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Inuit.
    In general, the more contact a people have with foreigners, the more they lose their innocence regarding the strangers' motives, and this cynicism is usually reflected in their language. The late-medieval book of travels attributed to Sir John Mandeville has proven to be a compilation of travel narratives from many sources, and, along with the actual accounts of early (thirteenth- and fourteenth-century) travelers to China, includes medieval fantasies about cannibals, one-eyed men, and dog-headed people. Among others, Shakespeare used the more outlandish details in his work—Caliban is taken straight from Mandeville.
    Columbus's descriptions of the islanders he encountered in the West Indies show him to have been heavily influenced by Mandeville. He asserted that he saw one-eyed men, and cannibals, and dog-nosed individuals. He was also influenced by Marco Polo, and using his copy of Marco Polo's
Travels
as confirmation, Columbus thought he might be in Asia. Some islanders he took to be soldiers of the Great Khan. It was important for Columbus to establish the myth of Carib cannibalism, for then Spain could enslave the people on grounds that they were savages. This same logic applied in the Pacific (New Hebrides is the most dramatic example), where the apparent existence of cannibalism justified intense missionary activity, or slavery, or both.
    Anthropological stereotyping is not new, but one of its symmetries is that when an isolated people are visited, and they discover that the visitors are not gods or ancestors or goblins but are people looking for gold, land, or souls to save—usually all three—they tend to protect themselves, and for defending their homes they are termed "cruel," "brave," "bloodthirsty," "warlike," or "savages." The word in Italian for slave
(schiave)
is related to the word for Serbian
(Schiavone),
as in English (from Latin) "slave" is related to "Slav"—so many Slavs had been enslaved that the words became synonymous, as "barbarian" has its roots in "bearded"—the hairy enemy. And "bugger" is related to "Bulgar."
    This European stereotyping is shared by the Arabs and the Chinese. In China there are many words for foreigner, from the generic
wei-guo ren
to the words for "red-haired devil," "white devil," and "big nose." It cannot be a mere coincidence that all these Europeans, Arabs, and Chinese live in places that have been crossroads for foreign travelers, and enemies. Unlike the New Guinea highlanders and the Inuit, they were well aware that there were others in the world.
    The Arabic language reflects this worldliness: "foreigner" is
ajnabi,
and the root means something like "people to avoid." Another such word is
ajami,
which means foreigners, barbarians, people who speak Arabic badly, and Persians.
Gharib,
stranger, is related to
gharb,
the West, in the sense of "a person from the West." ("East" appears to have more friendly connotations in Arabic.) But the point is clear: linguistically, first contact exemplifies a kind of innocence, and nothing intensifies xenophobia more than seeing strangers as a threat.
    "Every stranger is an enemy," a notion I have encountered in my travels in various cultures, achieved its cruelest expression in Nazism. In his preface to
Survival in Auschwitz
(also titled
If This Is a Man),
Primo Levi discusses this delusion. He writes, "For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the
Lager
" — the Nazi extermination camp.
    It is rare to find the opposite view, but not long ago, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, wrote in his essay "Compassion and the Individual": "All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities. I try to treat whoever