Humanities are academic disciplines in which humans seek understanding of human self-understandings and self-expressions, and of the ways in which people thereby construct and experience the world they live in. Thus, the tentative definition developed in the first chapter. Most humans are “other humans,” near and far. To understand these, we need to be able to communicate – and, hence, we need language. And we need to understand their context, their place, the space they move in. As we seek to understand them, we need to reflect upon the process of understanding and the criteria involved. Our scholarly understanding of others need not be received well, as historical insight may be at odds with the self-understanding of people involved. Such topics will be considered in Chapter 2, “Understanding Others.”