Identity, otherness, interculture: conceptual orientations between stereotypes and social imaginary

Abstract

The concept of otherness implies that of identity, with which it maintains a dialogical and dialectical relationship. “Je est un autre”: I am another, we could say, recalling the words of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. This formula, however, can only be understood if -framed in a context of permanent becoming- identity is not a given, a monolith, but a process that presupposes and needs otherness. “There is no given I that does not inevitably refer, inevitably, to a Thou, to a contact, to a relation.”
Social representations theory takes diversity among subjects as its starting point, and “it aims to discover how individuals and groups can construct a stable, predictable world based on such diversity.”
To understand these phenomena better and to advance our reasoning further, it is certainly useful to go back to the definition of social representation formulated by Jodelet – in the wake of Émile Durkheim – according to whom it appears as a system of values, notions, and practices with a dual vocation. On the one hand, the vocation of installing an order that orientates subjects in their social and material environment, managing to “dominate” it, and on the other, the vocation of ensuring communication between the members of a community, offering them an unambiguous code for denominating, and classifying the component parts of their individual stories and the history of the world in which they are immersed.