Conceptualizing the Other in Intercultural Encounters: Review, Formulation, and Typology of the Other-Identity

Abstract

Acculturation’s impact on migrating individuals’ cultural identity is one of the foci of intercultural communication research. Many intercultural communication studies deliberately place ethnic identity at the core of identity research to avoid using racial identity. Influenced by the difference-as-problem viewpoint, sojourners’ and immigrants’ Other-identities are often viewed as abnormal, deviant, and alien and therefore should be managed, reduced, and even eliminated. However, critical scholarship has revealed that the sense of being the Other is the main theme of sojourners and immigrants. Drawing upon postmodern, postcolonial, and hermeneutic approaches, sojourners’ and immigrants’ 3 types of Other-identities are conceptualized in this review, and their embeddedness in asymmetric power structures is explained. These ideas emerge from social categorization processes that use both phenotypic and cultural markers as primary categorizing criteria. Consequently, the view held by biculturalists is refuted, and elaboration is presented about the ways migrating individuals—in intercultural encounters—enrich their sense of Self through integrating their Other-identities into their Self-identities, producing fused identities.

KEYTERMS:

• Hermeneutics
• postmodernism
• postcolonialism
• the Other-identity; Otherness