alterity are re-
presented in a changed light.
Keywords
alterity, otherness, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, sociology of the stranger, semiotics,
Waldenfels
Introduction
Response or responding are certainly common enough terms, familiar through
use in everyday language as synonymous for answer or reply. Less so responsivity,
or responsiveness, which have a ring of technicality to them. As a denition for
the adjective responsive, from which these two words are derived, we nd in
Websters dictionary: reacting in a desired or positive way, quick to react or
Corresponding author:
Bernhard Leistle, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, 1125
Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada.
Email: bernhard.leistle@carleton.ca
Leistle 49
respond. Response is here identied with reaction, implying a causal relation to a

stimulus. In this sense, the term has gained a certain currency in the scientic study
of behavior, as can be seen from the following entry in a dictionary of behavioral
science:
1. An answer, especially a formal answer, such as to a question on a test or a

questionnaire.
2. Any process in the body, muscular, glandular, and so on, which results from
stimulation.
3. A psychic process which results from previous psychic processes, sensory or
imaginal.
4. Any over or covert behavior; the class or the organisms executing processes.
(Wolman, 1989)
Two things seem noteworthy here: the extension of the meaning of response to all
forms of behavior physiological, sensory and psychological in denitions 1, 2
and 3, and the identication of behavior with responding in denition 4. Without
putting too much stress on it, we can derive from this dictionary entry important
characteristics of the concept of responsivity developed by the German philosopher
Bernhard Waldenfels.1 In our everyday understanding, reected in the rst three
denitions, we regard response as a secondary phenomenon, as something executed
or occurring in the aftermath of something else, and in this sense temporally, or at
least logically subordinated to it: the answer follows the question, answering it; the
reaction is caused by the stimulus, which preceded it.
The fourth denition introduces a new dimension: when every form of behavior
is a response, then does this not apply to questioning behavior as well? And if a
question is itself a response to yet another question, who or what asks that ques-
tion? Are we being continuously questioned, called, summoned, and is our own
experience essentially a process of responding to a demand which escapes us?
Questions such as these are tackled in Bernhard Waldenfels philosophy, which
is essentially a rethinking of the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition
from the vantage point of responding. Just as in our everyday usage, philosophy
traditionally gives priority to the question over the answer.2 Knowledge is pro-
duced through answering questions, and the questions ask about what we dont
know. Thus, everything appears to rely on the question; the answer just seems to ll
a void, or compensate for a lack, which is already inscribed in the question.
Therefore, if philosophy can dene the nature of questioning, it will automatically
gain a correct understanding of answering. Waldenfels engages thoroughly with
this line of reasoning and proposes to start from answering or responding as a
primary phenomenon.3 Before the human being can ask any questions, it answers
to a name; before it speaks, it is talked to; before it perceives, the world appeals to
the senses and the body.
Recently, it has been claimed that the notion of a fundamental responsivity
bears the potential of overcoming some classical obstacles in anthropological
50 Anthropological Theory 16(1)
theorizing: the dichotomies between subject and object, structure and agency, real-
ism and constructivism (Leistle, 2014, 2015; Schwarz Wentzer, 2014). While the
thinking of Waldenfels has not yet made its way into the center of anthropological
discourse, there are indications that its arrival is imminent (Leistle, forthcoming).
Through the growing inuence of the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1981), the
concept of responsibility has recently gained substantial ground in anthropology
(Evens, 2008; Lambek, 2010). Levinas situates the origin of all meaning in an
ethical call manifested in the face of the Other. Through the face, the Other
pleads to the self not to kill her or him, thereby confronting the self with a resist-
ance which it cannot overcome.4 The self becomes a self in the sense of a perceiving,
acting, and thinking subject only through responding to this call that it cannot
evade, by taking over a limitless ethical responsibility for the Other. The common
term responsibility is thus related back to its etymological origin.
Beyond this general trend, the term response, implying in a sense the concept of
responsivity, appears conspicuously in anthropological literature, and across topical
and theoretical orientations. For example, in his ethnography of contemporary
religiosity in urban Morocco, Emilio Spadola describes the emergence of the reli-
gious subject in terms of a selective response to competing calls of Islam. These calls
can be mass-mediated, or, as in the following passage referring to a young woman by
the name of Zuhur, they can be expressed in the medium of ritual possession:
Well before Zuhur was summoned to trance, so too was her grandmother. She specu-
lated that her own possession by the jinns derived precisely from that lineage as a
debt unpaid and now inherited. Those accumulated debts reiterate the sense that the
ritual of trance is the response to a prior command, thus an act of responsibility, rather
than an original act in itself. Even though Zuhur was responding to the jinns call, that
call, as command, was bound up with people who preceded her and indeed who placed
her in the position of suering the call itself. (Spadola, 2014: 86)
Another example of using responding in the sense of responsivity is provided by

Karin Sykes in her contribution to a debate on whether ontology is just another
word for culture (Venkatesan, 2010). In arguing against this proposition, Sykes
denes cultural phenomena as responses or answers to ontological questions, such
as what is a person?, or what is a beautiful object?. Referring to the malanggan
sculptures, carved by New Irelanders on occasion of burials and then burned
immediately after, Sykes writes:
. . . I argue that anthropologists, in their attempts to understand culture as a creative

process, will never grasp anything of importance (such as how people nd lives mean-
ingful), if they do not confront the fact that ontological questions are the subject of
anthropology and the answers are its objects of study.
. . . We cannot study most peoples questions, but we can study how they answer them
as the object of our study, and thereby know their questions and our questions better.
Leistle 51
A malanggan is [a] proper object for anthropological study. It is a carving, which, in

the process of making it, answers the ontological question, What is a life?, and
thereby provokes rigorous careful deployment of our disciplinary work.
(Venkatesan, 2010: 169)
The concept of responding, in the sense of giving an answer to questions humans

ask about their being-in-the-world a capacity which denes them as human,
according to Heidegger (2010) here acquires a central position in the theory of
culture. This also applies to anthropological practice, for Sykes goes on to char-
acterize the anthropologists interpretation of the malanggan as a response of the
second order:
In the process of understanding culture as a creative response to the question, What is

a lived life of another person?, or better yet, What is the value of a beautiful
memory?, the anthropologist invents a cultural, interpretive response. (Venkatesan,
2010: 171)
Eorts such as these are interesting, since they proceed from correct intuition, but
they suer generally from a lack of conceptual reection, leading to a use of terms
like question and answer, call and response, in their colloquial sense. The present
essay intends to provide further arguments for the usefulness of Waldenfels con-
cept of responsivity in anthropological theory and practice. This is to be accom-
plished through connecting his concept with empirical approaches to alterity that
are more familiar to anthropologists, namely the sociology of the stranger, psy-
choanalysis and semiotics.5 Stressing responsive aspects of these approaches will
not only demonstrate their compatibility with Waldenfels phenomenology, but
also further clarify the concept of responsivity itself.
Responsivity as relation to the other

In Waldenfels phenomenology, the concept of responsivity and the notion of a
radical otherness or alienness (Fremdheit) cannot be separated from each other.
Indeed, responsivity and otherness are dened correlatively: Responding is relating
to the Other as other, and conversely the Other is what we respond to.
Before exploring these propositions in detail, a short detour seems appropriate
to provide some contextual information about philosophical debates in which
Waldenfels work engages, and to clarify my own use of the terms Other,
other and alien. In recent decades, the so-called question of the Other has
provided one of the major discursive arenas in continental philosophy, in particular
phenomenology (see, for example, Dallery and Scott, 1989; Quellet and Harel,
2007; Kearney and Semonovitch, 2011). Fueled by political developments in the
postcolonial world, the question of how to talk about others without denying their
right to self-presentation has acquired a pressing urgency. Philosophically, this
translated into the problem of the otherness of the Other: if, as phenomenology
has shown since Husserl, everything I experience is endowed with a subjective

sense, simply by virtue of entering my consciousness, how can I have a relationship
to an Other that is not appropriation? How can there be an experience of the Other
in which the Other retains its otherness, in which it appears as itself, the Other as
other? In trying to answer this question, philosophers like Levinas, Derrida,
Baudrillard, or Waldenfels produced new conceptions of alterity, conceptions
that were radical in the sense that they tried to get to the ground of the phenom-
enon of otherness.
To signify its conceptual and abstract character, Other is usually capitalized in
these discussions. The singular term the Other is an attempt to preserve an open-
ness to alterity, to express a relation to otherness prior to its dierentiation into
concrete others persons, objects, facts or events that are endowed with par-
ticular signications. To speak of the Other is the attempt to address a thing before
it is experienced as something. In what follows, I have adopted this usage, distin-
guishing between the Other in a radical sense, and concrete, empirical others.
Another possible way to express the otherness of the Other is by using the terms
alien and alienness, as translations of the German fremd and Fremdheit. In the
present paper, alien is not intended to carry the negative connotations with which
it is often associated in English, but to designate something that eludes experience,
that shows itself in a movement of withdrawal from orders of sense and meaning.
These characteristics of elusiveness and withdrawal are highlighted by the
German fremd.
Waldenfels arrives at the denitions cited above via a thorough re-reading and
re-working of key phenomenological concepts. In phenomenology, a thing appears
in experience not as itself, but as taken by a consciousness in a certain sense. Thus,
phenomenological consciousness is portrayed as actively and constitutively
involved in the appearance of experiential reality. On the other hand, this means
that consciousness can never be empty or pure; inevitably it is linked to its
object, to what it is consciousness of. This is, in a nutshell, the phenomenological
concept of intentionality: something appears as something in consciousness. The
conjunctive as here marks a hiatus between external world and experience which
Waldenfels refers to as signicative dierence (Waldenfels, 2011: 213). Things
appearing in consciousness are not the things themselves, but present themselves
in essential correlations with acts and perspectives of consciousness. There is, as
Merleau-Ponty puts it, no object in-itself, but only an in-itself-for-us (Merleau-
Ponty, 2012: 74, 336). Underlying the signicative dierence, which he regards as
irreducible, Waldenfels posits another, a responsive dierence:
The transgression of the sphere of an intentional or rule-governed sense takes place in

a responding to an alien demand that does not have sense and does not follow rules,
but which interrupts the familiar formations of sense and rules, thus provoking the
creation of new ones. What I say in response owes its meaning to the challenge to
which I respond. The alien which appears to us as the call of the alien or the outlook
from the alien loses its alienness if the responsive dierence between that to which we
Leistle 53
respond and that to which we answer is replaced by an intentional or rule-guided sense

process. (Waldenfels, 2011: 36)
Responding occurs in relation to a demand characterized as alien due to the fact

that no response can ever encompass it. The demand remains that to which we
respond; it can never be equated with how we respond. Demand and response thus
acquire a dual aspect: The demand splits into a claim by and a call from the Other;
responding bifurcates into an answer and a response in the accurate sense of the
term. In its aspect as claim, the demand articulates a request, for example for a bit
of information (What time is it?). This claim is satised (or rejected) by a concrete
responsive behavior, e.g. the answer we give to a question (Its three oclock, I
dont have a watch, etc.). The pair of claim/request and answer, then, is part of the
order of sense, dening a situation as a particular type (a person asks me for the
time). Underneath this ordered exchange, however, there remains the fact that the
Other has called me and that I respond to this call in a sphere that is ultimately not
regulated by communicative rules. Rather, my answer to the claim of the Other
rests on my response to the call.
In its preoccupation with intentionality, phenomenology is concerned with the
study of orders of experience. But according to Waldenfels, all orders are incom-
plete and partial, since their validity is contingent on the adoption of a perspective
which they cannot encompass. Every order has its blind spot, the point from which
it is claimed as order (Waldenfels, 1996). Due to this structural limitation, the
phenomenon of order is pluralized: there can be no all-encompassing totality any-
more, only particular orders that are claimed by someone, and which include some
things and some people, while excluding others. Seen from inside any given order,
this means that things can be otherwise, that alternative realities exist as a possi-
bility, in the form of what is excluded from the order as extra-ordinary. The extra-
ordinary, as that which withdraws from the order through a simultaneous process
of inclusion and exclusion, opens a sphere of genuine otherness, or alienness, that
cannot be closed o or covered over. From this sphere emanate demands to which
the order in question must respond; this process of responding takes place on every
level on which ordering takes place, that is: in every domain of human existence.
Waldenfels distinguishes three basic levels of ordering interlaced with each other in
existence: the order of selfhood, the order of social collectivity, and the order of
reason (Waldenfels, 2007: 1415).
It is crucially important to understand that, although order is a ubiquitous
phenomenon, because without it there can be no sense or meaning, no order can
generate itself. The origin of order lies outside of it, that is: in the sphere of the
alien. To express this in positive, dynamic terms: every order arises from a response
to alien demands. An obvious example for this responsivity of order is the devel-
opment of the personal self in the childs relations to its parents or other caregivers.
Even the token of personal identity, my rst name, is given to me by others, and
I gain my rst sense of self through learning to respond when they call me by it. In a
similar way, social and cultural orders are not pre-given but emerge as shared
responses to collective demands: an entity such as Europe, whatever reality one

might assign it, does not pre-exist itself, but arose (and continues to arise, as
Edward Saids investigations into orientalism have shown) by demarcation
from what is Non-Europe. Ultimately, however, it emerged in responding to a
demand preceding this distinction. A pre-European order was confronted with
alien demands and the response to these demands resulted in the birth of a new
order Europe. Neither individuals nor cultures can take possession of the moment
of their birth, or of their death, for that matter. As to the order of reason, the
studies of Michel Foucault (1995, 2003, 2006) and others in his wake have shown
how the contingency of orders applies even to such notions as rationality and
scientic thought.
Waldenfels has worked out several basic structural characteristics of responsiv-
ity, which he sometimes refers to as aspects of a response-logic (Waldenfels, 2011:
3942, 2007: 28., 1994: 320336): singularity, inevitability, and asymmetry.
Singularity refers to the in-between character of events which prompt us to
respond. Such events which, strictly speaking, happen continuously but mostly
go unnoticed do not follow a pre-established set of rules or a pre-determined
course; rather, they produce their own logic in the process of unfolding, giving
rise to new orders. But in the moment in which they happen, events do not obey
any existing order, nor can they be incorporated into the order emerging through
them. They are singular in the sense that they cannot be compared to other events
through referring to a common principle or law. A good example of this singularity
and openness are historical upheavals, like the French Revolution, which, as
events, can neither be reduced to eects of what preceded them nor to causes of
what they initiated. In their unfolding, they can only be approached as open situ-
ations in which actors respond to a call they experience as a historical necessity but
that cannot be objectied; a call, that is, coming from a sphere beyond any order,
an alien demand.
Insofar as it must elicit a response, this demand is unavoidable. When one is
called by the Other, one cannot not respond. Even refusal to answer, the silence of
neglect, becomes a response, and a particularly strong one at that. This is true for
everyday communication, as well as for extra-ordinary situations in which a call of
history places demands on the individual. Often this historical call intertwines with
the ethical demand of the Other, so forcefully described by Levinas: in revolution-
ary situations like the Nazi tyranny remaining silent cannot be construed as a form
of neutrality. The inevitability of responsivity forces one to choose sides so that
inertness, refusal or paralysis present themselves as forms of responsive behavior.
Responding is thus characterized by an inevitable yet necessarily asymmetrical
relation to the Other. As a demand we respond to, the Other remains truly other,
an alien which eludes any answer we might give. Our response always comes too
late to catch up with what prompted it; it is deferred in relation to the call it
responds to. The event in which something happens to us, for example a trac
accident, always has already happened when we answer to it, as victims or as
witnesses. From a responsive perspective, experience becomes a form of pathos,
Leistle 55
a suering, but not to be identied with pain. The temporality of responding is

characterized by an original deferment, a gap between demand and response that
Waldenfels refers to as diastasis: The antecedent pathos and the deferred response
have to be thought of together, but only across a gap which cannot be closed and
thus requires a creative response. Happenings not only lead us to think, they also
force us to think (Waldenfels, 2011: 31). Expressed in spatial metaphors, we can
say that responding describes a movement that begins elsewhere. The demand of
the Other comes from a place where I am not and cannot be.
It is in the sense outlined above that the Other can be dened as what we
respond to. A radical otherness is not conceivable if self and Other belong to one
spatio-temporal continuum, if they become part of a communicative order, or are
subjected to the laws of intentionality. The concept of responsivity, while linking
self and Other, owness and alienness with each other, breaks the bonds by which
the Other is captured and held captive. Responding situates the Other in an alien
sphere where the self cannot go. This is not due to some insurmountable positive
power of the Other, but because the Other appears in experience as a demand
that compels one to respond, and is always already gone when the response
occurs. This original absence is what the preposition to in the phrase what we
respond to expresses. While it thus enables the conception of radical otherness,
responsivity is, on the other hand, a necessary component of human existence due
to the essential partiality and contingency of every conceivable order, whether
experiential, discursive or epistemological. The impossibility of an all-encompass-
ing, total order, and the consequent pluralization of orders, suspends human life
in an open-ended exchange of demand and response which is always already
underway. To be human is to be responsive from the moment of ones birth to
ones death.
The human being is thus presented as characterized by an in-between state, or,
to put it in terms with considerable anthropological resonance, as a liminal being
(Waldenfels, 2011). This becomes particularly obvious in the domains of volition
and agency where responsivity leads beyond the traditional opposition between
determination and exertion of free will. To be responsive means that ones
thoughts and actions begin not with or in oneself, but elsewhere as responses.
But since a true elsewhere, a genuinely Other, implies that there can be no
common measure between demand and response, it is impossible that the response
is already inscribed into the demand. This leads Waldenfels to the formulation of
what he calls the paradox of creative response:
The response is creative despite its being a response. The call does not belong to the
order which integrates or subjects the response. Rather, the call only becomes a call in
the response which it causes and precedes. Thus responding runs over a small ridge
which separates bondage and compliance from arbitrariness and willfulness. The one
who waits for ready-made responses does not have anything to say because everything
has already been said. In turn, the one who speaks without responding does not have
anything to say either because there is nothing for him to say. We invent what we
respond, but not what we respond to and what gives weight to our speaking and
acting. (Waldenfels, 2011: 42)
Other approaches to alterity

Waldenfels conception of responsivity touches on many aspects of anthropological
research and intersects with a great number of theoretical approaches (Schwarz
Wentzer, 2014). For the present essay, I have selected three of these possible points
of contact, each roughly corresponding to one of the ordering levels mentioned
above (individual, society, reason). Although none of them has originated within
anthropology, all the selected approaches have informed the understanding of
alterity in anthropology in various ways, and it is therefore interesting to see
how they can be re-read from a responsive perspective. In no way do I intend
the following to be exhaustive; I do not claim to present a satisfying overview of
any treated approach, nor do I suggest that they cover the topic of the Other in
anthropology (for a more detailed treatment see Leistle, forthcoming). Rather, my
concern is to demonstrate the compatibility of the concept of responsivity with
existing approaches to empirical otherness, and to illuminate one through the
other.
Sociology of the stranger

In social reality, the Other appears most prominently in the gure of the foreigner,
or, more generally, the stranger. One of the foundational texts of what can be
called a sociology of the stranger is Georg Simmels famous little essay appended
as an excursus to his magisterial Sociology (Simmel, 1950). In this essay, Simmel
describes the stranger as a type of social relationship characterized by certain
structural properties. His interest is directed not at the passer-by or the tourist
but at the stranger in the critical sense of one who comes today and stays tomor-
row (Simmel, 1950: 402). As such, the stranger becomes a member of society, but
one in which presence and absence, closeness and distance, are mixed in peculiar
ways:
The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation is organized,
in the phenomenon of the stranger, in a way which may be most briey formulated by
the saying that in the relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is
far, and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near. For, to be a
stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specic form of interaction. The
inhabitants of Sirius are not really strangers to us, at least not in any sociologically
relevant sense: they do not exist for us at all; they are beyond far and near. The
stranger, like the poor and like sundry inner enemies, is an element of the group
itself. His position as a full-edged member involves both being outside it and con-
fronting it. (Simmel, 1950: 4023)
Leistle 57
From a perspective of responsivity the social type of the stranger can be understood
as a kind of hinge between the radical and the empirical Other. In the sociological
phenomenon of the stranger, society as an order is confronted with a person or a
group of persons that, while part of society, is also alien to it. Interactions with the
stranger and his treatment at the hands of other group members can be interpreted
in terms of responses to this challenge. In this way, the stranger becomes known
and in a certain sense familiar, for example, in the widespread role of trader, but
also as immigrant, mediator or shaman. However, he or she also retains irre-
movable traces of otherness. These can be detected in the strangers fundamental
ambiguity: near and distant, distant when near, present and absent, inside and
outside of the group, a member of it and yet objective and to a certain degree
indierent toward it.
To provide clarication of this strange ambiguity, Waldenfels concept of a
responsive dierence can be invoked. Insofar as the stranger is assigned a function
and a role, he or she becomes part of a social order of meaning. This naming and
assigning has to be understood as the concrete, empirically observable answer to
the practical problem posed by the stranger to society: somebody comes today and
stays tomorrow, as Simmel puts it. But intertwined with the answer to this problem
is a continued relation of call and response. Although an answer has been given, the
otherness of the stranger has not been, can never be completely banned and abol-
ished. In the gure of the stranger, an alien demand keeps challenging and disturb-
ing the order, provoking it to respond creatively, that is, in ways that aect the
order itself.6
In his short text, Simmel characterizes the social relationship to the stranger with
a ne phenomenological intuition, opening up interesting perspectives for anthro-
pology. For in so far as societies are necessarily in contact with each other, and
perhaps have always been, the stranger is a ubiquitous phenomenon. How dierent
societies typify their specic strangers, what categories they apply to make sense of
them, how these categories relate to concrete social interactions with strangers
these and other questions could provide guidelines for anthropological inquiries
into responsivity. Moreover, a body of classical sociological research and a wealth
of ethnographic materials7 could be examined with a fresh eye. This is even true for
the role of the anthropologist, famously referred to as a professional stranger
(Agar, 1980).
What would it mean concretely to approach the social phenomenon of the
stranger from a perspective of responsivity? On the one hand, anthropology
would have to continue doing what it has done traditionally: provide thick descrip-
tions to determine as accurately as possible the value of a certain sign or practice
within a semiotic context. This is because responding necessarily takes place in
relation to orders of cultural meaning out of which the responsive movement
must emerge and into which it must fall back. On the other hand, however, anthro-
pology would have to search for ways in which to preserve genuinely responsive
aspects of the relationship to the Other. In other words, ethnographic description
and interpretation would have to develop a sensibility for how responding is
fundamentally creative through its capacity to break through existing structures of

practice and meaning. Elsewhere I have argued that one path towards such sens-
ibility consists in a heightened awareness of the event-character of events (Leistle,
2015). Another particularly rich source of inspiration in this direction are the many
discussions about style and representation in anthropology. Responding to the
Other in its otherness cannot be made thematic, addressed directly. It has to be
presented indirectly, in hybrid forms of speech (Waldenfels, 1999: 152.); debates
around the crisis of representation continue to be relevant in this regard (see, for
example, Cliord and Marcus, 1986).
While Simmel approached the problem of the stranger from the side of society,
the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz took the reverse perspective. In his study The
Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology, Schutz concerned himself with the situ-
ation of the stranger who intends to live, whether voluntarily or through force of
circumstance,8 in a society dierent from the one in which he was raised. Thus, for
Schutz, the strangers situation is essentially characterized by his confrontation
with another life-world, a way of acting, perceiving and communicating alien to
him.9 The phenomenological concept of the life-world refers to what is taken for
granted by the experiencing subject when living in what Husserl has called the
natural attitude. In his understanding of a phenomenological sociology, Schutz
has borrowed this concept and enriched it considerably (see Schutz and Luckmann,
1973). The subject10 experiences the life-world as spatially, temporally, and socially
structured; through a set of shared taken-for-granted assumptions like the reci-
procity of perspectives (you would see the world like I do if you would be standing
in my place) or the congruence of systems of relevance (your interests in the
present social situation conform to the same rules and regulations as mine),
these structures can serve as orientating devices and enable communication
between ego and other subjects. The subject experiences the life-world following
the pragmatic motive (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 6): it is predominantly oriented
towards acting in the world and achieving objectives in accordance with its prag-
matic interests. Knowledge of the life-world is therefore not based on theoretical
concerns but contains typical solutions for typical problems encountered by actors.
The subject possesses a stock of knowledge of the life-world in which practical
solutions to problems are organized, often in a rather incoherent manner, accord-
ing to dierent degrees of relevance (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 99.).
When the subject leaves the life-world in which it was socialized and becomes a
stranger in another life-world, its stock of knowledge will prove insucient to solve
the problems it confronts in an acceptable, that is, intersubjectively shared,
manner. The immigrant-stranger becomes unable to act naturally as he or she
can take nothing for granted, except perhaps the general humanity of the other.11
He or she is forced to interpret what lies in the nature of things for members of the
host culture. A massive crisis of understanding thus motivates the features most
frequently associated with the stranger: objectivity and doubtful loyalty. As to the
rst characteristic, Schutz assigns to the experience of strangeness an insight into
the limitations of the life-world itself: the stranger has learned from bitter
Leistle 59
experience (Schutz, 1963: 104) that his own taken-for-granted assumptions can be
proven invalid under certain circumstances, and therefore sees faultlines in the host
life-world with a clarity denied to its members. Schutz regards as not without basis
the suspicion of lack of loyalty to which the stranger is often subjected, but dier-
entiates as follows:
. . . Very frequently the reproach of doubtful loyalty originates in the astonishment of

the members of the in-group that the stranger doesnt accept the total of its cultural
pattern as the natural and appropriate way of life and as the best of all possible
solutions to any problem. The stranger is called ungrateful since he refuses to acknow-
ledge that the cultural pattern oered to him grants him shelter and protection. But
these people do not understand that the stranger in the state of transition does not
consider this pattern as a protecting shelter at all but as a labyrinth in which he has
lost all sense of his bearings. (Schutz, 1963: 1045)
Such statements remain relevant in contemporary contexts of migration, trans-

nationalism and globalization; perhaps their relevance has even increased, indicat-
ing that it might be time for a re-discovery of Schutzs work in anthropology.12
With respect to the stranger, Schutz introduces a set of conceptual tools, which
allows for a detailed description of responsive processes both from the viewpoints
of culture and of self. The immigrant-stranger comes to be seen as a person who
has lost the ability to answer to the demands of a situation because his or her
responsive repertoire has become obsolete. Since the constitution of an order of
selfhood depends on our capacity to respond in socially acceptable ways, this
inability is structurally connected with a crisis of the self. From the perspective
of the socio-cultural order, the life-world that confronts the stranger, the stranger
presents a challenge through his or her inability to comprehend, often interpreted
as unwillingness. Insofar as he or she is strange, the stranger remains alien to the
social and cultural order of which he or she is at the same time part. The stranger is
what the order responds to, and the order realizes itself in the answer given. From
the perspective of responsivity, the ways in which a society deals with its strangers,
whether by an assimilationist neglect of dierence or by a multicultural emphasis
on dierence, come to be understood not only as ways of relating to others but also
as modes of self-fashioning. Assimilation, multiculturalism, discrimination,
etc., in any combination, must be regarded as forms or styles of responding to
the Other by which society creates itself but which, at the same time, fall short of
their shared goal: to fully integrate the Other into the order. As what society
responds to, the demands of the Other remain outside of the order they provoke.
Psychoanalysis
Otherness doesnt appear only in social relations to others, for which the stranger-
relation is only a particular example; it also characterizes relations to oneself.
Radical alterity, as conceived by Waldenfels and others (e.g. Derrida and
Levinas), challenges the very idea of selfhood as an autonomous sphere. The Other
permeates the self to the core. In our discussion of conicts experienced by the
stranger in his approach to a new life-world, we have already indicated how the
inability to respond to the Other aects the constitution of a personal self.
The crisis of sense experienced by the stranger and in confrontation with him
always is also a psychological crisis. The intrusion of the Other into the individual
self has, however, become the specialty of another intellectual project: psycho-
analysis. It can be said with some justication that the main discovery of Freud
consisted in the realization that the ego is not master in its own house (Freud,
1955a: 143). Rather than being in control of aect, thought and behavior, the
psychoanalytic self was seen to be inuenced by unconscious drives and desires,
many of which were unacceptable to the conscious ego of the person, and conse-
quently repressed.
The particular text of Freud most often cited in connection with the problem of
alterity is his 1919 essay, The Uncanny (see, for example, Csordas, 2004: 1689;
Kristeva, 1991: 18292; Waldenfels, 1997: 44). Here, Freud rst denes his goal as
a psychoanalytic study of motifs of the uncanny in literature, in particular in the
works of the German romantic author E.T.A. Homann. His investigation of the
meaning of the German word unheimlich (uncanny), however, already indicates a
more encompassing perspective. Un-heimlich is grammatically a negation of heim-
lich, an adjective with highly ambiguous semantics: on the one hand, heimlich is
connected with what is homely (from the noun Heim, home), that is, long
known, intimate and familiar. On the other hand, it refers to the sphere of the
hidden, the secret, the clandestine (to do something heimlich is to do it without
others noticing). Freud concludes: Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which
develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it nally coincides with its opposite,
unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich (Freud,
1955b: 226). One semantic strand of heimlich already carries the notion of the
uncanny within it. When we experience something as uncanny we are frightened
precisely by what is close to us, what we are familiar with: the uncanny is that class
of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar
(Freud, 1955b: 220). In other words, in experiencing the uncanny we feel that what
is our own doesnt completely belong to us, that our very self is always also other.13
Or, as Julia Kristeva (1991: 188) puts it, uncanniness is a destructuration of
the self.
In her book Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva credits Freud with the discovery of
a radical otherness in ones own self. Focusing on the experience of the foreigner, in
both the subjective and objective sense, Kristeva connects the notion of the
uncanny with the sociological stranger, in particular, with the phenomenon of
xenophobia:
In the fascinated rejection that the foreigner arouses in us, there is a share of uncanny
strangeness in the sense of the depersonalization that Freud discovered in it, and
which takes up our infantile desires and fears of the other the other of death, the
Leistle 61
other of woman, the other of uncontrollable drive. The foreigner is within us.
And when we ee or struggle against the foreigner, we are ghting our unconscious
that improper facet of our impossible own and proper. (Kristeva, 1991: 191)
Waldenfels (1997: 4042) criticizes Kristevas solution to the dilemma of the Other
which is summarized in her slogan: The foreigner is within me, hence we are all
foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners (Kristeva, 1991: 192). For
him the intertwining of ownness and alienness is an irreducible fact: inclusion in an
order of self-world-experience and exclusion from it are two aspects of one and the
same movement. Also problematic is Kristevas characterization of the relationship
to the alien as negative and ultimately leading to rejection, fascination notwith-
standing. In a responsive phenomenology, relation to the alien must be situated on
a level prior to the split between positive and negative evaluation. Rejection and
fascination, love and hate are already responses to the alien, dening it in one
or the other way. Any intrinsic value assigned to the Other must necessarily miss it
in its otherness.
But without having to agree on particulars, we can acknowledge that psycho-
analysis provides a conceptual language to address the self in its capacity as respon-
sive process. Emotions, aects, anxieties, feelings of uncanniness
psychoanalytically, these are not the reactions of a closed o entity to external
stimuli but responses produced by a self interacting with a world. The world has the
power to overwhelm the self in trauma and pathos, and the self struggles to nd
responses that give rise to a viable order, an emotional economy, if one wants to
put it this way. Freud himself came very close to a responsive conception of psychic
life, when he interpreted delusional symptoms like those exhibited by Schreber not
as signs of disease but as attempts at healing, that is, as responses to suering
(Freud, 1958: 7071).
As was said with reference to the stranger, the ethnographic record, particularly
studies in psychological and psychoanalytical anthropology, can be revisited from
a perspective of responsivity. The question then becomes how the selves of cultural
others respond to the demands of the alien, and in what ways their responses and
their styles of responding are dierent from, or similar to, our own. The example I
would like to present here, however, focuses on the relationship between the
anthropologist and the Other, George Devereuxs From Anxiety to Method in the
Behavioral Sciences.14 Devereuxs general thesis is that anthropologists and other
behavioral scientists under certain circumstances respond to anxiety-arousing
research experiences with counter-transference, that is, the transference of their
own psychic conicts onto the behavior encountered in research subjects.
Devereux regards this as a major problem aecting claims of validity and demands
scientic reection, not only on the behavior of others but on the relation between
the researcher and those others. Through a great number of case studies and
vignettes of varying lengths, Devereux is able to show that anthropologists (as
well as psychiatrists and psychoanalysts) respond to emotionally problematic
experiences through a variety of defenses. Some can be called professional
defenses, dened as certain frames of reference, methods and procedures at the

disposal of the scientist which incidentally also happen to reduce the anxiety
aroused by his data and therefore enable him to function eciently (Devereux,
1967: 83).
From a perspective of responsivity, these professional defenses can be regarded
as a responsive repertoire whose competent performance in relevant contexts
enables the scientist to produce a viable professional self. Forms of such profes-
sional responses are the mechanism of isolation, by which, for example, the
psychoanalyst separates transferences of patients from his or her own person;
or what Devereux (1967: 84) calls the professional stance and activity defense,
the assurance derived from culturally sanctioned denitions of ones self (I am
an anthropologist) and ones situation (This is eldwork). Vicarious pre-
experience (Devereux, 1967: 84) prepares practitioners of a profession for trau-
matic experience and allows them to postpone anxiety-responses until after the
event has passed. Of particular relevance for anthropologists is the methodo-
logical position of cultural relativism, which can serve as a powerful psycho-
logical defense against anxiety, but can also become the vehicle of massive
counter-transference:
Case 44: A psychologically sophisticated anthropologist told me that he had witnessed

the burial of a live person who had lost his soul and was therefore considered tech-
nically dead. When I asked him why he did not try to stop it, he haughtily replied: As
an anthropologist I am not supposed to undermine native customs, but to study
them. (Devereux, 1967: 87)
Devereux then goes on to comment:
Cultural relativism . . . seeks to reduce anxiety, by viewing cultural data in a human

vacuum. Though scientically sterile, this subterfuge is eective, since one reacts with
less anxiety to the female mantis coital cannibalization of the male mantis (with
whom one cannot identify) than one would to a similar human custom. Similarly,
we can articially reduce our anxieties by viewing the torturing of prisoners simply as
custom, thereby denying that these practices have any bearing on esh and blood
beings, with whom we would have to identify ourselves. (Devereux, 1967: 87)
I would venture to claim that there is no anthropologist who has not at least once
employed this professional defense to ward o anxiety and to deal with ethical or
psychological conict in eldwork. The evocation of the professional stance, or of
cultural relativism as methodological paradigm, is an example of a response on the
part of the anthropologist that is motivated psychologically but makes use of
pregured answers provided by a cultural order, in this case the professional cul-
ture of anthropology.
At this point we can ask ourselves whether the perspective of responsivity
enables us to adopt a critical attitude and to dierentiate between good and
Leistle 63
bad responses. Since responding to the Other takes place in the interstices between
orders, and since its creativity rests on its in-between character, this criterion can be
applied for purposes of evaluation. Creative responses do not fall into the domains
of any order and are in this sense excessive but at the same time manage to use
their situation in relation to orders to achieve transformative eects, i.e. produce
new orders. This characterization doesnt imply a moral evaluation; rather, it
denes creativity from a structural viewpoint. The question therefore is not any-
more whether a response is good or bad, but whether it is progressive or con-
servative. Answering according to a pre-existing responsive repertoire may be an
accomplishment of great importance for human evolution, which allows preserva-
tion of the achieved and frees cognitive capacities for other tasks (Bateson, 1972:
1413; Wulf, 2013: 512), but becomes an impediment in confrontation with
the unexpected and new. In such situations, and anthropological eldwork can
serve as a ne example, creative responding is called for, not falling back into
pre-established orders of meaning in a quasi-automatic manner.15
Semiotics
When loosely dened as the systematic study of the formal and pragmatic proper-
ties of signs, semiotics seems exclusively concerned with what can be named,
depicted, symbolized. The semiotic Other must always be the signied other
associated with a signier which serves as a token for it, therefore part of a sign-
relation. Beyond such a sign-relation there is only the unsayable, which becomes
synonymous with the non-existent. In other words, a radical Other, always already
elsewhere and past because we respond to it, seems to be a concept alien to
semiotics.
Such a statement, however, needs to be qualied in at least two respects: for an
anthropology grounded in a notion of responsivity, semiotics and other approaches
concerned with communication, like hermeneutics, are indispensable research
tools. To regard selfhood and ownness, and with them any kind of objectication
resulting from an underlying process of responding to the Other, means that signs
are ultimately to be understood as answers. And we as anthropologists are con-
cerned with signs in the sense of answers in empirical research.16 To put it dier-
ently: even if signication would rule out radical otherness, all empirical otherness
still has to take the form of signs.
The second qualication relates to the philosophical implications of a semiotic
perspective on human existence. What does it mean if we posit that as human
beings we have no access to the world except through the use of signs, that in
this sense nothing exists beyond the semiotic? One of the founders of semiotics, the
American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, articulated this panse-
miotic view of the universe explicitly, stating: The entire universe is perfused with
signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs (Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 5,
Paragraph 448, fn; cf. Noth, 1990: 41). As to the place of the human being in this
universe, Peirce even went so far as to conclude that the fact that every thought is a
sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that
man is a sign (Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 5; cf. Noth, 1990: 41).
But if it is true, as Peirce implied, that mind, self and even man himself are sign-
processes, dont we have to acknowledge once more, as in the case of psychoanaly-
sis, that the Other intrudes upon the very abode of ownness, this time in the form of
semiotic structures of sign-composition and sign-use? Peirce famously distinguished
between icon, index and symbol as dierent types of relations between the signier
and the referent. While icon and index both preserved a direct connection to what
was being represented (similarity in case of the icon, physical contact or contiguity
in case of the index), the sign-type of symbol was based on conventional agree-
ments and, thus, ultimately arbitrary. The arbitrariness of signs was further empha-
sized by the semiotician and linguist Ferdinand De Saussure (1966) for language,
where the symbolic is the predominant type of signication. But if signs, or more
precisely the relation between signier and signied, are regarded as fundamentally
arbitrary, this means that signied reality can always also be otherwise, since other
conventions would give rise to a dierent reality. Any actually existing worldview
would carry around with it the shadow of unrealized possibilities. In other words: a
sphere of unreality would always accompany what we claim to be real, manifesting
as an ultimate uncertainty about whether the signs and signifying structures we use
to make sense of the world are indeed true or even the best possible. The appear-
ance of this uncertainty of experience can engender anxieties mounting up to a
horror vacui, the fear of falling into an existential void. If this is indeed the case,
then semiotics, too, is confronted with the problem of radical otherness and, thus,
not at all opposed to responsivity.17
Empirical and radical alterity merge in a famous study that adopts a semiotic
perspective towards the European discovery and colonization of America, Tzvetan
Todorovs The Conquest of America. The books subtitle seems auspicious for our
theme: The Question of the Other. Indeed Todorov frames his study of relations
between Spanish conquistadores and colonizers and the Aztecs in terms of an
encounter with otherness. His guiding question is how the Spaniards under
Columbus and, particularly, under Cortes were able to subdue, with a compara-
tively small contingent of armed men, a population which greatly outnumbered
them and whose civilization was, in many respects, comparable to that of the
Spaniards. He gives a semiotic answer to this question: the Spaniards were able
to defeat the Aztecs not because of superiority in military technology, greater bru-
tality, or immunological dierences,18 but because of an advantage in the eld of
communication. More than the Aztecs, the Spaniards made use of what Todorov
calls the interhuman aspects of communication, the fact that sign-use is also an
action that has an eect on the addressee. Hand in hand with this went the
Spaniards realization that signication, at least of the symbolic type, is grounded
in conventional agreement and in this sense arbitrary. Taken together, these two
insights amounted to acknowledgement of the importance of communicating with
others in order to gain information about them. They also led to an attitude in which
signs could be used for instrumental and manipulative purposes, as for example
Leistle 65
when Cortes intentionally and successfully posed as the God Quezalcoatl, whose
return was prophesized in an Aztec myth (Todorov, 1999: 11619).
In contrast to the Spanish ability to improvise, to respond eectively to unpre-
cedented situations and problems, stood the inability of the Aztecs to make sense of
the invaders and to transform their understanding into action. This paralysis was
personied in the reigning Aztec ruler, Montezuma, who let himself be taken cap-
tive by Cortes and seemed to oscillate between admiration and contempt for his
captors (see, for example, Todorov, 1999: 7072). Montezumas indecisive behav-
ior, Todorov insists, was not merely a personal idiosyncrasy, but was motivated by
the Aztecs cultural perspective, their view of the world. Drawing on contemporary
accounts written by both Spanish and indigenous authors,19 Todorov presents
Aztec culture and society as organized around the key-concept of order
(Todorov, 1999: 66). Everything and every person had its place in a strict social
hierarchy; ways of speaking with each other and about things were strongly ritua-
lized; events were predetermined by oracles and prophesies. Within such a cosmo-
logical order a radically dierent cultural perspective was inconceivable. As an
example of the Aztec conception of the Other, Todorov cites the Totonacs,
whom Aztecs thought of as speaking a barbaric, unintelligible language and
leading an uncivilized life. In general, the Aztecs distinguished two types of strange
people: those whom their Gods accepted as sacrices and those whom they found
unacceptable:
Now, the otherness of the Spaniards is much more radical. . . . Unable to integrate
them into the category of the Totonacs whose alterity is not at all radical the
Aztecs, faced with the Spaniards, renounce their entire system of human otherness and
nd themselves obliged to resort to the only other device available: the exchange with
the gods. (Todorov, 1999: 76)
In other words, the Aztecs inability to assess the motives of the strange newcomers
correctly and respond to them eectively was due to a cultural perspective that
determined their thinking and behavior. Unlike the Spaniards actions that, as
improvisations, moved beyond the known and familiar into new territories, the
Aztecs responses remained within the connes of their cosmos; they lacked the
creativity called for by a completely unprecedented situation. As presented by
Todorov, we might call the Aztec response conservative in the above sense.
Yet, it would be wrong to suppress the subtlety of Todorovs argument which, in
a simplied form, can be regarded as ethically problematic. He doesnt simply
claim that the Spaniards were more creative than the Aztecs; rather, he says
that the cultural perspective from which the Europeans were acting provided
more margin for the emergent idea of an extreme cultural dierence. The openness
of Renaissance culture to the Other (a culture which Todorov calls allo-centric,
since its religious center was perceived as lying elsewhere, in Jerusalem) and their
previous experience with cultural alterity through confrontation with Muslim civ-
ilization allowed the Spaniards to perform more eectively in the situation of the
conquest. On the other hand, Todorov makes a serious eort to avoid representing
Aztec responses in terms of failure. Their emphasis on order, ritual and religion is
itself to be understood as a positive expression of the second fundamental aspect of
communication, which is communication not as interhuman exchange but as a
contact between man and world. In communicating with each other, human
beings always also communicate with nature, with God, with the Universe; they
become part of an order whose origin lies beyond their doings. To selectively
emphasize interhuman aspects of communication may have given the Spaniards
the edge over the Aztecs in the conquest of America, but it comes at the price of
destroying the capacity to feel in harmony with the world, to belong to a pre-
established order. The eect of the victory is to repress mans communication with
the world, to produce the illusion that all communication is interhuman commu-
nication; the silence of the gods weighs upon the camp of the Europeans as much as
on that of the Indians (Todorov, 1999: 97).
However, here my concern is to point out as clearly as possible the convergences
and frictions between a semiotic perspective on otherness and one grounded in the
notion of responsivity. For this purpose it is useful to quote Todorovs abstract
formulation of the problem:
The touchstone of alterity is not the present and immediate second person singular but
the absent or distant third person singular. . . . Language exists only by means of the
other, not only because one always addresses someone but also insofar as it permits
evoking the absent third person; unlike animals, men know citation. But the very
existence of this other is measured by the space the symbolic system reserves for him:
such space is not the same, to evoke only one massive and by now familiar example,
before and after the advent of writing (in the narrow sense). So that any investigation
of alterity is necessarily semiotic, and reciprocally, semiotics cannot be conceived
outside the relation to the other. (Todorov, 1999: 157, emphasis added)
The Other is dened as a value in a system; in this view, a radical Other in the sense
of what we respond to is, indeed, not possible. This is why the fateful encounter
between Spaniards and Aztecs has to be reduced, on the theoretical and analytical
plane, to a clash of signifying orders, with the more ecient or more aggressive
order emerging as winner. Ultimately, it is the operation of structures, not the
actions of individuals, that determines the outcome of historical confrontation.
There is no need to completely dismiss this thesis, or the structuralist/post-
structuralist perspective that gives rise to it, in the name of responsivity. As has
been stated repeatedly, responding to the Other takes place in relation to orders;
and signifying orders, or cultural systems of meaning, are particularly important
for anthropology which, by denition, is concerned with eorts of understanding,
i.e. interpreting the Other. Rather, the concept of responsivity adds something
vitally important to this traditional concern, thus promising to solve some of the
aporia resulting from it. It allows us to grasp theoretically and analytically that no
matter how strong the structural and contextual forces in a situation, in the last
Leistle 67
analysis these are incapable of completely determining the behavior of the partici-
pants. Determination and causality are, at least as far as humans are con-
cerned,20 post hoc descriptions of processes which, when ongoing, are
indeterminate and open-ended.
The conceptual pair of demand and response enables us to move closer to the
event as actually happening (even though this remains, of course, an approxima-
tion). A fact is not simply something given but results from responding to a
demand which eludes any answer one might give, and exceeds any order that
might emerge, even that of reason. A responsive anthropology would aim to get
at this excess and nd ways of expressing it. This is important for any discipline
dealing with human phenomena, but it is critical for anthropology, for which, some
would say, working with groups and persons in marginal and subaltern positions is
its dening characteristic (Bourgois, 1991). Here, the concept of responding to the
Other opens up the possibility of speaking about power, oppression and violence in
structural terms, without in the same breath renouncing the individuals agency,
freedom, and dignity. For a discipline like anthropology, this is no minor or trivial
achievement.
The Conquest of America contains many indications of primordial responsivity
in a Waldenfelsian sense,21 including even the motivation of the project itself.
Todorov describes this project as the writing of an exemplary history (as contrasted
with a narrative that simply claims to tell the historic truth objectively), a history
that attempts to answer a moral question: How to deal with the Other? (Todorov,
1999: 34, 2534). Doesnt this mean that the author himself describes his book in
terms of a response to a demand coming from the Other, a demand which has a
strong ethical dimension? I believe that Todorovs dedication, which seems so
strange at rst, should be read in this sense: I dedicate this book to the memory
of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.
Conclusion
If there was such a thing as an overarching discipline of anthropology, it would
have to have the whole human being as its subject matter: a being endowed with a
sense of self that is, however, necessarily realized in social and cultural contexts. In
both its personal and its socio-cultural existence, this being relies on faculties that
distinguish it from other beings; it is dened by a specic form of reason, a logos.
Understandably, this thematic eld came to be divided among a great number of
sub-disciplines, dierent anthropologies specializing in specic aspects of being
human: psychological anthropology, social and cultural anthropology, and philo-
sophical anthropology, amongst others.
Another fundamental concern of anthropology is otherness, or alterity (Auge,
1998; Maranhao, 1998). This concern runs through all the various levels of anthro-
pology dened as a science of the human being or, perhaps better, of being human.
Otherness becomes critical in cultural anthropology where researchers study cul-
tural dierence by entering into encounters with concrete others. In these
encounters, the anthropologists self and the others self engage in a complex
interweaving of their personal and cultural experiences. The entanglement of self
and Other that occurs in ethnographic eldwork has the potential to cast doubt on
the universality of reason. It can lead to an epistemological crisis in which the
rationality the anthropologist applies to the interpretation of the Other appears
as only one particular type of reason, the logos of western modernity.
Bernhard Waldenfels concept of responsivity and his characterization of the
human being as a responsive being enable us to talk about these fundamental
anthropological concerns in a unied conceptual language; this alone should
secure an anthropologists attention. Furthermore, the notion of a constitution
of orders and ownness in responding to alien demands overcomes the usual prob-
lems of dualistic thought. Since the Other we respond to is always already gone, the
answer we give (and in which we produce ourselves and the other as someone or
something that is named) never reaches what provoked it. The response is never
caused by the demand, as, for example, a physiological reaction is caused by an
external stimulus. Although they give rise to orders of sense, to sets and systems,
responses dont follow existing rules and regulations. While thus essentially con-
nected to structural processes, the response is animated by an irreducible agency of
the individual human being. The individual itself, however, needs to be thought of
as a continuous process of responding, of including what belongs to it (but never
completely so) and of excluding what is alien to it (but keeps disturbing the self
through its demands). Ownness and alienness, self and Other, subject and object,
structure and agency within a responsive paradigm all of these and other oppos-
itions have to be thought of as primordially intertwined with each other.
The challenges of adapting this conception to the needs of anthropological
research are obvious. They can only be met through careful and thorough discus-
sion. The purpose of the present article was to demonstrate adaptability through
linking responsivity with other approaches to alterity which are more familiar to
anthropologists. The sociological type of the stranger was presented as someone
forced to respond to the demands of an alien socio-cultural order (Schutz) or,
conversely, as a person or a group who placed a demand on that order
(Simmel). More than existing approaches, I propose that responsivity allows us
to account for the dynamics of stranger-relations. In particular, it allows us to
better grasp the function of strangers in the constitution of social identity: whatever
label we attach to the stranger, whether we refer to him as guest, immigrant, or
enemy, inevitably in one movement we conceptualize him as bearer of the label
and ourselves in relation to him. But to regard this as a creative response means
that there must always remain a sphere of alienness in connection with the stranger
from which demands continue to arise. There is no perfect or ultimate social
response to the stranger.
The psychoanalysis of the uncanny and of anxiety was compatible with a
responsive conception of the personal self. Freuds Ego struggles for order but is
continuously in danger of being overwhelmed by the unconscious drives of the Id.
Several processes of responding structure the persons psychic life: on the one hand,
Leistle 69
the person responds to the world as a totality; on the other hand, various aspects of
the self respond to each other. The psychoanalytical self is thus never completely
identical with itself, a non-coincidence reected in the feeling of uncanniness.
The concept of responsivity can enrich anthropological approaches inspired by
psychology and psychoanalysis. This potential was exemplied through anthro-
pologists responses to anxiety experienced in the eld. Professional defenses in
the sense of Georges Devereux were interpreted as answers to a threatening alien.
These responses can be called conservative in that they are pre-formulated by an
existing order, a professional culture of anthropology, and serve to preserve
that order.
Finally, the semiotic approach to otherness was considered, both in general and
in a violent encounter between cultures, the Spanish conquest of America as pre-
sented by Todorov. As with the earlier approaches, the investigation stressed points
of contact and compatibility rather than contradictions. Waldenfels conception of
the Other as what we respond to in no way precludes the importance of signifying
structures and orders of meaning, but deepens the semiotic-hermeneutic approach
through a sensitivity for the origin of orders in an in-between sphere of dis-order.
No matter how abstract and impersonal a constellation might appear, from a
responsive perspective it must ultimately be relatable to an unpredictable
human element. This notion is particularly important for anthropology as a dis-
cipline which is often concerned with people who nd themselves in the subordinate
position of power relations, a discipline in which questions of ethics acquire central
importance.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Notes
1. Waldenfels himself relates his use of the terms response and responsivity back to
behaviorism, but to the German adaptation of this broad approach through authors
such as Karl Buhler, J.F.F. Buytendijk, Wolfgang Kohler, or Kurt Lewin (Waldenfels,
2007: 28). Following ordinary usage, Waldenfels uses the German word Antwort for
various aspects of responsivity that can be distinguished as response and answer in
English. The more abstract notion of a general responsiveness he renders as Responsivitat,
translatable as responsivity.
2. With certain modifications this even applies to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, who also
assigns priority to the question: It is of the essence of the question to have sense. Now
sense involves direction. Hence the sense of the question is the direction in which alone
the answer can be given if it is to be meaningful. A question places that which is
questioned within a particular perspective. The emergence of the question opens up, as it
were, the being of the object. Hence the logos that sets out this opened-up being is
already an answer. Its sense lies in the sense of the question (Gadamer, 1975: 326). For a
critical discussion of Gadamers hermeneutic from a perspective of responsivity see
Waldenfels (1994: 12236).
3. See in particular Part I of his Antwortregister.
4. This is not supposed to mean that the self cannot factually kill the Other. Quite to the
contrary, Levinas, who lost his family in the Holocaust and was himself imprisoned in a
German POW camp, attributes to the self a desire to kill which is aroused by the Other.
The resistance lies in the fact that self, when fulfilling this desire, destroys its object. The
Other cannot be possessed, not even by murdering him.
5. I happily acknowledge that Waldenfels himself provided the inspiration for making
these connections. He regularly cites Simmel and Schutz, Freud and Bakhtin, even
Todorov in his works.
6. It should perhaps be stated explicitly that this is not supposed to mean that efforts aimed
at integration are futile. But one should keep in mind that integration, when it is
completely successful, dissolves the phenomenon of the stranger. The completely inte-
grated stranger is no stranger anymore but a normal member of society and the ambi-
guity that defines the status of the stranger has vanished.
7. For example the studies of the Chicago School of sociology, whose members
initiated the field of immigration studies and formulated important concepts of the
immigrant-stranger as marginal man (Park, 1928) and sojourner (Siu, 1952, 1987).
Both Park and Siu based their conceptions directly on Simmels The Stranger (Siu,
1987: xxxii). Also valuable for a revitalization of the sociology of the stranger would
be Margaret Mary Woods monograph The Stranger: A Study in Social Relationship
(New York, 1934). As for anthropological sources, they are too numerous to list as
any study of contacts between social groups will provide material on the types of
strangers involved. A good example for how to make use of the ethnographic record
from a perspective emphasizing otherness is Fritz Kramers comparative work on art
and possession in Africa, The Red Fes (1993). Kramer is able to show how, in a
variety of African societies, contacts to actual, concrete strangers, that is to other,
African and European peoples interrelate with aesthetic forms and possession prac-
tices in non-arbitrary ways. In general, Christoph Wulf (2013: 71) has pointed out
that the stranger has been one of the central concerns of research in historical
anthropology.
8. This difference is of course important for the effective outcome of processes of adapta-
tion and integration, but it is not relevant with regard to the structural characteristics of
the experience of the stranger considered by Schutz.
9. For Schutzs influential conception of the everyday life-world as that province of reality
which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted in the attitude of
common sense, see Schutz and Luckmann (1970: 3 ff).
10. The term is accurate for Schutz and preferable to self since Schutz himself defines the
ego in the center of the life-world as reflecting on its own experience, that is as subject in
the strict sense.
11. Simmel, too, describes the relationship to the stranger as founded on a shared human-
ness that, somewhat paradoxically, restricts the possibility of intimacy with him: In
some cases, perhaps the more general, at least the more unsurmountable, strangeness is
Leistle 71
not due to different and ununderstandable matters. It is rather caused by the fact that
similarity, harmony and nearness are accompanied by the feeling that they are not really
the unique property of this particular relationship: they are something more general,
something which potentially prevails between the partners and an indeterminate number
of others, and therefore gives the relation, which alone was realized, no inner and
exclusive necessity (Simmel, 1950: 407).
12. Schutzs influence on anthropological theorizing outside of phenomenological anthro-
pology was mostly indirect. A notable exception is presented by Clifford Geertzs essay
Person, Time and Conduct in Bali (Geertz, 1973), in which he uses Schutzs distinction
between predecessor, contemporary and successor for a description of the Balinese
conception of time.
13. An example for the uncanny in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffman are the various figures of
the double: a doubling of the self by someone who is uncannily similar to it and whose
thoughts are telepathically connected to the selfs; or the identification of the self with
another up to point where self and double cannot be separated from each other; a
duplication of events which keep recurring again and again (Freud, 1955b: 234).
Freud relates both the duplication of the self and the recurrence of events back to
infantile experiences and instinctual drives. At an early stage of development, he says,
the other self is experienced as a protection since it seems to guarantee the continuing
existence of self. Later, however, the double becomes a reminder of ones own death; it is
now frightening since it reminds us that our very life is surrounded by otherness.
Recurrent events, like passing the same place again and again when lost, are uncanny
because they carry within them a residue of the compulsion to repeat characteristic of
instinctual behavior (Freud, 1955b: 238).
14. Although Devereux doesnt work explicitly with the concept of the uncanny, but with
the more encompassing notion of anxiety, what he has to say applies to uncanniness in
the stricter sense. After all, uncanniness can be understood as the mode of anxiety that
relates to the selfs insecurity regarding its sphere of ownness (that class of the frighten-
ing which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar).
15. These interrelations also seem to be at play in Devereuxs distinction between sublima-
tory, that is, creative, and defensive, that is, automatic uses of methodology: What
matters, therefore, is not whether one uses methodology also as an anxiety-reducing
device, but whether one does so knowingly, in a sublimatory manner, or unconsciously,
in a defensive manner only (Devereux, 1967: 97).
16. See also the remarks by Sykes at the beginning of this essay.
17. Some semioticians have come up directly against the problem of the radical Other.
Gregory Bateson, for example, in his famous essay A Theory of Play and Fantasy,
arrives at the realization that any form of change and innovation in communication
involves logical paradox (Bateson, 1972: 193). As in Waldenfels concept of responding,
meaning arises here out of the interstices between orders. Another example for a semi-
otic contribution to a radical notion of alterity is the literary theory of the Russian critic,
linguist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. The discourse of the novel, says Bakhtin, is
organized according to the principle of heteroglossia, the tendency of any living language
to differentiate itself into a theoretically infinite number of varieties, dialects, sociolects,
professional jargons, etc. (Bakhtin, 1981: 2623). In the novel, heteroglossia becomes
dominant, dissolving the individual voice of the author into a genuine polyphony. The
author or speaker becomes a meeting ground of heterogeneous forces: she is not in
control of what she says her speech literally comes from elsewhere, the product of
responding to the Other in language.
18. Although these factors, and in particular the last one, played a big part in the near
annihilation of the Indian population of Latin America within 50 years of the conquest.
19. However, it has to be taken into consideration that the indigenous accounts were mostly
written in retrospect, that is, after the Aztec defeat.
20. The concept of responsivity theoretically extends to the non-human realm, including
animals as responsive beings. It suggests that the boundary between human and non-
human animals cannot be drawn in absolute terms, but must be based on a distinction
between different modes of responding. A promising starting point for such an endeavor
seems to be the human ability to produce creative responses, thereby transcending
pre-existing orders of being and creating new ones. This approach connects well with
classical attempts in philosophical anthropology (Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner,
Arnold Gehlen) to define the human being.
21. Todorov is, for example, very sensitive to differences in responding on both sides of the
conflict. On the Aztec side, he contrasts Montezumas hesitant behavior, and that of the
Aztecs in general, with the determination of other leaders and peoples. For the Spanish
on whose side the historic record is, for obvious reasons, richer Todorov contrasts the
attitudes and behaviors of such different figures as Columbus, Cortes, Las Casas and
Sahagun, thereby demonstrating that one and the same cultural perspective can give rise
to a great variety of individual responses. Particularly worthy of note is Todorovs
interest in culturally hybrid figures, like Cortes famous Indian interpreter and mistress
whom the Spanish called La Malinche or Dona Marina (1999: 100102), or the
Dominican Diego Duran (pp. 202ff.), who was raised in Mexico and whose description
of the pre-Columbian world was characterized by standing in-between the two cultural
worlds (for a reading of the role of La Malinche in openly responsive terms, see the
chapter The Go-Between in Stephen Greenblatts Marvelous Possessions). Finally,
Todorovs discussion of the work of Bernardino de Sahagun (pp. 219ff.) must be men-
tioned in terms of polyphony and dialogical representation.
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Bernhard Leistle is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University,

Ottawa. He has conducted extensive eldwork in Morocco and published on
Moroccan rituals of trance and possession. Theoretically, his work lies at the
intersection of philosophical phenomenology and cultural anthropology. He is
the editor of the forthcoming Anthropology and Alterity. Responding to the Other
(Routledge 2016).

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respond. Response is here identied with reaction, implying a causal relation to a

1. An answer, especially a formal answer, such as to a question on a test or a

Another example of using responding in the sense of responsivity is provided by

. . . I argue that anthropologists, in their attempts to understand culture as a creative

A malanggan is [a] proper object for anthropological study. It is a carving, which, in

The concept of responding, in the sense of giving an answer to questions humans

In the process of understanding culture as a creative response to the question, What is

Responsivity as relation to the other

has shown since Husserl, everything I experience is endowed with a subjective

The transgression of the sphere of an intentional or rule-governed sense takes place in

respond and that to which we answer is replaced by an intentional or rule-guided sense

Responding occurs in relation to a demand characterized as alien due to the fact

responses to collective demands: an entity such as Europe, whatever reality one

a suering, but not to be identied with pain. The temporality of responding is

Other approaches to alterity

Sociology of the stranger

fundamentally creative through its capacity to break through existing structures of

. . . Very frequently the reproach of doubtful loyalty originates in the astonishment of

Such statements remain relevant in contemporary contexts of migration, trans-

defenses, dened as certain frames of reference, methods and procedures at the

Case 44: A psychologically sophisticated anthropologist told me that he had witnessed

Devereux then goes on to comment:

Cultural relativism . . . seeks to reduce anxiety, by viewing cultural data in a human

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Spadola E (2014) The Calls of Islam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bernhard Leistle is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University,

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