Kapuściński, Ryszard; with an introduction by Neal Ascherson; trans. Antonia Lloyd‐Jones. The other. 100 pp. London: Verso Books, 2018. £8.99 (paper)

Abstract

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) was an internationally acclaimed Polish journalist and author, whose writings generated some controversy for their apparent blending of reportage and literature. This volume includes four lectures: the ‘Viennese lectures’ which were delivered in Vienna on 1-3 December 2004 at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen; ‘My Other’, which was given at the International Writers’ Symposium in Graz on 12 October 1990; ‘The Other in the global village’, which was delivered at the Father Józef Tischner Senior European School in Kraków on 30 September 2003; and ‘Encountering the Other as the challenge of the twenty-first century’, which was delivered on 1 October 2004, when Kapuściński was awarded an honorary doctorate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The lectures pursue interlinked trajectories of reflection on Europe and its relations with Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the question of the Other and the direction of social and cultural change. Over the course of the lectures, Kapuściński engages substantially with anthropology, particularly through the figure of Bronislaw Malinowski, and continental philosophy, through that of Emmanuel Lévinas. In this brief review, I will address these elements, before concluding with some short remarks about Kapuściński's representation of anthropology and Malinowski. For Kapuściński, Enlightenment humanism – expressed initially through literature and travel writing – opened up new spaces in which the Other emerged not as an object of conquest or conversion, but as a human being. According to Kapuściński, anthropology and the ‘philosophy of dialogue’ (p. 68) as practised by the likes of Lévinas, emerged from this Enlightenment space (p. 27). His summary of the development of anthropology from the debates of evolutionists, diffusionists, and functionalists into a discipline defined by ethnography, with Malinowski as ‘the creator of anthropological reportage’ (p. 32), segues neatly into a discussion of Lévinas, and his foregrounding of the ethics of the encounter with the Other, a move which Kapuściński sees as building upon the fieldwork pioneered by Malinowski. Kapuściński adds that fieldwork ‘is not only recommended for anthropologists, but is also a fundamental condition for the job of a reporter’ (p. 31), a point which highlights potential points of contact between the two professions. Kapuściński provides two perspectives on European history and experience: one, as we have seen, begins with the Enlightenment and moves on via the novel to anthropology and the philosophy of dialogue. The other focuses on social and cultural change, and the transition, as Kapuściński sees it, from mass to global society, a transition precipitated by decolonization and the end of the Cold War, as well as the advance and spread of new communication technologies. According to Kapuściński, mass society, particularly in its totalitarian forms, negated the individual: the subject was a member of a class, a race, or a nation. As such, our new multicultural-global society must embrace the spirit of dialogue found not just in the writings of Lévinas but also in those of the Polish Catholic theologian Józef Tischner, for whom the idea of dialogue was precisely conceived in opposition to mass and totalitarian social forms and in the recognition of the individual human being. Importantly, Kapuściński understands that a defining feature of the new global and multicultural society is its emergence from ‘various contradictory worlds, a composite creature of fluid, impermanent contours and features’ (p. 33), and that it is ‘hybrid and heterogeneous’ (p. 89). This new society will, according to Kapuściński, require something of the spirit of Malinowski, Lévinas, and Tischner if it is not to succumb to the many enmities and challenges that beset it from all sides. One reason to read this beautifully composed book is for its representation of anthropology and one of the discipline's most controversial figures, Malinowski. Kapuściński sees in anthropology, and fieldwork in particular, a deliberative methodology for dialogue and understanding the Other. Perhaps this is a rose-tinted view of the fieldwork encounter that does not adequately grasp its ongoing implication in asymmetries of power, race, and gender, but Kapuściński offers some useful points of departure for pursuing related questions about ethnography and literary craft, and for exploring anthropology and journalism as entangled professions. Finally, given the links made by Robert J. Thornton (‘Imagine yourself set down …’, Anthropology Today 1: 5, 1985) between Malinowski and one of Conrad's more disturbing creations, Kurtz, there is perhaps some irony in the fact that Kapuściński's final lecture closes with a quotation from Joseph Conrad (p. 92) that points to a common humanity binding together the dead, the living, and the unborn.