Working paper
Reshaping the Western Concept of Human Identity: Christianity's Encounter with Europe's Indigenous Past
Iowa Research Online
04/01/2024
DOI: 10.17077/pp.006727
Abstract
In recent years a great deal of time and effort has gone into discussing the topic of “Othering”, the discursive practice by which non-western hunter-gatherers and Indigenous peoples in general have been distanced from the modes of thought, norms and ontological grounding of modernity and the human exceptionalism that has been part and parcel of that Western conceptual package of human identity. In the case of Europe, most of the ethnographic and ethnohistorical research carried out so far has also internalized another conviction: that orally transmitted beliefs and social practices are not worthy of serious study. The appropriateness of that approach to the orally transmitted ethnographic and ethnohistorical data has been further reinforced by the assumption that if there ever was a widespread alternative pre-Christian spirituality and/or animist ontology in Europe, Christianity wiped out all or almost all traces of it.
Consequently, the Western worldview is regularly positioned in opposition to the animist beliefs and social practices of the Indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of North American and Eurasia. And this has resulted in them being “Othered”. Hopefully, this study will allow the reader to entertain the following possibility: that a careful analysis of certain European beliefs and social practices from the not-too-distant past can lead to an Othering of our own Western concept of personhood and human identity. And this process of European Othering should allow for the recognition that the earlier European worldview was far more in consonance with these hunter-gatherer cosmologies than has heretofore been suspected. Stated differently, this reinterpretation of the European ethnographic and ethnohistorical materials will open up the possibility that Europe, too, possesses a forager past, one that is linked to an older and different sense of human identity. Hopefully, this essay, will give readers the opportunity to engage in a new way with Europe’s own indigenous past and their own sense of human identity.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Reshaping the Western Concept of Human Identity: Christianity's Encounter with Europe's Indigenous Past
- Creators
- Roslyn M Frank - University of Iowa, Spanish and Portuguese
- Resource Type
- Working paper
- DOI
- 10.17077/pp.006727
- Publisher
- Iowa Research Online; Iowa City, Iowa, USA
- Number of pages
- 84 pages
- Copyright
- © 2024 by Roslyn M. Frank.
- Language
- English
- Date posted
- 04/01/2024
- Academic Unit
- Spanish and Portuguese
- Record Identifier
- 9984572790202771
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