Category:Alterity ontology

Alterity is the creation of internalized prejudices and abusive relationships between a population or subpopulation and surrounding populations. The theme of alterity is important to some theories of international empire or racism within a country, as well as some general identity-politics theories revolving around demographics. Thus some periods of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition can be categorized as "alterity theories".

The concept of alterity refers to real-world observations; it should not be dismissed as "not real". However, particularly within the First World, it can be subtly misused in some cases to create questionably-framed theories. An academic can easily sidestep what the real questions should be in the context of some particular series of events, and, perhaps due to society being fragmented into tiny islands of people, fixate on the immediate goals of one of the tiny islands for its mere existence and begin entirely replacing larger-scale problems with alterity. Alterity is easily misused as a kind of trojan horse to transport in historical non-materialism and existential non-materialism, potentially undermining the whole project of breaking down alterity as people fail to understand how to predict an effort's successes or failures.