The exotic as a symbolic system

Abstract

Thinking of other cultures often means thinking of the exotic [ 1 ]. Thinking of an? thropology is to refer to distances and differ? ence. One explanation for these associations is that in the popular imagination anthro? pology derives largely from infrequent visits to an ethnology museum, a sampling of dis? tinct and distinctive cooking, or a story of travel to Bali or Borneo. What is common among these experiences is the remoteness, rarity of reference, and supposed difficulty in gaining access to such places and peoples. Yet if anthropology is the study of exotic cultures, then to know anthropology is not only to say what is meant by culture but also to say what is meant by the exotic. The present essay investigates this latter topic. The exotic immediately evokes a symbolic world of infinite complexity, surprise, color, manifold variety and richness. It is a truism, yet fundamental that the exotic world is what we make it, possibly a compensation for the increasingly schematized patterns of everyday life in industrial society, a memory bank of how and whom we think we were in the "primitive" reaches of the past. The exotic may be a false testimony of an ever beckoning frontier, to the inexhaustible scale of a planet fully mapped, fully inhabited and clearly bounded. The exotic is a source of hope as well as of fear. It is an image which asserts infinite possibilities for social trans? formation, cultural reconstruction, and geo? graphical escape. It is a symbol and a concept which fits neatly into the ecology of meaning that is western culture, no doubt a concept which non-western cultures would find odd and exotic. Following Michel Foucault, I sug? gest that the exotic is an episteme, a relatively fixed cultural problematic which becomes operational as an internalized gestalt and struc? tures discursive activities pertaining to cul? tural difference; anthropologizing is but one such discursive activity. The exotic, much like the concept of culture itself, is a great zero, a place-holder about which is elaborated complex semantic systems and cross references defying the imagination of even the most far out science fiction novelist. The concept of culture and that of the exot? ic operate in comparable ways in the discourse about human difference. Both terms label and thereby initiate the "control" of social pheno? mena which, being at the outset remote and unknown, may for those reasons appear cha? otic, threatening, bizarre, ineluctable. These terms begin the domestication of the foreign and unpredictable, so that once the labeling is imposed, the phenomena to which they then apply begin to be structured in a way which makes them comprehensible and possibly pre? dictable, if predictably defiant of total familiar? ity. The exotic is always full of surprises; it delights and titilates. To domesticate it ex? haustively would neutralize this aspect of its meaning and regretfully integrate it into the Stephen William Foster is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.