Ethical Life with Strangers: Sociality and Civility

How do we deal with strangers in different parts of the world. What is a stranger? And to whom? Many theorists suggest that dealing with anonymous strangers is central to norms of sociality and civility. For the thinker Georg Simmel, the stranger is less concerned with norms of civility, and more with the promise of urban life, a category ripe for marginalization but also an illustration of the possibilities of ambiguous and multi-faceted life with others that reckons not only with our connections with others but our secrets. Others suggest that questions of empathy and ethics are concerned with how others' are imagined and interacted with. However, is social life an encounter with strangers in a simple sense? Surely what it is to be a friend, enemy or a stranger is socially and historically produced? Who are the same and who are the others? Is anybody an 'other' by virtue of not being oneself? What is the public and what is the private in different places, in different interactions? What is the difference between distant others, and those who are others to each other whose histories are intertwined? This class examines these questions and the complex issues around how heterogenous individuals and communities live together, by emphasizing the historical stratifications of race, class, caste, gender that comprise the stakes in any-one meeting in any space, but especially in certain spaces. We will read ethnographies and histories that teach us the ways in which structures of power, colonialism and often as a corollary exclusion and fear structure how and who meets each other, AND, also emphasize the ways in which social life can be exhilarating, complex, violent, contingent and transformative.