RT Article
T1 The Heterological Quest: Michel de Certeau’s Travel Narratives and the “Other” of Comparative Religious Ethics
JF Journal of religious ethics
VO 30
IS 1
SP 23
OP 48
A1 Barbieri, William A.
LA English
YR 2002
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1822384575
AB One of the central methodological issues for contemporary practitioners of comparative ethics is how to conceptualize and relate to the “other” encountered in cross-cultural studies. A valuable resource for reflection on this problem is the work of the French historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, whose diverse opus coheres around his notion of heterology—a “science of the other.” In this article I explore perspectives on the cultural “other” emerging from Certeau’s analyses of a series of “travel narratives” documenting the European encounter with the peoples of the New World. Certeau’s meditations on the metaphor of the voyage, the interplay of orality and literacy, the politics of ethnography, and the semiotics of the “return of the repressed” offer, I suggest, important insights for comparative ethicists.
K1 return of the repressed
K1 Otherness
K1 Alterity
K1 heterology
K1 comparative ethics
K1 Certeau
DO 10.1111/1467-9795.00097