A Buddhist Monk is a True Fundamentalist

Engstrom's article discusses, utilizing personal accounts, autoethnography, paying more attention to self-reflexivity. In all contexts, and especially through the 9/11 personal account of the author, the unit of analysis was the Self toward and in conversation with the Other. The narrative testifies to the sense of the Self's urgency/necessity to adapt, self-reflect, change if you will, in order to cope, understand, and successfully work with this Other, which on the other hand, is approached as concrete, rigid, unchange-able, frozen and self-absorbed in its own "space". Should not self-reflexivity intellectually "demand" a reciprocal theoretical relationship, an expectation of multiplicity, fluidity and changeability to both sides of the particular intercourse?
In which sense is the subject a valid unit of analysis, a subject apt to practice the theory, while the object of analysis is not subjected to such treatment or expectation? Is not this view bearing traces of post-colonial, paternalistic thinking, of situating the Other, de facto, as the specimen "frozen in time" worthy of investigation and "aid"? How is self-reflexivity negotiated within and on such an asymmetrical plane?
Would not such a deeply ideological point of departure testify to a society, a world even, of individuals engaged in regular rituals of witnessing their own victimization? Isn't the non-reciprocal, non-radical autoethnographic approach just another version of the good old Enlightenment propositions?


In these terms, let us explore the "limit of the Other's radical Otherness", today's deeply ideological refusal of "identification", and the notion of "saving the victim."