ABSTRACT
The examination of different theories of the stranger has underscored that certain types of strangers develop special powers of observation due to their spatial and social position. Their physical proximity and their social and cultural distance generate specific cognitive qualities. The phenomenological approach suggests that the process of strangeness and familiarity is in fact general categories of our interpretation of the world (Schutz, 1976c, p. 105). The following discussion explores the implications of these special insights into the social world on the production of intercultural knowledge, specifically an intercultural knowledge that incorporates the view and voice of both the self and Other. Theories of the stranger have alluded to in-between strangers such as ‘ambivalent people’ (Bauman), the genius (Simmel), the marginal man (Park) and the cosmopolitan, who develop a type of hybrid knowledge or hybrid consciousness that challenges conventional knowledge based on binary and essentialist thinking. These in-between strangers, however, are not always associated with the stranger as Other or foreigner. For example, I have examined how Simmel’s work alludes to the historian and genius, and Park mentions ‘urban dwellers’, whereas Bauman’s ‘ambivalent people’ do not necessarily denote immigrants or foreigners. As opposed to the ‘classical stranger’, which has come to be associated with the immigrant and foreigner, these in-between strangers can be categorised as ‘professional strangers’ (Ahmed, 2000). They are professional strangers because Otherness does not define their difference. In intercultural encounters the relationship between professional strangers and the stranger as Other is an unequal one because the construction of meaning, and understanding is skewed towards the former. By contrast, in what follows I ponder how critical intercultural hermeneutics rethinks the construction of intercultural knowledge where the role of the stranger as Other, if not at the forefront, is at least an equal partner in the construction of meaning.
