ABSTRACT
A practice-based conception of the stranger views the process of estrangement as something which is constructed within the everyday activities of people like us, our habits and ordinary ways of behaving. The principal authors in this book: Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias and Zygmunt Bauman were focused on attempting to explain stability in social life, the processes of sociability, together with an understanding of how and why people choose to cooperate with one another within a social order. However, not all people are included and the mechanisms that bring about a sense of community are the same mechanisms that generate estrangement. In addition, some people are subjected to collective strategic actions that aim to change the constructed social order in such a way as to actively bring about their exclusion from social life. The process of barrier or border construction is the starting point for the processes of estrangement for all the principal authors in this book. The excluded individuals are the strangers. The stranger is then an ‘assembled being’ and as such the stranger is not a role but a configuration of the Other in our ‘bordered imagination’.
