review: manuela boatca, claudia neudecker & stefan rinke (eds.) (2006). des fremden freund, des fremden feind: fremdverstehen in interdisziplinärer perspektive [the stranger's friend, the stranger's enemy: conceiving foreignness in an interdisciplinary perspective]

This book comprises the papers of a multidisciplinary workshop on the topic of foreignness/strangeness held at the Catholic University of Eichstätt, Germany, in July 2004. Seven authors try to critically question ways of conceiving foreignness instead of understanding or explaining it in the first place, doing so as a means of changing perspectives. The papers deal with the self-evidence of presumed Otherness and with aspects of constructing Otherness that appear to be strange indeed. A lengthy essay written by two of the editors rounds up the collection. The book is theoretically profound and politically ambitious, since both the workshop and the publication of its proceedings have an important aim: to develop an international and transcultural horizon of values for a common political and social agency based on multi- or interdisciplinary debates. The latter are conceived of as not only dealing with the objects of research, but with its subjects and with the multiple proceedings that lie behind the ways of getting to know the Other by constructing it. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0703238