Kulturthema Fremdheit
Leitbegriffe und Problemfelder
kulturwissenschaftlicher Fremdheitsforschung
Edited by Alois Wierlacher,
Munich: Iudicium,1993, 575 pp.
If it's not Greek you speak you're stuttering&emdash;you're a "barbarian". Tatars are dog-headed. Potatoes aren't food for people; Slovaks aren't people. It's all the fault of the Jews. Hungarians are perfidious knaves....
The very streets are strewn with subject matter for the science of xenology, and have been since the days of the Greek polis. From Aristotle to Montesquieu, and from Hegel to Heidegger, "the other", the foreign, the unknown is something that a great many thinkers have focused on from time to time. Still, it is only in our days that xenology is beginning to be recognized as an autonomous discipline. Just how autonomous is open to discussion; what is conspicuous is that, unlike the classical sciences, it is a science without a past. For much as the classical sciences, too, are beginning to be esteemed primarily for their (socio-economic) productivity, they have yet to cast off, tattered though they be, the quaint old ideals of "the search for truth" and "the spiritual and moral education of the nation". Not that xenology does not aim at truth, or does not aim to make its truths an integral part of the culture of the new generation. Still, its immediate goals are distinctly practical: helping foreigners conform to a particular host culture, for instance, or teaching businessmen working abroad to adjust to local circumstances more effectively. In this sense, xenology is a typical postmodern science: "The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions."1 Postmodernism is highlighted by an emphatically interdisciplinary nature: we can be certain that we won't be seeing departments of xenology being set up at universities. On the other hand, the establishment of a non-academic institute for research into international communication was announced in Bayreuth at the very conference whose papers are published in the volume under review.
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