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Dagnostaw Demski
And because people were reacting differently than they do today to the various
phenomena that were characteristic of their times, this is also what makes reading
the old press so fascinating and worthy of study. And it must be stressed here that
the presence of other nationalities and ethnic groups as targets in the satirical press,
forming only a fraction of the authors’ sphere of interests, remains a separate issue.
The Category of Otherness
The notion of Otherness is the traditional concern of anthropology, and as such,
individuals who do not belong to our culture were depicted in various ways in,
what was noted later, an objectified manner, creating imagined pictures of Others
digestible for our comprehending (Rapport, Overing 2003: 10).
It was not only necessary to understand the notions of the Other and Otherness,
but also significant who was using these terms. To regard a person or a phenom¬
enon as Other signifies a process of renouncing the other side directly or ascribing
it with some mainly pejorative characteristics, comprising the qualities that are not
approved as “ours.” Such qualities can be described as not ours, strange, alien, hostile,
or even hateful or disgusting. By one term or another, the position of the Other is
established, and in this way the Other acquires an ambivalent status, or becomes
excluded from the known in the sense of creating schemata by attributing one set
of features to the whole community.
Symbolically, this places the Other in a marginal space or, even, outside their
own space. It also means that the values represented by the Other do not accord
with “our” values, “our” expectations, “our” aspirations, and so on. The specific form
of this phenomenon depends on the culture, that is, on the place and the time. As
Brian Porter-Szuecs suggests, at the end of the nineteenth century (after the period
of Romanticism), the reality in Poland became redefined once again, and, as a re¬
sult, the category of Other came to embrace the minorities (Porter-Szuecs 2011:
14) Following Porter-Szuecs’s thought, we could adopt the point of view that states
that although the use of the notion of “nation” was able to stretch the boundaries
of patriotic language in many directions, it was still impossible to pretend that such
boundaries did not exist (Ibidem: 14). The presence and the application of the no¬
tion of “the Other” indicated the existence of boundaries and started a process of
inclusion/exclusion in particular.
Porter-Szuecs claims that in order to speak the language of nationalism, it was
indispensable to adopt certain definitions and conventions that were de rigueur
at that time and to choose from among a limited repertoire of worldviews. The
> As the same author puts it, nationalism begins to hate only with the passing of time (2011: 14). He
poses a tremendously interesting question of how it happened that millions of people came to accept a
specific national identity and he notes that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was one of the
most important factors of political life. He also calls for the examination of the range of views of people
who started using the notion of nation (Ibidem: 14).