Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia by George Makari

Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia Reviews

• 
  Lou (nonfiction fiend)

  Of Fear and Strangers is a startling work of historical sleuthing and synthesis which reveals the forgotten histories of xenophobia—and 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. By 2016 when it was impossible not to notice an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues he started out in search of the idea’s origins. To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of never-told 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 late-nineteenth-century 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 concept’s 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 twenty-first century. He investigates xenophobia’s evolution through writers like Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus and Richard Wright, and innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul 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.
• 
  Ryan

  In Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, George Makari offers a history of xenophobia. I’m 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,’ we’re 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 Polyphemous’s punishment for betraying guests or Ovid’s 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 Columbus’s 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, China’s Boxer Rebellion, are considered by Europeans closed minded and scared of strangers. By the end of the 19th 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 in 1948 as 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.
  
  Makari’s 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 sit-coms 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 one’s identity is hateful, it’s 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 Foucault’s model—the 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 Memmi’s “heterophobia.”
  
  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 1826. For its bonfires were not meant to kill merely a few, scattered heretics, but rather the ghosty spirit of a Semitic and Moorish past. 21.
  
  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. 30-1.
  
  Why, Hobson pressed, was the superiority of each imperium obvious only within its own borders? Such self-deception 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. 84.
  
  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. 87.
  
  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 ideals—human equality, liberty, acceptance, and dignity, a commitment to science and reason, the rule of law, and the rights of citizens—with the worst excesses of injustice, lies, oppression, and predatory brutality. The two became so entwined that they could no longer be easily teased apart. 99.
  
  By then [1948] careful students could have recognized xenophobia was three-headed, 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. 130.
  
  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 anti-Arab, anti-Semitic, and anti-French vitriol. He understood the need for a broadly encompassing term that linked such hatreds together. In 1982, 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 Memmi’s coinage never caught on. 245.
  
  
• 
  Gregory

  Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election jolted psychiatrist George Makari into writing this wide-ranging, highly readable investigation of xenophobia. It’s organized in three parts: first, tracing the elusive origins of the term itself; next a deep dive inside the xenophobic mind; followed by a concluding section summarizing major explanations and proposals for combating xenophobia today.
  
  The author’s opening assumption was that the term must be nearly as old as homo sapiens, whose many migrations were likely to provoke innumerable bouts of “stranger anxiety” between unknown, potentially threatening newcomers and resident societies. For ancient Greeks, “xenos” meant both “stranger” and “guest.” If the latter, they could claim the host’s hospitality (“xenia”). But violators of xenia – think of the Cyclops’ rude habit of devouring visitors in The Odyssey -- were branded barbarians, fit only to be enslaved or killed, said Aristotle.
  
  But Makari’s research led him to reject his first working assumption: far from originating in classical times, xenophobia only rose to common usage in the late 19th century, in two very different contexts. First, the new practitioners of psychiatry added it to a list of dozens of other phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia, etc.) in medical dictionaries. A second, far more frequent use was as a European justification for invasion and colonial subjugation across Africa and Asia. Cloaked in their self-image as “modernizers” and “civilizers,” apologists denounced any resistance by indigenous people (like China’s Boxer Rebellion, 1899-1901) as “irrational xenophobia.” Then, once some of the newly colonized victims tried to return the favor by traveling to Europe, the “immigrant boomerang” incited anti-immigrant xenophobia of the sort all too common today. A so-called “racial science” arose to claim that foreigners’ anti-imperialism was proof of their biological inferiority. The author sketches multiple brief biographies of key colonizers as well as anti-imperialists like Bartolome de Las Cases (son of a Columbus shipmate), Voltaire, Tolstoy, Mark Twain and Franz Boas, whose anthropological findings helped undermine racial science.
  
  To explain xenophobia, Makari devotes the book’s next section to an ambitious survey of relevant 20th century research. Over five chapters he somehow covers everything from behavioral psychology, stereotype formation and Freudian projection, to the Frankfurt School’s findings linking authoritarian parenting to children’s racist attitudes. For all its many merits, his coverage of postwar Existentialism, feminism, deconstruction and Foucault seemed to me a rather rushed “aerial map” of too much terrain. The problem, in his defense, is that we lack “a unified theory to help us name, decode and defuse the different kinds of xenophobia.”
  
  As a first step in that direction, he suggests that we clearly distinguish three main types:
  First, “Other Anxiety” – the everyday uncertainty on meeting a stranger which, depending on one’s socialization, can set off biased conditioned reflexes; second, “Overt Xenophobia” – rigid stereotypical thinking that projects one’s own shame and self-hatred onto demonized individuals or groups; and last, “Covert Xenophobia” – uncritical acceptance of discriminatory biases built into institutions and laws. Makari holds out hope that at least two of these can still be changed. Other Anxiety among, for example, homogeneous rural populations, may be diminished by sensitivity training and more opportunities for interracial workplace and social interactions. Covert Xenophobia is vulnerable to sustained pressure for legal and institutional change by large and persistent social movements. Here the points to the recent surprising gains of the civil rights, feminist and LGBTQ movements.
  
  By far the most difficult to change is Overt Xenophobia. Impervious to rational discussion, reeducation or shaming, its adherents swoon mindlessly, even suicidally before a charismatic leader. Makari suggests a long-run strategy of countering their rigid biases with consistent demands for “radical egalitarianism” and tolerance (except toward those undermining tolerance). Two out of three isn’t bad! And perhaps we can hope he’s right that, under mounting pressure for more global cooperation against climate change, nuclear proliferation and pandemics, progress against all forms of xenophobia is still possible.
  
• 
  Peter Baran

  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 in 19th 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 WW1 to 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 anti-immigration 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.
• 
  Steve

  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.
• 
  Alexandra

  What an absolutely remarkable book. It's not quite what I was expecting - which was a history of, I guess, where xenophobia has occurred, and maybe it consequences. But more interestingly that that, this is a history of the very concept of xenophobia. It does use examples of historical xenophobia - of course it does; you can't discuss what the word means without showing what it has looked like. But it's more psychological and philosophical than I was expecting, as a way of getting to the guts of why humans can react so poorly towards strangers, and how we have tried to explain that to ourselves.
  
  And the first thing I learned is that 'xenophobia' as a word is brand new. Like, end of the 19th century new. Makari goes through his whole journey of discovery about this - detailing what he read and what explanations he chased down - in what almost amounts to a thriller in terms of sudden clues popping up. This was the first hint that not only was this going to be fascinating information, but also that the style was going to keep me engaged and keep me ploughing through what otherwise might have been overwhelming, both intellectually and emotionally. This was also building on a very personal opening to the book: Makari outlines his own family's experience of being "xenos" - strangers - descended from Lebanese ancestors, living in America, experiencing the dismissal of "Arabs" and wondering about his family's place in the world. Being published in 2021, as well, and of course, the question of xenophobia and how "we" react to the "stranger" remains as tragically relevant today as it has been at any time in the past.
  
  Part 1 explores "The Origins of Xenophobia" - where the word originates, how it was used to describe the so-called Boxer Rebellion in China - and therefore the 'mad' reaction of Chinese people to Westerners and all the 'enlightenment' they could bring. And then how the word was used in colonial contexts - xenophobia is a product of the inferior mind, because 'they' don't understand what 'we' (colonisers) are bringing, and they don't know any better than to be hostile! And then on through Conrad's Heart of Darkness, flipping that idea of xenophobia around and showing how colonisers might be the scared ones... and then on into discussion of immigration. Sadly, that connects really early on with Jewish migration, and then of course the book leads into the Holocaust.
  
  Part 2, then, explores "Inside the Xenophobic Mind." I have neither philosophical nor psychological training, so this part both taught me many new things, and was also surprisingly approachable. Well, approachable in terms of understanding in general, although again confronting in some parts - like the experiments to train kids into having phobias to try and understand how such fears can develop... and also because some of the philosophical aspects definitely went over my head. So this section, too, made me think much more both about xenophobia as a concept but also about how different groups have approached the desire to understand it - external or internal reasons, love and projection and can we ever truly know someone else... and so on.
  
  I would heartily recommend this to people who are interested in why humans act the way they do, for people seeking an understanding of the way the world is and has been; whether you're an historian or not, whether you've knowledge of psychology or not, Makari makes difficult concepts relatively straightforward to grasp. And he doesn't claim to be able to explain all of humanity, but the book does suggest a range of ways that we might try to think about ourselves, and our neighbours, and our leaders... and think about why we react the way we do. And that can only be a good thing, right? In fact, I think that as many people as possible should read this book, so that we can be much better at talking about these things, and be a little less defensive.
  
• 
  Maher Razouk

  أشار عالم الأحياء التطوري ستيفن جاي جولد إلى نقطة مهمة : ألا يفضل الانتقاء الطبيعي أولئك الذين اكتشفوا متى كان القتال ضروريًا ومتى لم يكن كذلك؟
  
  الفِرق التي تجنبت الصراعات غير الضرورية ، على عكس تلك القبائل المعزولة التي اختبأت في أعماق الغابة ، لديها القدرة على بناء مجموعات متنوعة وقوية ، وهي حقيقة أدركها تشارلز داروين نفسه. كما أشار جاريد دايموند ، حدث تكيف ثقافي حاسم - تجرأ حتى الآن على تحديد تاريخه قبل 7500 عام - عندما تعلمت الفرق والقبائل "لأول مرة في التاريخ ، كيفية مواجهة الغرباء بانتظام دون قتلهم". من خلال إدارة الصراع مع الغرباء ، اندمجت القبائل الصغيرة في مجموعات سكانية أكبر ، قادرة على تحقيق فوائض غذائية سمحت بالتقسيم الطبقي والتقدم التكنولوجي.
  
  في مثل هذه المجتمعات المعقدة ، قد يتنافس الأفراد ويبحثون عن الرقم واحد ، لكنهم أيضًا يتجاذبون أطراف الحديث مثل النحل العامل. إذا كنا مجبرين على القتال ، فنحن أيضًا مجبرون على ، حسنًا ... المغازلة. يلتقي البشر بالغرباء ، ويشكلون أزواجًا ، وعائلات ، وقبائل أكبر ، وأممًا جديدة. في هذه الهياكل الناشئة ، لا يكون كره الأجانب ميزة تطورية. في الواقع ، ربما يكون أكثر أنواع الكوارث زعزعة للاستقرار.
  .
  George Makari
  Of Fear And Strangers
  Translated By #Maher_Razouk
• 
  Zachary

  (I received an advanced copy of this book as part of a giveaway.) I thought this was an excellent book that would be of interest to anyone curious about how the term "xenophobia" and the present idea of xenophobia developed over a long period of time, going back to the Greeks and Spanish Conquistadors all the way to the present.
  
  My biggest complaint with the book comes down to an editorial/publishing decision, rather than the contents of the book. Although there is a significant note section at the end of the book, there are no markings to indicate endnotes in the text, this makes it unnecessarily difficult to cross reference his ideas with the citations provided, I am always cautious of an academic book that doesn't have any little numbers directing me to sources.
  
  I think this book would be of special interest to social science scholars broadly. I was impressed by the way the author told the story of xenophobia while tracing the developments in the surrounding academic fields. I hope future academics pick up on some of the threads the author left to better figure out how we can reverse the issues stemming from xenophobia in our society, and prevent the broad category of prejudices from tearing us apart further. From this book, I think that is likely a project that will be ongoing or reoccurring throughout human history.
• 
  Michelle Arredondo

  Great 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 psychology-based 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 & Company for my copy of this book won via giveaway. I received. I read. I reviewed this book honestly and voluntarily.
• 
  Cara Byrne

  As one of the winners of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Award for Non-fiction, I had the opportunity to read and unpack this book with a group of educators for a week in August 2022. While the writing is dense and Western European-centric, Makari provides a rich history of how white men have understood and used the term "xenophobia" over the last couple of centuries.
• 
  Michel Sabbagh

  Subject Appeal: 5/5.
  Research Depth: 4/5.
  Research Breadth: 4/5.
  Narrative Flow: 4/5.
  
  Verdict: 4/5. A hard-hitting wake-up call to the cosmopolitan need for loving the unknown and Other in times of uncertainty.
• 
  Russ

  Lots going on here. Will need a second read.
• 
  Natalie

  Mind blowing, enlightening, intelligent.
• 
  Lirazel

  Worth the price of admission for the colonialism stuff in part 1.
• 
  Leah (Jane Speare)

  This book chronicles the history of how xenophobia came about, demystifying the prevalent idea that this fear of strangers is biologically innate. Instead the author argues that it’s taught and curated through dangerous nationalist ideas and the social constructs of human races and hierarchy. More recently with the spread of mass media, stereotypes have been created and used to justify many outdated schools of thought. Reading this will probably make you uncomfortable with recognizing your own biases toward people unlike yourself, but it also allows for an important learning opportunity as it’s revealed why we have that discomfort to begin with.