ABSTRACT
In consumer culture, the commodity object which is, at once, an image and a material thing, enables subjects to have a close encounter with a distant other (the one already recognised as ‘the stranger’). Through consuming objects that are associated with other places and strange cultures, either in how those objects are represented and framed (as in Boots’s Global Collection), or how they are produced and travel, subjects can almost become the stranger, or can become or smell like the stranger. The strange encounters that produce the figure of the stranger do not necessarily involve the immediacy of the face to face. The subject does not have to travel to meet the one who is apparently from another place: ‘Even if you don’t have a magic carpet to transport you to the exotic East, you can enjoy a Turkish bath of your own.’ Objects and images mediate such encounters between bodies-at-home (or bodies-in-the-bath) and those recognisable as from a strange or ‘exotic’ place.
