Obcy w perspektywie socjologicznej

Abstrakt

Attempts at distinguishing the category of “stranger” from other research categories have been made from a variety of points of view characterising different disciplines of knowledge. The approach suggested in the article tries to set in order the existing considerations conducted in sociology. Its aim is not to reconstruct and compare all the possible explanations but rather to establish limits in which the suggested solutions may be placed.

The analysis of chosen items from the literature of the subject made in the present article points to a peculiar dualism – existence of two basic ways of understanding the “stranger” and, in consequence, two criteria of “strangeness”. One of them results as it were from the essence of the “stranger” as the subject of the analysis, who is stigmatised irrespective of himself or the external perspective – the perspective of the appraising subject. One is a “stranger” by virtue of objective, unchanging factors, like e.g. race, sex, nationality or age. Most often these categories consider not so much people's very traits, as consequences of their belonging to cognitively distinguished social classes or groups. This type of explanation may be labelled as absolute or unqualified. The other criterion of “strangeness” is liquid, as it is established in a subjective appraisal by the observer in a dynamically changing context. Here it is called relative or contextual, because of the subjective perspective of appraisal dependent on a socially defined situation. As it will be shown, this type of interpretation shakes the conceptions that from social categorisation made a tool of a “necessary” division into “better” and “worse”, “one's own” and “strange” people.