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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Other in Western Civilization

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This chapter explores how the Otherness was imagined by Europeanness, as well as the stereotypes, prejudices and idealized image around the non-Western Other. This section not only discusses to what extent Europe launched to colonize the world but the socio-cultural background for the European proclamation of supremacy over the rest of the world. The perverse core of European ethnocentrism rests in its paternalism to understand the cultural difference, adjoined to the rise and consolidation of Science, which paradoxically accelerated what David Riesman dubbed ‘the Other-oriented’ gaze. This is the moment of great technological breakthrough and the flourishing of romantic novels, literature and anthropology which engaged with a peripheral wonderland to be domesticated. In this stage, the material asymmetries of center and its periphery were crystalized while Europe adopted capitalism as its main socio-economic project.