The fetishisation and universalisation of the stranger: A critical analysis

The sociology of the stranger has a long history in which the category of the stranger has been constantly refined and re-assessed to improve its analytical and heuristic value. Recently, such re-evaluations have led to claims that the stranger has been overly fetishised and has lost its descriptive and analytical power in our hyper-diverse, globalised, and mobile worlds. In such worlds, diversity becomes a general or universal condition, making the stranger the rule rather than the exception. Such criticisms have recently been directed at Georg Simmel, Alfred Schutz and Zygmunt Bauman, whose work has been pivotal to the scholarship on the stranger. Through a detailed analysis of their work, subtle differences, complexities and multiple perspectives of the stranger emerge. This analysis will allow us to move beyond the narrow concerns of the fetishisation thesis and provide a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes the universalisation of strangeness. Unlike recent evaluations, the work of these thinkers captures the overlapping nature of the stranger-as-figure and strangeness as a process, and, more importantly, the latter allows Simmel, Schutz and Bauman to articulate an existential view of the stranger that is overlooked by recent assessments. Finally, these sociologists link the condition of strangeness with the sociology of knowledge, allowing us to ponder the relationship between the outsider, objectivity and epistemic privilege. So, while the fetishisation and universalisation thesis make some insightful observations, the work of Simmel, Schutz and Bauman captures broader sociological and epistemological concerns regarding the stranger that recent assessments have discounted. This article begins by contextualising current accounts within the broader sociology of the stranger. Then it suggests how different themes underlying the work of these thinkers contest, expand and transcend the fetishisation and universalisation thesis.