Bodily strangerhood(s) revisited: on bodily strangerhoods and glocalised bodies

Abstract

Experiences of strangerhood prove to be as diverse as the ways of productively processing these experiences. In the perspective of the praxeological sociology of Pierre Bourdieu phenomena of strangerhood can be understood as modes of a drifting apart or, if you like, of a no-longer or not-yet-matching of habitus and habitats. The bodily dimensions of such mismatches had been discussed by Bourdieu already at the beginning of the 60s, when describing a village dance evening in his home village in Béarn. It is already evident here, in what way symbolic violence - which goes hand in hand with the expansion of the markets of symbolic goods and practice forms - has an effect on motor skills and body idiom. Today, similar developments are taking place on a global scale, with the effect of a glocalisation of bodily habitus. The trend towards a global unification of cultural forms is combined with a social dynamic, which re-manufactures and re-produces cultural diversity and differences again and again, and this goes for all levels of the body and body practices. Field-specific bodily strangerhoods are constantly generated, reinvented and socially constructed again and again in contexts of globalisation. Apart from that, the sociological work of Bourdieu itself bears witness that a productive, field-specific processing of the experiences of strangerhood may result in a very special clearness of vision combined with disciplinary profits. Sociologists in this view are also professional strangers, and the business of sociology among other things requires a constant and methodologically controlled application of strangerhood as an epistemological principle.