The social and cultural practice of defining certain people as “others” in relation to one’s own group may be, of course, as old as humanity itself. The anthropologist Robert Redfield has argued that the worldviews of many people consists essentially of two pairs of binary oppositions: human/nonhuman and we/they. These two are often correlated, as Jonathan Smith observes so that “we” equals “human” and “they” equals “not human.” The distinction between “us” and “them” occurs within our earliest historical evidence, on ancient Sumerian and Akkadian tablets, just as it exists in the language and culture of peoples all over the world. Such distinctions are charged, sometimes with attraction, perhaps more with repulsion – or both at once. The ancient Egyptian word for Egyptian simply means “human”; the Greek word for non-Greeks, “barbarian” mimics the guttural gibberish of those who do not speak Greek – since they speak unintelligibly, the Greeks call them barbaroi ....