’Othering’ is a process where people construct an image of an ‘Other’ as a mirror or measuring stick in order to construct the ‘Self’. Often people emphasize exactly those traits of the ‘Other’ that they don’t want to recognise in themselves.
Such an ‘othering process’ may serve to conceal an existing gap between ideals and realities. In the Norwegian case the strong focus on for example domestic violence against ‘supressed’ Muslim women may serve to conceal the fact that domestic violence against ‘emancipated’ Norwegian women also represent a serious problem.
While this ‘othering process’ is generally perceived as being in defense of traditional Norwegian values, and a valued traditional national self, I will argue that this strong and negative focus on Muslims as a threat helps to conceal changes regarding how both values and the national self have been interpreted. In the period Margaretha is analysing: 1978-2010, Norway has changed both economically, politically and culturally due to factors far removed from the influence of ‘Muslims’. Although many changes may be unpopular, they are surprisingly little discussed. Instead, we have continuous debates on ‘the Muslim threat’.
Highlighting the problems of Muslims women, and thus establishing a dichotomy between ‘supressed Muslim women’ and ‘emancipated ethnic Norwegian women’, has also helped establishing a dichotomy between ‘bad Muslim men’ and ‘good ethnic Norwegian men’. While in the 1970s there was a strong focus on the opposition between women and men, and on men as representing a threat to women’s rights, the focus on ‘surpressed Muslim women and their bad men’ seems to have created another opposition. Instead of women against men, increasingly the main opposition is perceived to be between ethnic Norwegians and Muslims. This tends to conceal the existing problems between ethnic Norwegian women and men, but apparently many – both women and men – have experienced the battles in the seventies as painful and are only too pleased to replace the old opposition with a new one further removed from their personal lives.
From Orientalism to New Orientalism
While studying the transformations Margaretha is analysing, it is important to remember that during the very same period, there was a gradual change from Orientalism to a critique of Orientalism and then to New Orientalism from the 1990s. At the end of the 1970s, Orientalism, i.e. a tendency to place different societies/cultures/civilizations in an evolutionary hierarchy, was strongly criticised. In the 1980s, there was a short break in which the belief in such hierarchies seemed to be discarded, and new, more questioning, respectful frameworks were introduced. But since the 1990s, we have seen a backlash. The idea of civilizational hierarchies are back in fashion and the West is yet again placed on top. The final proof of ‘the truth’ of such hierarchies is of course the differences in gender equality - particularly between the West and the Muslim world. Cultural relativism has become a bad word; open and questioning strategies has become naïvité; politeness and respect another word for censorship, and the will to compare problems experienced by ethnic Norwegian women and Muslim women, to study similarities and differences, is often, strangely, perceived as acceptance of violence against Muslim women.
Inherent in the old and the new Orientalism there is a strong tendency to essentialize both ‘the West’ (good, or rather, best) and whoever is proclaimed as ‘the other’ (less good, less developed, and perhaps a threat to the West). As Edward Said argued, this essentializing tendency served strategic purposes. Unquestionably, so does the New Orientalism, but which purposes – in which contexts? The concept strategic essensialism seems useful when analysing ‘othering processes’. But it is also important not to overlook – or conceal – the potential power differences between those who may respectively essensialize Islam in order to defend it, and those who likewise essensialize Islam for very different purposes. Potential power differences within the two categories must also be taken into account.
Berit Thorbjørnsrud is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo
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