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Introduction: Facing the Other

ABSTRACT This essay serves as an introduction to the articles in this special issue, Stranger Races, dealing with how indigenous peoples use the white Other in constructing their identity. I review key issues in anthropological debates over alterity and relations between former colonisers and indigenous peoples. Addressing the hegemony and power related to constructed identities in postcolonial settings, I highlight the ambivalence in alterity. While negative and ethnocentric evaluations of others are commonly associated with the power of the colonial gaze, there is also agency in the mimesis and exoticism by which indigenous peoples co-opt cultural elements of the former coloniser. Given the ambivalent views of foreign peoples that are marshalled in the interest of local cultural values, popular and academic conceptions of ethnocentrism should be reconsidered. Despite the rise of xenophobia in western politics and the dominance of research on racism, sexism, and economic inequalities within ‘dark anthropology’, this volume suggests that the ethnographic record presents a range of relationships between peoples. In the spirit of Boas, the discipline can use these findings to remind people of the creativity and spectrum of responses to culture contact in the midst of otherwise dark times.