The Foreigner

... Richard Sennett wrote an article on the foreigner that starts from Simmel's understanding of the stranger's role to expose "the sheer arbitrariness of society's script, which insiders follow thinking lines have been written by Right, Reason, or God" (2002) and goes on with the foreigner's knowledge about living a displaced life... To understand the meaning of these roles, Sennett reminds us of Sophocles' Oedipus: "The two wounds on Oedipus's body are thus a scar of origins that cannot be concealed [his ankles bear a scar that marks his origins] and the wanderer's self-inflicted scars that do not seem to heal" (192). The two scars represent the conflict between the truth claims of belonging and the truth discovered by wandering. And to come to present times, Sennett places this ancient conflict at the origin of the modern tendency to change societal arrangements at will, and to treat community, identity and roots as "borders to be sealed rather than boundaries to be crossed" (194).

Wandering around with a camera, we/our cameras play the foreigner's role... similar to the (outside) participant observer in field research in anthropology. In the city the story is a bit more complicated, as politics (life in the polis) manifest in speech and action (at least according to Aristotle). At present there is one talk on multiculturalism and more actions towards isolation and exclusion. But hopefully flânerie might help to bridge that gap...