The Globalization of Strangeness

C. Rumford

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349323340, 9780230272569
• eBook ISBN: 9781137303127
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

The figure of the stranger is in serious need of revision, as is our understanding of the society against which the stranger is projected. Under conditions of globalization, inside/outside markers have been eroded and conventional indicators of 'we-ness' are no longer reliable. We now live in a generalized state of strangeness, one consequence of globalization: we no longer know where our community ends and another one begins. In such circumstances it is often the case that neighbours are the nearest strangers. Strangeness occurs when global consciousness outstrips global connectivity and this means that we need to rethink some core elements of globalization theory.Under conditions of strangeness the stranger is a 'here today, gone tomorrow' figure. This book identifies the cosmopolitan stranger as the most significant contemporary figure of the stranger, one adept at negotiating the 'confined spaces' of globalization in order to promote new forms of social solidarity and connect with distant others.

1

Introduction: When Neighbours Become Strangers

Strangers or strangeness?

According to Zygmunt Bauman, the most cited contemporary commentator on the stranger, each society ‘produces its own kind of strangers, and produces them in its own inimitable way’ (Bauman, 1997: 17). This book takes issue with this statement, not because it is wrong in any fundamental way, but because it doesn’t go far enough. Firstly, Bauman doesn’t take sufficiently into account the global dimension. Even a cursory awareness of the multiplicity of transformations bundled under the heading ‘globalization’ make it increasingly difficult to defend the idea that societies are discrete, self-contained and easily bounded. Expressed in slightly different terms, in a world of flows and networks driven by communication technology, on the one hand, and a whole range of mobile individuals on the other, it is difficult to maintain the fiction that one society can remain insulated from others. Secondly, it perpetuates the notion that in order to study the stranger we need to study individuals who are outsiders, or at least clearly marked off from mainstream society. Strangers do still exist but – and this is one of the central arguments advanced in the book – they are best understood within the context of a more generalized condition of societal strangeness in which differentiating ‘us and them’ is increasingly problematic.

Our first task then is to understand the difference between the relatively familiar idea of the stranger and the newer concept of strangeness. Strangers are still a common feature of social life, even if they do not always appear in the guise of the migrant or the refugee or any of the other ‘usual suspects’. Contemporary figures of the stranger are many and various and include the tourist, the ‘illegal’ immigrant, the ‘trusted traveller’, the mystery shopper, organizers of ‘secret cinema’ showings, and call centre workers. We will give full consideration to a very different contemporary figure of the stranger, the ‘homegrown terrorist’ in Chapter 5. But first, in this section we will introduce several examples of the contemporary stranger in order to both illustrate the changing nature of the stranger and introduce the idea of strangeness.

The first of these examples explores the role of the stranger in contemporary social life, finding it less restricted and predetermined than in earlier times. It highlights the fact that in many ways strangers have become a routine and familiar part of our everyday lives. The second example complements the first but highlights a more conventional (and more troubling) figure of the stranger. Although these two examples are very different they illustrate an important aspect of the contemporary stranger: they are both examples of what I call the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ stranger which I argue has replaced the more traditional notion of the stranger as one who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’. The third example, again taken from the contemporary UK, reinterprets recent events through the lens of strangeness and shows how this, much more than the existence of individual strangers, can have a destabilizing effect on social life.

For my first example of the contemporary figure of the stranger I have drawn upon a recent trend in the UK: ‘rent-a-friend’ services. Following the success of rent-a-friend services in Japan and the US and elsewhere rentafriend.com launched in the UK in the summer of 2010. According to its founder, Scott Rosenbaum, people often live far away from where they grew up and they work long hours, leaving limited time to meet new people. ‘As the internet has replaced face-to-face time, there are a lot of people out there who want to get out and socialise with new people but it has got harder to meet people.’¹ So, for a fee it is possible to hire a ‘friend’ for a day. In the words of one journalist;

[Y]ou can purchase friendship at your convenience, by the hour. For a certain consideration, you can hire someone to go to a museum with you, or hang out at the gym, or keep you company while you shop. A stranger, you might say, is just a friend who hasn’t invoiced you yet.²

It may be argued that this is not a meaningful or representative example; rent-a-friend services are still a novelty (in the UK) and provide (at best) a pseudo-service to a small number of relatively affluent people (who perhaps have more money than sense). It could further be objected that rent-a-friend services are not really a sociological phenomenon, more a ‘flash in the pan’ news issue, and possess no real social base for long-term existence. These are all reasonable concerns, but the point I wish to emphasize is that rent-a-friend services make certain uses of strangers and alert us to something important about both who might be considered a stranger and the role of strangers in our social environment. In the case of rent-a-friend services the stranger-as-friend is an individual who emerges from the mass of people who form the backdrop to our existence, drawn into our orbit only by the offer of a job. The stranger who we employ to be our friend would not necessarily be considered as a stranger under other circumstances. Indeed, we call the stranger into being by allocating him/her a new socio-economic role; that of rent-a-friend. The key element of this is that strangers in contemporary social life are less people marked out by some indelible difference, more selected for this role by circumstances (or opportunity). Rent-a-friend services position strangers as unthreatening and socially useful: strangers as lifestyle accessories. The stranger is chosen by both the person renting the friend (choosing to spend time with a stranger rather than exploring avenues which might lead to friendships based on shared interests, such as joining a club, taking up a hobby, playing sports), and by the employee who chooses to occupy the role of stranger. Rented friends cease to be strangers the moment they are no longer employed (they also cease to be ‘friends’, of course): they are ‘here today and gone tomorrow’. In this sense the rent-a-friend stranger shares much in common with other contemporary figures of the stranger, as I will demonstrate throughout this and subsequent chapters.

A rent-a-friend is a very good example of the contemporary stranger, for all the reasons outlined above. But at the same time, s/he is not everyone’s idea of a stranger, particularly as the figure of the stranger is frequently associated with the migrant, the refugee; outsiders in a more obvious sense. For this reason it would be a good idea to give another example of the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ stranger, one which fuses elements of conventional expectations with contemporary concerns. In February 2004, 23 illegal immigrants from China died while attempting to collect cockles in Morecombe Bay, Lancashire. They were swept out to sea after the fast-rising tide engulfed them before they had a chance to return to land. The tragedy led to the jailing of the gangmaster held responsible for the deaths, found guilty of 21 cases of manslaughter,³ and the setting up by the UK government of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority in an attempt to regulate what had been an unregulated and largely invisible sector of the economy. To the UK public the Chinese cockle pickers’ tragedy was particularly shocking, not just because of the large numbers of people killed, or because it brought the somewhat shady figure of the gangmaster out into the open, or even because of the poor conditions under which illegal labourers are obliged to work and live, which was revealed via the media in the aftermath of events in Morecombe Bay. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the tragedy was that very few people had any idea that the cockle pickers even existed (or that illegal immigrants from China were working in such an organized way).

The cockle pickers do not fit the profile of the conventional stranger figure. As illegal immigrants controlled by gangmasters, who organized their living and working arrangements as well as links to families back home in China, they were consigned to a life beyond the margins of society. They were not ‘come today, stay tomorrow’ strangers because of their lack of visibility and lack of choices. Until their tragic deaths most British people would have been unaware of their existence; to be a stranger, in the conventional, Simmelian, sense you have to be seen (and once seen you can be positioned by others as newcomers, wanderers, foreigners, outsiders). The cockle pickers, in common with other contemporary figures of the stranger, were never accorded the status of outsiders: instead they erupted into our consciousness via a tragedy, visible only in death when they emerged briefly from a society that had obscured them and rendered them invisible. For all these reasons they are also good examples of the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ stranger, the existence of which works not only to confound our expectations of the stranger but serves to emphasize the strangeness of our social world.

We have so far looked at two examples of the contemporary stranger. What we must do now is to establish the idea of strangeness as a context for understanding the stranger. In the summer of 2011, during the rioting which broke out in London and other UK cities, there was one incident which the public found particularly disturbing, in many ways more so than images of burning buildings, looting, and violence directed at the police. Captured on CCTV, images of Asyraf Haziq Rossli, a 20 year old student from Malaysia, being robbed by people who were pretending to help him were particularly memorable and emerged as one of the defining moments of the events of August 2011. The CCTV footage of the ‘bad Samaritan’ incident, as it became known, was shown a great deal on TV and was also relayed around the world on news websites and social networking sites. For many people it summarized all that was bad about the motives – and morality – of the rioters.

Immediately prior to being robbed by the ‘bad Samaritans’ Asyraf Haziq Rossli had been attacked by other rioters and had suffered a broken jaw. The CCTV footage shows him sitting on the ground looking stunned and bleeding from the mouth. He is helped to his feet by a young man who appears to be offering genuine assistance; the act of a ‘good Samaritan’. Moments later the ‘good Samaritan’ shows his true colours as he attempts to take possessions from the rucksack which Asyraf Haziq Rossli was still wearing. At this point, other youths turn their attention to the rucksack and one of them clearly removes an item from it and walks away. Asyraf Haziq Rossli is unaware that this is happening as he is being distracted by other rioters and still appears confused and dazed as a result of his earlier attack.

The few minutes of drama captured on video seemed to sum up the problem with the rioters, in the view of many commentators. ‘The “bad Samaritan” incident has come to encapsulate the moral vacuum that is at the heart of these disturbances’ (BBC News).⁴ The Prime Minister, David Cameron, echoing his ‘broken Britain’ theme was quoted as saying; ‘[w]hen we see the disgusting sight of an injured young man with people pretending to help him while they are robbing him, it is clear there are things that are badly wrong in our society’.⁵ The riots more generally were viewed as an abnormal series of events, displaying behaviour which was held to be untypical of British youth, even those in thrall to the ‘get rich quick’ culture which was for many at the root of the problem. The overwhelming response to the riots was shock and anger, as it was not easy for people to understand the motives of the rioters, who were compared unfavourably with rioters from previous decades who were thought to have been motivated by understandable political concerns.

The widespread rioting and opportunistic looting of 6–9 August 2011 shook Britain to the core. What apparently started as a community’s protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London, swiftly degenerated into an orgy of wanton violence, theft and destruction that afflicted many parts of the capital and other cities. Politicians, the police, community leaders and citizens alike were left dazed, shocked and confused. It was as if no one could quite believe what had happened (Birch and Allen, 2011: 1).

The shock and confusion stemmed not only from the apparent lack of any social justification for the riots, but also because of the speed with which they spread to other parts of the country, their unpredictability and the ways in which ‘familiar and well-loved streets were turned, for a time, into alien, frightening battle zones’.⁶ But perhaps the most shocking aspect of the rioting and looting, as represented in the mainstream media, was the social distance between the rioters and the rest of society. It was this perceived distance, reinforced day by day as the riots continued and exacerbated by the absence of an obvious ‘explanation’ for the events, that was particularly disturbing.

For Marotta (2011: 107) ‘when those who are physically close are socially and culturally distant’ a situation of ‘strangeness’ exists. This is an interesting idea and one that goes to the heart of why we experience the riots as disturbing and difficult to accommodate within our sense of what is ‘normal’. Asyraf Haziq Rossli certainly experienced a great distance between himself and society, and those people who he perhaps could have expected to offer support were not just cold and distant but actively hostile – his violent treatment at the hands of the rioters positioned him very much an outsider. In a conventional sense Asyraf Haziq Rossli was obviously a stranger, an overseas student whose residence in the UK was temporary and who would have been marked out by various kinds of difference (ethnic, linguistic, cultural). As we have seen, a stranger is usually seen as one ‘who comes today and stays tomorrow’ in Simmel’s famous formulation, and is a person who exhibits some form of difference which forever marks him or her as not ‘of’ society.

The idea advanced here is that a conventional notion of the stranger is no longer adequate. There are many reasons for this but the most immediately important are that we no longer live in societies in which it is easy to distinguish who has ‘come today and will stay tomorrow’ and ethnicity and other markers of difference no longer necessarily signify someone who is not ‘of’ society. For these reason The Globalization of Strangeness advocates a shift from a focus on the stranger to consideration of a societal condition of strangeness. Marotta’s strangeness thesis is a valuable starting point in this regard. It introduces the idea that in society we can be physically close while remaining disconnected in important ways. Marotta’s strangeness thesis appears to be applicable to Asyraf Haziq Rossli’s case, at least at first glance. It helps understand what happened to him in a way that labeling him as a stranger does not. Those who were physically close to Rossli did not constitute a community and they did not offer him hospitality as an outsider, a visitor to the UK. There existed a gulf of social and cultural distance between Rossli and those physically proximate to him. But ultimately this is not an adequate account of the strangeness generated by the riots, in my view. This is because for Marotta, strangeness is something only experienced by those conventionally labelled as strangers, like Asyraf Haziq Rossli.⁷

The interpretation of strangeness advanced in this book starts from the idea that strangeness is a more general experience of social life, experienced not only by those strangers who ‘come today and stay tomorrow’ in the conventional sense, but importantly also by members of the host society. This condition of strangeness occurs when people are no longer sure who ‘we’ are, and who ‘the other’ might be. In other words, strangeness is a sense of disorientation resulting from – as I will argue – an experience of globalization in which previously reliable reference points have been eroded and we encounter strangers where previously we encountered neighbours. The rioting and looting in London and other UK cities revealed new strangers, who emerged from within and made palpable the strangeness of society. These were by and large people who should have been ‘of’ society but were in fact revealed by their actions to be somewhat alien to it.

A caveat is necessary. The temptation to draw glib conclusions from the events of August 2011 should be resisted. My point here is not to join the debate on the causes of the riots, the role of gangs in organizing the looting, the lack of role models for young people in society, or any of the other social issues that these events raised. The point is to register both that strangeness is not such an exceptional state of affairs – it is rather easily achieved (and at times may possibly be more like a norm than an exception) – and also that it is a central feature of the contemporary stranger that s/he emerges from within society (rather than being from elsewhere, as in the classical sociological interpretation) and erupts onto the political scene in an unpredictable way. These aspects of the stranger will be investigated throughout the book, and it is suggested, can be best pursued via a new framework for understanding the stranger, one which is in fact much needed (and probably long overdue).

In short, this book will advance a new and different reading of the stranger, and assert that the stranger does not necessarily come from elsewhere, as in the conventional sociological sense. Rather, the stranger emerges from within a social order previously unaware of the stranger’s existence. The stranger is of society and upon emergence contributes strangeness to it. This stranger often appears with great rapidity, in a surprising and even disconcerting way, and his/her appearance is frequently interpreted as an index of the fragility of social bonds and community sentiment. But there is more to the contemporary stranger: the stranger has to be placed in the context of a more widespread state of strangeness, a development which is of equal if not greater importance than the changing nature of the figure of the stranger. Our contemporary societies are characterized by strangeness – which is palpable in the distance we perceive between ourselves and those to whom we are supposed to be close. Strangeness exists when people are no longer sure if they belong to a ‘we’ collective and cannot say with any certainty who ‘the other’ members of this ‘in group’ might be. I argue that this state of affairs – the strangeness of society – is a product of the Global Age. It is an as-yet barely recognized product of globalization concealed hitherto because insufficient attention has been paid to our personal and individual experiences of globalization. Not everyone experiences globalization in the same way and in addition to opening a world of opportunity (for some) it may also be the case that for others globalization actually turns the world into a rather claustrophobic, restrictive, and limiting place.

Placing strangeness in a global context

Why write a book on the stranger? A conventional answer to this question might be as follows: because we need to understand those people who are ‘in but not of society’ (and because they may pose a threat to us). My answer is rather different. We can no longer assume that we know who the stranger is. More importantly perhaps, we do not necessarily know who ‘we’ are anymore. It is likely that, to some degree at least, ‘we’ are at the same time also strangers (both to ourselves and to others). A key feature to have emerged from the literature on the stranger in recent years is the idea that ‘we are all strangers now’. This means that when we study the stranger we are not focusing exclusively on ‘the other’ (the migrant worker or the refugee, for example). Nowadays, the study of the stranger is also a study of ourselves and our ‘we-ness’. To study the stranger is to explore the ways in which society coheres and the forms of association and solidarity that may exist, in a context in which we can no longer assume that community is proximate and nested within the social structure of national societies. These are the sort of changes that are placed un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction: When Neighbours Become Strangers
• Chapter 2 The Unchanging Stranger: A Critical Survey of the Literature
• Chapter 3 Ulrich Beck: A Perspectival Account of Strangeness
• Chapter 4 The Global Context: Rethinking Strangers and Neighbours
• Chapter 5 The ‘Cricketing Stranger’: The London Bombings and the ‘Homegrown Terrorist’
• Chapter 6 The Cosmopolitan Stranger: A Thesis
• Chapter 7 Representing the Stranger: Film and Television
• Chapter 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index