Sunday Word: Alterity
alterity [awl-ter-i-tee]
noun:
otherness; the quality or condition of being different, especially of being fundamentally different from or alien to the sense of identity of a person or cultural group
Examples:
Her influential thought experiment The Left Hand of Darkness uses this strategy to explore gender and alterity. (Julie Phillips, The Fantastic Ursula K Le Guin, The New Yorker, October 2016)
Bourdain’s magic lies is in his capacity to formulate the most updated representation of readily consumable alterity. He doesn’t need to know Africa to do his work; he just needs to understand his customers, America and the appetite for a revamped experience of darkness. (Tunde Wey, The power of those who get to tell the stories, San Francisco Chronicle, March 2018)
Khatibi was, among other things, a sociologist, philosopher, novelist, poet, and literary critic; he described himself as 'a professional stranger' - ie, a traveling intellectual whose thinking is constantly open to variation and difference, and whose writing, as he once put it, functions as 'an exercise of cosmopolitan alterity.' (Khalid Lyamlahy, The Professional Stranger: On Abdelkebir Khatibi's 'Plural Maghreb', Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2019)
Throughout the nineteenth century, the concept of a Chinese typewriter was a popular signifier of Chinese alterity. (Ed Jones, REVIEW: The Chinese Typewriter: A History, The New Lens, December 2014)
During such encounters, we briefly return to a pre-economical state in which things can be 'tendered', as Adam Potkay puts it, 'that is, treated with tenderness - because of the generosity of their self-giving, as if alterity were itself pure gift.' (Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks)
Origin:
First recorded in 1425-75; Middle English alterite 'change, transformation, difference,' from Middle French alterité, from Late Latin alteritāt-, stem of alteritās 'alternation, change,' equivalent to alter 'other' + -i- connecting vowel + -tās noun suffix, modeled on Greek heterótēs 'otherness, difference'. (Online Etymology Dictionary)
You’re probably familiar with the verb alter, meaning 'to make or become different,' and you may not be surprised to learn that it is a relative of alterity. Both words descend from the Latin word alter, meaning 'other (of two).' That Latin alter, in turn, comes from a prehistoric Indo-European word that is also an ancestor of our 'alien.' Alterity has been used in English as a fancy word for 'otherness' ('the state of being other') since at least 1642. It remains less common than 'otherness' and tends to turn up most often in the context of literary theory or cultural studies. (Merriam Webster)