The "Other"

An interesting thing we talked about this week was the other. It is very weird to think that we have people that we associate with our group and that everyone else is basically an other. But in every community this type of thinking exists regardless of whether we mean to or not. For example, when I went to Beijing for the Olympics, I quickly realized that I was a very obvious other. I am about 5' 7" so I am taller then most of the people there and I have blonde hair and blue eyes. This was definitely strange to many people who would stare at me and my family (we all have blonde hair and blue eyes). People would ask to touch my hair or to take pictures, because I'm pretty sure none of them had ever seen someone who looked like me besides maybe in movies. I'm in no way a celebrity, but some of the people sure made me feel like I was. People were just fascinated with the "other" which was us light skinned Americans. It was a very interesting experience and I definitely felt like a did not fit in but rather stuck out like a sore thumb. It was pretty obvious I was an other.



In the United States we definitely exotify the other in many ways. We separate ourselves from people of other countries, and we make other places seem like they are so foreign, exotic and different from our own country. I haven't been to many places, but this past summer I was able to travel a little bit in Europe. I went to Germany, Paris and London. One thing I found interesting was how I had these big perceptions of what the countries were going to be like because of movies, advertisements and various other types of media that glorify these places to intrigue the viewer. Tourism is a huge business, so countries want you to love their ads and be enticed into going. I was struck by how similar these places where to the United States. Many times I didn't feel like I was really in a foreign country and many people even spoke english so that wasn't hard to deal with either. I felt like I had these grand images in my head and when I got their I loved the places I went, but I was very taken aback by the actual place in front of me. The cities were pretty, but just not as magical as I had assumed they would be. I have been fed these images of foreign countries all my life and was just underwhelmed that these places were similar to America, not really an "other" like I had assumed they might be.



As I was trying to find various advertisements for foreign countries that I have seen on TV, etc., I came across instead an Absolut ad made by a Mexican advertising company. It struck me as very important and so I figured I would post it here. It is of the Mexican border as it was before the Mexican-American War of 1848 when Mexico had much more land (CA, TX, etc.). Then of course it says "In an Absolut World." I just thought this was a clever advertising campaign considering the fact that Mexico wants their land back and these advertisers were clever enough to point this out in an ad campaign. I just found it very interesting and it shows the way things used to be and how in an ideal world that is how they would be, but because of the power and influence of the United States, that will never happen. Also because Absolut has some wild advertising campaigns and this is yet another example.