Familiar’s Strangeness: For a Renewal of Alfred Schütz Social World Theory
Alfred Schutz’s sociology has the potential to capture the complex interplay of familiarity and strangeness in the everyday life of contemporary societies. However, his analyses of the arrival of a stranger in a group, put together in his well-known essay “The Stranger”, run into difficulties calling for a critical reconstruction. A reading of his background theses on social typification and knowledge by acquaintance brings to light limitations to the ideal type of the migrant, which expresses a primacy of the external relation to strangeness. This approach to the problem of belonging overstates the conformity of practices and routines in the group receiving the stranger on his territory. An awareness of internal alterity opens the discussion to the latent strangeness within the We and the Ego through a fresh take on tools provided by social phenomenology.