Earn Of Fear And Strangers: A History Of Xenophobia Formulated By George Makari Shared As Electronic Format

cover and interesting content, I wanted a unique read diving into things that I feel I've grasped some knowledge on but also want totally new information to learn about.
I know what I know and I want to know all the things I don't know,

Woah. Talk about complex and detailed, I was a bit intimidated after a few pages but very excited to get exactly what I asked for, Yes, as mentioned, it is complex but it's written so fantastically that when you get past being intimidated you discover that it's approachable, It's comprehensive but it's descriptive and I appreciated that, A topic very much on the front end of all things politics, religion, social, etc, I was intrigued that it details xenophobia throughout history and not just what is current, I assumed it was going to be more psychologybased but it instead is a record of accounts and some discussion on that,

Thanks to the good people of Goodreads and to W, W Norton amp Company for my copy of this book won via giveaway, I received. I read. I reviewed this book honestly and voluntarily, Maybe inevitable when an author is both a psychiatrist and a historian, but this book went in too many directions for my taste, along with a terribly long digression about French existentialism.
Just a chapter or two, but why oh why But there is a lot of valuable information and analysis here, and some good history, A thread through the book is about the changing meaning of the word xenophobia, which despite its Greek components was never a term used in the classical times, although a similar word meaning “love of strangers” was found in ancient writings.
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Verdict:/. A hardhitting wakeup call to the cosmopolitan need for loving the unknown and Other in times of uncertainty, Of Fear And Strangers is subtitled A History Of Xenophobia which seems like a pretty timely subject and a very broad church indeed, It feels like a pretty universal axiom of human nature that we are predisposed to hate "the other", and as a psychologist I thought that this was the question Makari was going to test.
But that isn't really what this book is about, Instead it is a history of the term Xenophobia, spending a lot of time seeing if the term ever really existed in the Greek, and then skipping through the ages until a modern coinage in the late Victorian period.
Makari is right of course that once concepts have names they gain a different kind of power, but the introduction touts this survey as something that might be able to help dismantle xenophobia, when it really ends up allowing us to point out when the word is being used incorrectly according the current agreed usage as the word has slipped through a number of meanings in its time.


Luckily Makari is an engaging guide through the use and misuse of the word, and wears his scholarship lightly, But there is a sense as we look for crumbs inth century newspapers that he himself knows that the project has slightly slipped away from him.
The concept of people hating outsiders is so large and slippery that it takes in diverse prejudices such as racism, jingoism and the concept of nation states.
These get played through and there is much to me said for the work here on why xenophobia as a concept is generally ascribed to ones enemies before WWto show how unreasonable they are rather than a recognisable state for their own citizens.
And certainly near the end he shows how a word previously used around warring nations gets played in the time of peace to prop up far right propaganda and antiimmigration rhetoric.


Of Fear And Strangers was an interesting read which promised a little more than it could deliver, The history of the term xenophobia is not the same as the history of xenophobia but then the history of xenophobia is pretty much the warring parts of all human history.
What Makari does well is at least show how the term has shifted through usage, and how the idea of broad xenophobia rather than say specific Francophobia has become so accepted as part of human nature that it is proudly trumped by people and even in some case politicians.
Of Fear and Strangers is a startling work of historical sleuthing and synthesis which reveals the forgotten histories of xenophobiaand what they mean for us today.
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst George Makari, the head of the department of history of psychiatry at Cornell who is also a historian, has written a timely new book Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia.
Bywhen it was impossible not to notice an international resurgence of xenophobia, What had happened Looking for clues he started out in search of the ideas origins, To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of nevertold stories, He discovered that while the fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, the notion of a dangerous bias called "xenophobia" arose not that long ago.
Coined by latenineteenthcentury doctors and political commentators and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged as a popular cultural concept alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide.


Makari chronicles the concepts rise, from its popularization and perverse misuse to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of the Holocaust, and then on to its sudden reappearance in the twentyfirst century.
He investigates xenophobias evolution through writers like Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus and Richard Wright, and innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon.
Weaving together history, philosophy and psychology, Makari also offers insights into related ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the authoritarian personality, the other, and institutional bias.
Makari offers a unifying paradigm for comprehending more clearly how xenophobia, other irrational anxieties and contests over identity sweep through cultures and lead to the dangerous divisions so prevalent today.
A fascinating, informative and eminently readable work of nonfiction, Written in elegant prose, this is a timely and comprehensive investigation of one of the issues blighting our lives, Highly recommended. As one of the winners of theAnisfieldWolf Award for Nonfiction, I had the opportunity to read and unpack this book with a group of educators for a week in August.
While the writing is dense and Western Europeancentric, Makari provides a rich history of how white men have understood and used the term "xenophobia" over the last couple of centuries.
In Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, George Makari offers a history of xenophobia, Im happy to recommend this work, but I will only focus on a few points of interest in this summary,

Etymology.

When we think of xenophobia, were probably thinking of a 'fear' of 'strangers,' but Makari finds that the Greek roots of these words other and fear did not appear together in Ancient Greece.
Instead, xenia was more associated with guest right think Polyphemouss punishment for betraying guests or Ovids story of Zeus the traveller needing a place to stay as encouraging kindness to strangers.


Spain.

When Makari's history of Spain begins, it is a pluralistic nation of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, Under Ferdinand and Isabella, however, the country became obsessively Catholic, Spain relied on the Spanish Inquisition to search out and brutalize outsiders in an attempt to become more purely Catholic, In a tragically ironic turn, Spain would go on to finance Columbuss trip to the New World, where he would brutalize the indigenous peoples he encountered.
In this context, we also encounter Bartolome de Las Casas, an early voice identifying exactly how dangerous treating others as subhuman can be,

Imperial and Post Imperial Xenophobia

Curiously, in this era, Makari finds xenophobia beginning to be used to describe colonized nations who object to imperial presence.
Here, the colonized people of, to given one example, Chinas Boxer Rebellion, are considered by Europeans closed minded and scared of strangers, By the end of theth century, however, the word begins to be applied to Europeans who worry about the colonized coming back along the trade routes to England and Europe.


Post World War II

In confronting the Holocaust, the West begins to recognize the dangers of xenophobia, Human beings are capable of being terrible to strangers, and now there were nuclear weapons, too, Makari cites a speech from Harry Truman inas calling on the academy to figure out why people are so capable of being cruel to strangers.
Many theories begin to be explored, Behaviorists, for example, argue that exposure to strangers can reduce xenophobia, so they run experiments and encourage policies to encourage mixing, Michel Foucault would later argue that institutions are designed to create an other group in opposition to a “normal” group,

Makaris conclusions

Makari argues that we often want to take several behaviours and group them all together under one label, and he suggests that this is what happened with “prejudice.
” But these single word summaries are tricky to get right, Makari argues that there are at least three sub categories of xenophobia: "other anxiety," "overt xenophobia," and "covert xenophobia, "

Other anxiety seems like an irrational fear of the unfamiliar that is well addressed by mixing with strangers, It's often suggested that inclusive representation of marginalized communities in sitcoms leads to broader acceptance, and perhaps that notion is well understood under this umbrella.

I understand the second term, overt xenophobia, as referring to bigotry, Makari argues that it is difficult to address overt xenophobia in people, He suggests that it might be best understood as a sort of identity/ group identity, Given that people can be notoriously unreasonable about how they identify themselves, if ones identity is hateful, its very hard to unwind that hatred, I often think of Saslow's Rising Out of Hatred, which is about a young man who takes four years to figure out that white nationalism is wrong.

Covert xenophobia is closer to Foucaults modelthe ways in which groups are “othered” through subtle processes, Makari suggests that this form of xenophobia is best spotted in crises and outrages that prompt investigation into institutions,

Curiously, Makari concludes that he would still like to see some group label applied to these three processes and relies on Albert Memmis “heterophobia.
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Notes:

By the time Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand died, their strategies of dividing the populace by faith and then bloodlines had transformed Spain.
Under their rule, rigid Catholic beliefs created a perpetual process of uniting “us” in our fear of “them, ” Once dazzlingly pluralistic and diverse, Iberia consolidated and became the most inflexible of Catholic countries, one that advertised its purity of ancestry, a claim so absurd as to constantly require vigorous justification.
Rooting out the hidden heretics and tractors became symbolic, hence always required, eternal, unreal, For centuries, the bureaucratized institution of such cleaning, the Inquisition, shouldered its unending mission, It would not cease until, For its bonfires were not meant to kill merely a few, scattered heretics, but rather the ghosty spirit of a Semitic and Moorish past,.

Bartolome de Las Casas applied a layer of reflecting paint on to the ideologies that made violence against strangers legitimate, He questioned the assumption that the foreigners were to be feared and hated, and declared that by labeling these strangers as subhuman, his own people had granted themselves license to do whatever served their interest.
By undermining the assumed righteousness of his own tribe, he opened up the dizzying possibility that ethics should not be distorted by tribal identity,.

Why, Hobson pressed, was the superiority of each imperium obvious only within its own borders Such selfdeception was no laughing matter.
An epidemic of willful blindness had destroyed the imperialists ethical vision, Whole nations had convinced themselves that greed was generosity, servitude care, and power charity, Sincere priests, educators, doctors, and scientists could thus become corrupted, Imperial

control hid behind those schools, clinics, and churches, that irrigation project with its clearly beneficial cleaner water,.

The invaders, inevitably perhaps, began to fear invasion, Once proudly liberal and tolerant nations began to be convulsed by a rash of fear, violence, and protest against these new immigrants,.

The terrible corruption of Western imperialism was not that it was simply a land grab based on voraciousness and power, Worse, it mingled some of the greater Enlightenment idealshuman equality, liberty, acceptance, and dignity, a commitment to science and reason, the rule of law, and the rights of citizenswith the worst excesses of injustice, lies, oppression, and predatory brutality.
The two became so entwined that they could no longer be easily teased apart,.

By thencareful students could have recognized xenophobia was threeheaded, like the hound that guarded the gates of the underworld, This Cerberus was made up of knotty questions regarding human identity, its relation to emotions like fear and aggression, and, lastly, the nature of groups.
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The closest proposal to my own came from Albert Memmi, The author of The Colonizer and the Colonized had experienced what it was like to be the object of antiArab, antiSemitic, and antiFrench vitriol.
He understood the need for a broadly encompassing term that linked such hatreds together, In, Memmi proposed to call it “heterophobia,” a fear of the dissimilar, which led to forms of “domination based on real or imagined differences, ” His logic impeccable, but Memmis coinage never caught on,.

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