Xenophobia

Why xenophobia is defined around groups

Wikipedia's definition builds the whole thing out of group membership. Xenophobia rests on a perception that a conflict exists between an in-group and an out-group, and it shows itself as:

• suspicion of one group's activities by members of the other
• a desire to remove the group under suspicion
• a fear of losing a national, ethnic or racial identity

Every clause there is collective. A specific phobia is a fact about one person's nervous system and this is a fact about a boundary. That difference is why xenophobia sits in this catalogue as a word that ends in -phobia rather than as a fear, and why the three words the 2008 encyclopedia of phobias gives it, fear of strangers, describe something else entirely. The third item on that list is not about any present person at all, which is where the term touches Fear of Change.

A review article published in 1997 puts the political content plainly, calling xenophobia an element of a struggle about who has the right to be cared for by the state and society, a fight over the collective good of the modern state. On that account the fear is not of the foreigner but of the claim.

Why admiring a foreign culture counts as xenophobia

The Italian sociologist Guido Bolaffi makes the point that stops the word being a synonym for hatred. Xenophobia, he argues, can also appear as an uncritical exaltation of another culture, one ascribed an unreal, stereotyped and exotic quality.

That is worth sitting with, because it identifies the operation rather than the sentiment. Deciding in advance what a group is like, and holding to it against evidence, is the same act whether the content is contempt or admiration. A person who believes a nationality is uniformly dangerous and a person who believes it is uniformly wise are both refusing to meet anybody.

How the ancient world wrote the foreigner down

The oldest example the article gives is orthographic. Ancient Egyptian wrote the names of foreign peoples with a determinative, a sign appended to indicate which class of thing a word belongs to, and the sign used was the one for hill country or desert, meaning foreign land, khaset. Egypt itself, Kemet, took the determinative for a town.

The distinction is built into the writing system rather than argued in it. Egypt is settled, cultivated and ordered; everywhere else is terrain. The same record refers to the Hittites as vile and treats the conquest of non-Egyptians as a necessity.

Greek did the same work with one noun. Barbarians were those whose speech sounded like babble, and the classification carried the conclusion that they were naturally suited to slavery. A speech attributed to the Roman commander Manius Acilius sorts opponents by worth: Macedonians, Thracians and Illyrians are warlike nations, while Syrians and Asiatic Greeks are the most worthless of mankind and born for slavery.

The historian Appian records something blunter. Before the battle of Philippi in 42 BC, Marcus Junius Brutus met an Ethiopian outside the gates of his camp and his soldiers hacked the man to pieces on the spot, taking his appearance for a bad omen, black being the colour of death to a superstitious Roman.

What the pandemic showed about xenophobia

The clearest modern demonstration is recent. The COVID-19 pandemic, first reported in Wuhan in December 2019, produced a rise in Sinophobia and in prejudice, discrimination, violence and racism directed at people of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent and appearance worldwide. As the pandemic spread and new hotspots formed in Asia, Europe and the Americas, discrimination was reported against people from each of them in turn.

That last clause is the useful one. The target moved with the map. A hostility that follows an epidemiological statistic from one continent to the next is not attached to any group's characteristics, which is the strongest available evidence for reading xenophobia as a structure rather than an opinion about particular foreigners. It took the vocabulary of contamination from mysophobia and left the logic behind.

Where the word xenophobia belongs

No diagnostic manual carries xenophobia, no prevalence has been established for it as a condition, and no clinician treats it. It belongs to sociology, political science and history, where it has a large literature, and its appearance in phobia lists is a consequence of the suffix rather than of the subject.

The catalogue keeps the entry because the word is one of the most searched in the whole vocabulary and because the answer to what it is has to include the sentence that it is not a fear in the clinical sense. A person cannot be treated for it. A person can be argued with.