Defining outsiders as barbarians is foundational to building group identity in every society

Evidence

From time immemorial, peoples have considered themselves as “the people” and all the rest as “others.” Familiar examples are the Greeks and the barbaroi, the Jews and the goyim, the Japanese and the gajjin, and China as the Middle Kingdom. Throughout, designating others and emphasizing their “otherness” have been fundamental to the construction of boundaries of identity and community, between and within societies. Over time, otherness has had many different meanings, as many as identity. It has referred to cultural differences along the lines of language, religion, civilization, “race,” ethnicity, region, nationality, gender, age, and to class, development, ideology, and so forth. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Links to how ‘otherness’ and boundary construction recur across the reader’s interest in ritual, sacrifice, and dress-panic as identity markers. — connects to: Indexical tie creation is inherently ideological and builds bottom-up group norms. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 59; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• DEFINE: Establishes otherness as a cross-cultural universal with shifting referents.