Comments on: Ubuntu, reconciliation, and the buffered self http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/06/07/ubuntu-reconciliation/ Secularism, religion, and the public sphere Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:07:41 +0000 hourly 1 By: Jeanne-Marie Jackson http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/06/07/ubuntu-reconciliation/comment-page-1/#comment-11957 Jeanne-Marie Jackson Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:41:13 +0000 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=12589#comment-11957 Out of curiosity, have you come across the alternate translation of, “A human being is a human being through (the otherness of) other human beings” that a few South African scholars have suggested? I will cop to not having studied Zulu or Xhosa, but I find the difference provocative and relevant for any point about ubuntu’s communitarian ideals. There is an interesting article on it in, of all places, the ‘Handbook of Restorative Justice’ that they use at many law schools.

I also wonder, without having read the Taylor anthology, if we need to reach as far as South Africa to poke some holes in the buffered subject of Latinate Christianity. Ricoeur, for example, traces the formation of the Christian self through others in the very grammatical structure of the language we use to articulate it. It sounds eerily like ubuntu as you describe it, but a whole lot more complex than the popularized form that is all I have access to (and which you detail very interestingly).

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