摘要：A generally accepted view in eighteenth-century Europe was that ofunderdeveloped nations to be identified in the East. On this terrain Voltaire sawcivilization as the best thing in the world to be exported to ‘Barbary’. Distance, in otherwords, creates barbarity. The ancient Greeks, we will remember, saw in the Persians theother pole of their civilizatory model, and portrayed them as inhabitants of the world ofhistory, if at the wrong end. Beyond the pale of civilization, a third category, theScythians, were deemed people of nature, living outside history, impossible to identifyin terms of religious allegiance, and escaping all philosophical taxonomies. Sinceunclassifiable, theoretically non-extant. Seen from Scythia, the Greek ‘Other’ looked‘quasi-Greek’, while appearing ‘quasi-Scythian’, when espied from Greece (Hartog: 46)– a question of perspective. On the borderline between the οικουμένη and savagery,between the world ‘in here’ and the one ‘out there’, between the familiar and theunheimlich, the initiatory space of hybrid identity played a crucial role in thecollective imaginary.
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