In a world where possibilities, if not hope, seem in short supply, can we learn to look at those who have been marginalized, excluded, and often dehumanized and demonized not as the Other but as the Otherwise—not aliens but alternatives for reimagining ourselves and our exhausted institutions and societies?
We live in an era of not only change and crisis—every era of human history has probably known change and crisis—but of disappointment and exhaustion. In 1979, Lyotard (1984 [1979]) diagnosed the condition as “postmodernity” with its failure or collapse of all “grand narratives” that previously offered meaning and hope, from capitalism and Marxism to liberalism, internationalism, and (paradoxically) both progress and tradition. There was apparently no going forward but no going back. We were out of options.
It is no coincidence that the same moment witnessed a rightward lurch of society and politics; for instance, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the first successes of the National Front in France (founded 1972), and right-wing military dictatorships that overtook Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1974. All of these movements were, in one way or another, pitted against “the other,” whether that meant communists, liberals, secularists, indigenous peoples, minorities, or simply the poor. All such groups were perceived as the cause of what liberal American President Jimmy Carter, in a completely opposite tone, called “malaise”: illness, unease, discomfort.
Today, everyone is ill at ease and uncomfortable, in their own ways and for their own reasons. The one thing that virtually everyone can agree on is that whatever we are doing now is not working—and not working more profoundly for some than for others. However, even historically privileged majorities, like straight white Christian males, feel the frustration, confusion, and pain. What modern states and societies seem to suffer from most acutely is a lack of possibilities. Where can alternatives to our failed and exhausted systems come from? Many scholars and activists argue that the answer is precisely those groups and voices that were previously (and falsely) deemed the problem in the first place, who were castigated as the outsider, the foreigner, and the Other.
[T]wo things are true: first, these myriad and fascinating and troubling cultures can be models not for what we were (in a cultural evolutionary sense) but for what we could be (in the future possibility sense); and second, we ourselves, whoever we are, are otherwise too—otherwise from all of the other human cultures as well as from what we were in the past and what we will be in the future.
My discipline, anthropology, has always been the realm of the Other. Mwenda Ntarangwi (2010), an African scholar who chronicled his experiences in American academia—viewing us as the Other—rightly observed that anthropology has (or is) a “romance with alterity” or otherness/difference. Anthropology originally studied tribal, traditional, or “primitive” peoples basically because no other discipline did; it was essentially comparative sociology. More than comparison, anthropologists concede that from the outset their discipline investigated such Others expressly to learn something about ourselves, whether the lesson was the presumed superiority of Western civilization and the white race, or the elementary forms of our social institutions like government, marriage, or religion, from which we had luckily graduated.
Lately, though, as anthropologist Janina Kehr notes, there has been a shift in the discourse from “the Other” to “the Otherwise,” with the adverb becoming a noun “to denote something that is an alternative” (2020: 27). What this portends is a reorientation from the question of “how to represent otherness and difference” to “how to productively engage with alternative ways of existence, not least to show that another world is possible, that an otherwise is possible” (28).
Similarly, in their introduction to an online essay series on “An Otherwise Anthropology,” McTighe and Raschig (2019) use “the Otherwise” to designate “political potentialities that are still emerging”—or perhaps not even yet realized or known. They explicitly invoke sources of “the Otherwise” in populations including African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, indigenous peoples, and non-heteronormative genders and sexualities who suggest “possibilities beyond our dystopic present,” against which they offer “reparative thinking and doing”: specifically, undoing the damage that colonialism, capitalism, modernization, globalization, and even Western scholarship itself has done
The magical word here is possibilities, as appears in philosophers Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers’ influential essay on “the insistence of possibles.” For them, learning about the Other is discovering the Otherwise, that is, “intensifying the sense of the possible” (2017 [2016]: 13) and “dwelling on possible becomings, pressing for, insisting on, all those ‘might haves’ and ‘could bes’ implicit in situations” (17). Back in my discipline, in Routes/Worlds, Elizabeth Povinelli finds in anthropology, and bequeaths to the world, the “will to be Otherwise,” which reveals and circulates “subjugated knowledges” (2012: 454) as an insurrectionist gesture of “willfulness in the face of dominant forms of knowledge—the will to know what exceeds, lies alongside, or refuses the functional coherence and formal systematizations that subjugate knowledge” (456).
Finally, Ghassam Hage calls it alter-politics, otherwise politics derived from and bestowing otherwise power. More than the search for quirks and oddities—or, more scientifically, universals or origins—in non-dominant cultures, Hage christens anthropology as the “search for alternatives”: “alternative economies, alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to the earth, alternative modes of thinking and experiencing otherness” (2015: 1). He argues that anthropology inevitably matured from a naïve study of other cultures to a study of cultural Otherwise (or Otherwises), in the process “widen[ing] our sphere of what is socially and culturally possible” (53).
Appreciating that these human Others and Otherwises that we encounter in fieldwork are human like us, and therefore part of the range of human possibles, has (or should have) a deep effect on us. Coming full circle from the (mis)uses of alterity in the late 19thand early 20th centuries, an anthropology of Otherwise teaches us that “regardless of what and who we are, we, as individuals and as a society, can dwell in the world in a completely different way from the way we dwell in it at any given moment” (54).
In other words, two things are true: first, these myriad and fascinating and troubling cultures can be models not for what we were (in a cultural evolutionary sense) but for what we could be (in the future possibility sense); and second, we ourselves, whoever we are, are otherwise too—otherwise from all of the other human cultures as well as from what we were in the past and what we will be in the future. It is a humbling but liberating revelation that the way things are for us are not the way they always have been or always will be.
Beyond anthropology, which is hardly an idle academic exercise, thinkers and activists are already putting the Otherwise to work. Two of the main areas of activity are feminism and race. As mere indicators of much larger movements, Dina Bolokan, Anukriti Dixit, Melina Rutishauser, and Julia Wartmann subtitled their book on gender studies Producing Knowledge Otherwise, writing in the introduction that the essence of their labor is “learning from diverse positionalities and from manifold epistemologies in order to counter prevalent practices of knowledge production” (2025: 15)—practices that sustain patriarchal and exploitative relations.
Meanwhile, in a special issue of the journal Taboo dedicated to the topic of “Dreaming Otherwise: Black Education, Resistance, and World-Making,” Shelton Johnson explains in his introduction that the point of education is (or should be) “sustaining the imaginative capacity to conceive…otherwise” (2026: 4); educators and students should “interrogate the limits of the present while imagining social arrangements that do not yet exist. In this sense, dreaming is neither escapism nor abstraction. It is a form of intellectual insurgency that disrupts the boundaries through which the present attempts to define what can be known, what can be imagined, and what can be built” (5). In a word, “To dream otherwise in education is to refuse the assumption that the present arrangement of schooling represents the natural or inevitable horizon of educational life” (11)—and the same can and should be said about society and culture as a whole.
The experiences of women, non-binary individuals, and people of color are rich sources of the Otherwise but far from the only sources. Migrants, refugees, indigenous peoples, and other cultural and ideological minorities (non-Christians, liberals, yes even socialists, and many more) are also the Otherwise in our midst. Indeed, Hage credits Zygmunt Bauman with noticing that, whereas the First World formerly tutored the Third World, this relationship is reversing, with postcolonial and marginalized and devalued people potentially tutoring a Western civilization badly in need of tutelage.
This is not to say that the rich, (post)industrial, (post)Christian white world is eager or even willing to receive such instruction. Many people prefer their own culture, and not just for chauvinistic reasons; many see their own traditions, values, and mythopolitics as real and true and want more, not less, of what they already have and are—even if those are the very things that failed them. Many, of course, are chauvinists, who feel that theirways are superior to the ways of the other, thus thrown into a defensive, rearguard stance.
This brings us to the contemporary global rise of nationalist, (civilizational, religious, and/or racial) populist, anti-globalist, and anti-immigrant politics. As Povinelli commented in another essay, contact with the Other is not always welcomed as a discovery of possibles but feared as a threat and insult which more often than not “produces an immunological response in the host mode of being” (2011: 1). The problem is exacerbated by economic uncertainty and precarity, political polarization and gridlock, war, environmental catastrophe, and all of the other perils of the present, including for the West and the United States in particular their wounded pride and sense of decline. Therefore, this is precisely how we should interpret the populism and malignant nationalism of the Putins, Netanyahus, Orbans, and Trumps of the world: as an allergic reaction to otherness, if not a scapegoating of the Other, and thus a rejection of the Otherwise.
Aaron McCright and various colleagues (e.g., McCright and Dunlap 2010) insightfully dubbed the response anti-reflexivity, a refusal to reflect on oneself, to critique oneself, and to seriously consider alter-politics and alter-cultures for oneself. The effect is a hardening of identity boundaries, a justification of current hierarchies and social arrangements, and necessarily a deafness if not hostility to the Otherwises in their vicinity, which are, again, often blamed for the problems in the first place. The perverse effect is to demand more of what did not work before—more whiteness, more maleness, more Christianity, more capitalism, more jingoistic nationalism, and more vilification of the available Otherwises that might provide solutions, or at least optimistic alternatives, to the discredited and bankrupt narratives that got us here.
But the Otherwise will not go away, and the future will not be the past or even the present. It is foolish for us, and harmful to them, to close our eyes and ears to the alternatives and possibilities they represent and to their fundamental and common humanity. In a word, to be human is to be otherwise.
Image Credit: Zakaria Tourabi, Trouver des Raisons d’Accepter, 2025. Mixed-media collage. Courtesy of the artist.
References
Bolokan, Dina, Anukriti Dixit, Melina Rutishauser, and Julia Wartmann. 2025. “Introduction: Anthology ‘Doing Gender Studies: Producing Knowledge Otherwise.’” In Dina Bolokan, Anukriti Dixit, Melina Rutishauser and Julia Wartmann, eds. Doing Gender Studies: Producing Knowledge Otherwise. Zurich and Geneva: Seismo Press, 11-20.
Debaise, Didier and Isabelle Stengers. 2017 [2016]. “The Insistence of Possibles: Towards a Speculative Pragmatism.” Angela Brewer, trans. Multitudes 4 (65): 13-9.
Hage, Ghassam. 2015. Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.
Johnson, Shelton. 2026. “Introduction: Black, Educated, and Dreaming Otherwise.” Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 24 (2): 3-12.
Kehr, Janina. 2020. “Toward the Otherwise: Anthropology, Politics, Medicine.” Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 145 (1): 27-45.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2010. “Anti-reflexivity: The American Conservative Movement’s Success in Undermining Climate Science and Policy.” Theory, Culture, & Society 27 (2–3): 100–33.
McTighe, Laura and Megan Raschig. 2019. “Introduction: An Otherwise Anthropology.” https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-an-otherwise-anthropology, accessed May 25, 2026.
Ntaragnwi, Mwenda. 2010. Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. “Routes/Worlds.” E-Flux Journal 27 (September): 1-12.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2012. “The Will to be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (3): 454-75.
