Introduction

All societies produce strangers argues Zygmunt Bauman (1997, 17). From the 1980s onwards, the stranger has figured prominently in Bauman's understanding of social exclusion, marginalization, and intolerance. The stranger is often viewed as slimy, a character who is polluted and contaminated and whose presence we find threatening. The stranger is a projection of our internalized fear of difference and fear of becoming psychologically invaded by Otherness. For Bauman people who are unable to adapt or fit in are seen to transgress boundaries and become strangers. Consequently, the stranger is ambivalence incarnated (Bauman and Tablet 2017, 139).

This chapter presents an account of Bauman's complex understanding of how the stranger as a distinctive analytical, social, and cultural category comes into being. Underpinning Bauman's analysis of the stranger in its various forms: the poor, later cast as the f lawed consumer, the abstract Jew, and the unwanted foreigner, refugee, and forced migrant; is Georg Simmel's understanding of people as boundary creating and boundary maintaining agents. From the exclusion of the abstract Jew in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) to his analysis of estrangement rooted in nationalism, his post-nationalist critique of the “nostalgic turn” and support for Pope Francis's critique of the European Union's stance on refugees and forced migrants (Bauman 2013, 2017). The chapter will explore Bauman's (2016a) “bridging” and “bonding” assumptions; that people are social but also boundarycreating and boundary-maintaining. Borders assist people in arranging objects, including people into assemblages or categories, and are central in the processes of estrangement. The chapter explains how Bauman's definition and redefinition of borders and boundaries come to generate adiaphoric moral indifference in relation to people who find themselves on the other side of our door.

A stranger is regarded as “strange” and their presence can be discomforting, even if they are not behaving aggressively. According to Bauman barbarians was the name given by the Ancient Greeks to people who did not inhabit Greece and did not speak Greek, consequently, because these people could not easily be communicated with, the Greeks were unsure of their motives and intentions. The barbarians were strangers, different but not inferior. However, the presence of the stranger could generate a vague, unspecific, and unfocused fear. The presence of the stranger demonstrated that there were other ways to organize life, prompting the Greeks to engage in self-justification and self-scrutiny.