Intimate alterity/ies: definitely unattainable?

Abstract

To us anthropologists, sensitive to cultural diversity and skeptical of any statement with universal pretensions, the work of Thomas Csordas (2004) on embodied alterity as the phenomenological kernel of religion is certainly provocative. This is especially true when we tackle a tapie such as alterity, which occupies a crucial place in the construction and questioning of the anthropological discipline (Boivin et al., 1995; Krotz, 1994) since it has often produced, as an analytical category, fictitious cultural distances (Thomas, 1991), and it has also highlighted the power relations that it implies and conveys (Segato, 1998). Furthermore, when it comes to the studies linked to corporeality, although this is an area that has opened lines of innovative and fruitful research, we have to be careful with ''the universalizing approach adopted by the new studies on the body, where [ ... ] the human body appears to be (potentially) the same everywhere"(Vilaça, 2005, p. 448).