Abstract

This article analyzes the ideological and empirical bases of the hegemonic logic of alterity characterizing the essentialized categories of Orthodoxy and West. Arguing for the importance of introducing political science and historical literatures to debates previously monopolized by theological claims about West-Orthodox difference, the article explores how religious and cultural distinctions produced divergences in the historical trajectories of Orthodox and Western Christianity. Consequent reflexive views of Self and Other were deployed by political and intellectual elites for purposes of material power. The article points to political science research, on the origins of the Westphalian state and secularist conceptions of modernity, as critical to understanding the consolidation of comfortable conceits of Otherness expressed in the Orthodoxy-West binary, and suggests that current scholarship on religious transnationalism and globalization offers fecund possibilities for moving beyond the empirical and intellectual limitations of Orthodoxy-West essentialisms.

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