ABSTRACT
In historical terms, inter-civilizational contacts inevitably created notions of otherness between different peoples and civilizations. Hence cosmopolitanism is the exception, not the rule. There is a sense in which any society with a more or less coherent cultural boundary, especially a linguistic or religious boundary acting as an inclusive foundation of solidarity, must necessarily have an exclusionary notion of the outside world and thus of difference and otherness. The more inclusive the notion of social membership, the more intense the notion of an exterior contrasting world. This idea of an outside and an inside social world is the basic truism of almost every general theory of society. In pre-modern or tribal societies, the depth of group identity and the closure of society against the outside world produced an intense sense of membership which was classically defined by Emile Durkheim (1960) as ‘mechanical solidarity’ involving low individualism, rituals of inclusion and shared values. The spatial isolation of small communities in pre-colonial Australia, as in the United States and Canada, intensified the practices of difference and distinctiveness. Similarly Mary Douglas’s notion of group and grid as the basic structure of any community with a strong framework of beliefs defining pollution provides another insight into these exclusionary structures (Douglas, 1973).
