Discovering the Other

I think more than anything else this class has impressed upon me the difficulty of truly discovering the other. Todorov’s Conquest of America has captured this theme, which prevails throughout the books we have read. Discovering the other is not merely meeting face to face, it is really getting under the others’ skin and understanding their own distinct logic and perspective. As Jackie writes, for true discovery there must be that “unique ability of both characters to see things from a different perspective… (and) maybe they can never completely relate to the practices of the aliens, but they have an understanding of why things are done that way.”

What appears to us as irrational behavior actually follows its own logic, it just may come from a place so different from our own cultural standpoint. There are so many opportunities for miscommunication and failure to understand. In each of the books we have read the characters in some manner fall prey to these misunderstandings.

At the end of his book, Todorov suggests that the ability to “get into someone else’s head” to grasp the others’ distinct logic and cultural experience is a form of maturity and evolutionary growth. He writes, “for the newborn child his world is the world, and growth is an apprenticeship in exteriority and sociality,” (247). He mourns the fact that it is possible to “live our lives without ever achieving a full discovery of the other” (247) since identification of the other moves from seeing the “other-as-subject,” such as Marjorie viewing the Foxen as animals, “to the other as subject, equal to the I but different from it,” as Marjorie eventually observes the Foxen as equal yet different intelligent life (247).

Each of the characters in the books we read has gone through or is stuck in this process. Those that never come to an understanding of the other as equal yet different were not able to lose their own cultural framework for however brief a moment and step into the others’, thus perpetually “Misreading the facts” (247) as a result of their cultural biases.