XENOLOGY – ONE OF THE SOLUTIONS OF THE RECENT CULTURE

Abstract

            Within the cultural and philosophical studies (not unified and homogeneous) about otherness there had been outlined a special way of studying the Other and the Foreigner – xenology (the term proposed by the researcher from Cameroon Douala M’bedy). Moving away from the Intercultural German Studies as the science of the Foreigner, the xenological approach is centered on the nomad, non-integrated, limited, unidentified human. We can refer to several disciplines that study the stranger, the other, the cultural otherness. These are allology, ethnology, cultural anthropology, imagology, barbarology, ethno-psychoanalysis, and xenology. The last one involves an investigation of the phenomenon of the (in)tolerance between a subject and the Difference, the Other who proves to be rather the Alien, as it represents by the limits of the intelligible, as the Difference is positioned beyond it. From here there is seen the state of suspicion, mistrust and non-acceptance of the host, which reaches to stigmatize the stranger, being excluded the social altruism. The stranger is not only the different one, the Other, a distant entity; it is rather a close matter of the supposed risk. But complementary there appears the Other as a human need of openness and interaction, as the alien from the perspective of his identity outlines the limits of self, serving as a catalyst for self-identification. Considered by some researchers a method, by the others a science xenology, unlike the study of otherness in all its forms, doesn’t relate to a simple differentiation, but to the element that is contrary and contradictory positioned between the ipseity and otherness. From this we can conclude that not every difference requires a certain “xenologity” of the studied object. This refers rather to a critical investigation of the intercultural phenomenon, to the estrangement, tolerance and aggression in terms of ethnology, philosophy and sociology (Albert Classen). Thus xenological steps from a simple cultural xenography may come to constitute a true xenosophy of the human being.