ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the immigrants, foreigners, and refugees, all as “strangers”. It describes the concept of the stranger is a useful tool for going beneath these static significations, which are perhaps not much more than what Zygmunt Bauman once called “legal fictions” that aim to make the strangerhood in these categories neutral and recognizable. The chapter explores different forms of ambivalence these mixed strategies involve in terms of globalization and hybridization. It discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, trying to relate it to globalization. Interest increases in hybridity, globalization, complexity, and “travelling cultures” and in the figure of the stranger as a whole in contemporary social thought. Globalization is roughly defined by Anthony Giddens as “the intensification of worldwide social relations that link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa”.
