Cordiality and Strangeness

This text reflects on the figure of the stranger and its ethical and aesthetic consequences for social life by comparing how relationships between autochthonous individuals and foreigners are described by the Brazilian and German sociologists Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Georg Simmel. It departs from Holanda’s notable interpretation of the Brazilian as a “cordial man,” a trait arising from patriarchal and exploitative colonization based on slavery, and analyzes it in its full scope: behind the façade of affectivity lie relations of domination and the swallowing of difference; behind proximity lie personalist social relations that undermine the public sphere. In a second moment, Simmel’s description of the paradox between physical proximity and psychic distance in the urban metropolis is brought into this discussion. The stranger, after all, can simultaneously be a figure of objectivity and impartiality, an element disturbing the stability of the place they settle in, and one that promotes the idea of an “us.” It is claimed that the possibility, opened up by the foreigner, of being a stranger to oneself could enable a different relationship toward the other.