On Doing Being a Stranger: The Practical Constitution of Civil Inattention

ABSTRACT: The article takes on a less developed aspect of the sociology of the stranger: the normalized non‐relations people in urban settings establish in their effort to stay strangers for one another. How is their “civil inattention” accomplished in practice ? What is the social orderliness of “asocial” relations? In order to answer these questions the article uses the elevator as a sociological research instrument allowing for a highly detailed investigation in structural problems of public encounters: bodily navigation, contact avoidance, feigned preoccupation, and the blocking of the automatism by which co‐present bodies start interactions. The setting used for the investigation also raises questions about how the artifact and the bodies present are integrated into the interaction order. The “heteromobile” of the elevator offers specific sociotechnical scripts for interaction. While the human actors work hard at doing nothing, their bodies seem to take over their agency. The specific challenge of elevator riding for the enactment of indifference is the vanishing of actors: undoing presence.