Soci 370/Simmel

The Stranger- Georg Simmel (1908)

Paragraph 1-8 Namra Qarni

Simmel discusses the concept of the The Stranger in the land where the stranger lives, trades, but does not physically own. He mentions the idea of the spatial circle, which is a group of people, in this case, the traders, whose boundaries consist of mutual interests, relative to trading. The trader does not belong in the group but helps benefit the group and their interests.

The Stranger ties into a small circle of traders, whose primary focus is economic activity. The people who are close by are distant, but their strangeness indicates that the people who are distant are near. The distance they create bring togetherness in their circle. The stranger makes an appearance, but plays the role of a trader, and that makes them a stranger. Essentially, the role of the trader absorbs the stranger's identity.

In contemporary society, the concept of The Stranger still exists as people in today’s world limit themselves to play certain roles. This builds their identity.

[COMMENT] It's interesting to read Simmel and consider the identity formation process as it takes place in the anonymized self as 'stranger'. The intersection of indifference and involvement, being both remote and detached with a air of objectivity yet close and implicated in social reality yields the possibility for expansion of the roles available to particular social actors. The Stranger exists, as Simmel describes, a synthesis of remoteness and nearness, which alters the borders of identity typically available to us in the social world. Being caught in this flux - the in-between space of involvement/detachment, promises the ability to achieve a certain serenity in relation to social experience. The Stranger can assess the relational dynamics, interactional scripts and social processes as they unfold without intervention or disruption on behalf of himself. This, I think is an interesting idea in terms of social research. Is this the idealization of the role of "participant observer"? The ethnographer is attuned to the nuanced mechanisms of interaction between actors but distances himself from the action itself in order to capture the essence of it. -Alexis Wolfe

Comment by Jose Beltran: I think Simmel's description of the stranger's objectivity and balance of indifference and involvement is only partially true. I think the degree of involvement is higher than this description accounts for. But I do agree that there is a level of indifference that is unique to the stranger. He gives the examples of judges who are not part of the community they are judging. That is a particular example that does seem to reflect a high level of indifference, but those cases are not the norm. Usually, the strangers that Simmel is describing participate in everyday life and they are ubiquitous. In some cities they even seem to be the majority. They form such a big part of daily life that they even form communities and groups of friends among each other, creating social life as we know it. Their subjectivity is so wrapped up in daily life and their influence so pervasive that in some cases their involvement probably exceeds what Simmel was accounting for. In many places today there seems to be a decrease in people with particular commonalities by virtue of their place of origin, so much so that where people find particular commonalities in tends to be between individuals who are actually different on the surface, for example, by virtue of place of origin.