CONCLUSION
The strategies aimed at throwing aside the Otherness, if one wants to
follow the words of Boyan Manchev, “always have as their preliminary
premise the homogenizing and making of the Otherness visible”.^1 In
fact, it was already during the Early Middle Ages, when the nomads as
well as the sedentary societies of Eurasia had made efforts not to throw
the Other totally aside, because one and the same idea came to both
their minds, namely that they had always been mutually dependent on
each other in spheres such as politics, economy, and identity. One of
the most revealing examples can be taken from the Bulgar–Byzantine
(822 A.D.), as well as Uighur–Chinese (756–762 A.D.) relations. In the
first case, the Bulgars helped the Byzantine basileus Michael II, and
in the second one—it was the Uighurs who supported the legitimate
Chinese dynasty T’ang against the rebellion launched by An Lu-shan.
Along with the purely pragmatic reasons, there were probably some
other considerations involved, which had more serious weight, namely
that the Romaioi and the Chinese had been viewed by their northern
neighbors as the ‘eternal’ Other. Ideologically, the Other should exist
forever for thus it could be incessantly rejected and, therefore, used as
the counter-image needed for the maintaining of own, i.e. Bulgar and
Uighur, identity.
The Other and its culture and essence had been evaluated in the
steppe empire through the prism of own—alien. The analysis of the
main configurations, e.g. core structures, in which Otherness was
thought of and realized and the notions of it—represented (nature/
ecology, religion, human person) shows that in some regions, and
especially after the seventh century, the dynamics in the process of the
nomads’ sedentarization caused a gradual opening towards the ‘Out-
side Other’. In some cases, it brought changes in the nomads’ culture
and identity, thus leading to a certain ‘softening’ in the extreme views
toward the Other. Therefore, the Outside Other was more and more
accepted by the nomads not so much from the old stereotypical ‘natu-
ral-ecological’ angle but, on the one hand, through criteria of morality
(^1) See his opinion in the newspaper ‘Kultura’, Nr. 10, from 8.03.2002.