The Stranger and Social Theory

The literature on ‘the stranger’ usually recognizes Simmel’s authority in formulating a sociology of strangerhood. Occasionally this literature provides a reformulation of the stranger through specific types of actors. For example, the Simmelian stranger has been the basis for Park’s ‘marginal man’ (1928), Wood’s (1934) and Schutz’s (1944) ‘the newcomer’, Siu’s ‘the sojourner’ (1952) and Stonequist’s notion of ‘the cosmopolitan individual’ or ‘the international mind’ (1937).1 Recent revisionist literature draws on, but moves beyond, the Simmelian stranger and its presuppositions. The category of the stranger has thus experienced a renaissance in contemporary social theory (Dessewffy, 1996; Harman, 1988; Stichweh, 1997; Tabboni, 1995). In particular, Zygmunt Bauman has been at the forefront in developing a social theory of strangerhood and his recent publications have contributed further to this intellectual project. In Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998a) and Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998b) Bauman is concerned with the constitution and treatment of the social and cultural Other in the west, especially those who have been excluded from an increasingly globalized and mass consumer society. Bulent Diken, in Strangers, Ambivalence and Social Theory (1998), draws on Bauman’s theory of strangerhood and its relationship to modernity and formulates an ‘ambivalent social theory’. In devising such an ambivalent social theory, Diken utilizes ethnographic data on Turkish immigrants in Denmark to reveal the exclusionary and oppressive practices latent in the public discourse of immigration. In their explication of the phenomenon of strangeness, Bauman and Diken highlight some of the recurrent themes in contemporary social theory: identity politics;