Overview

Most of us are conscious of having a single and stable self, but the self is more fragmented and plastic than we care to think. David Berliner explores the captivating world of identity through an array of astonishing experiences. From Napoleon doppelgangers to Philip Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zukerman and Wonder Woman cosplayers to anthropologists going native, he delves into the kaleidoscopic nature of the self and attempts to understand the heterogenous nature of identity. But Becoming Other also discusses a great cultural controversy of our time: who has the right to play at being whom?

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9781805396482

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Reviews

“Becoming Other is a tricky, lively, and seriously rewarding study that reminds us that the most fundamental subjects in anthropology are unfinished. Berliner’s book is a tour de force.” • Todd Meyers, McGill University “In Becoming Other, Berliner invites us to immerse ourselves in a series of immersive experiences reminiscent of the anthropologist's participant observation. It is both a theoretically and epistemologically provocative text and a brilliant contribution to the study of immersion. Just dive in!” • Anya Bernstein, Harvard University “In this brilliant and surprising book, David Berliner does not only remind us that the world is a stage, but also that the actors can be creative in sometimes unpredictable ways. Drawing on a broad range of examples, Berliner shows what an anthropologist can contribute to a field usually reserved for other disciplines. For our selves are not sui generis, they shift with social and environmental circumstances, and every practising anthropologist has learned this with their body and mind. Anthropology may be the most existentially taxing of all academic disciplines, requiring the ethnographer to adjust, sometimes chameleon-like, through lengthy immersion in unfamiliar settings. The fascinating stories in Berliner’s investigation nevertheless take us far beyond academic anthropology by expanding the world, making our lives in it more exciting, tentative and exploratory.” • Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo “The complex and vexing dynamics of the relation of self to other is central to our comprehension of the human condition. In his new book, Becoming Other Belgian anthropologist David Berliner dives into the turbulent stream of trying to understand the multiplicity of the self as it confronts a dizzying multitude of others including our own alter-egos that emerge situationally. The result is a brilliantly clear and compelling meditation on what it means to be a human being. Becoming Other is destined to become a classic in the human sciences.” • Paul Stoller, West Chester University “One always experiences pleasure reading David Berliner. I am tempted to say: ‘one catches pleasure’. This is because this pleasure is like a virus that one catches while reading the contagious pages. David clearly suffers from a massive case of viral intellectual pleasure and has left it there in every sentence he has written. The pleasure is made out of a mixture of fascination ‘Is this for real?’ and revelation ‘Aah...now I understand’. I like to think that this mixture is one that constitutes the very best of anthropological writing more so than any other discipline. Anthropology has always exhibited a degree of fascination with otherness. But here, in an analytical tour de force, the object of fascination is the more widespread fascination with otherness that circulates in everyday culture and subverts our ideas of the unified and mono-defined subject. And I have to add that the English reader is doubly lucky to have had an academic as competent and subtle as Stephen Muecke translate this book.” • Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne and Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology “David Berliner’s delightful Becoming Other brings readers to heightened awareness in a re-thinking of the idea of the stable self that shows the complicated, profound processes involved in the human capacity to inhabit multiple personas. In a writing style that is at once conversational and cerebral, Berliner invokes exaggerated instances of ways humans explore boundaries of what it means to be one-self and other, revealing who we all are and what we all do every day of our lives.” • Alisse Waterston, City University of New York “Are we one or something more? Is our self a singular I? This engaging and accessible book explore the human practices that seek to push our human individuality out of the way, and in the process, asks what it is to experience others. The questions here are fundamental.” • Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University

Author Information

David Berliner is an anthropologist at the Université Libre of Brussels. He is the author of several books, including Losing Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020).

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