Excursus on the stranger
Digression about the stranger is the title of a chapter of the 1908 published Sociology of Georg Simmel . The chapter is the basic text of the sociology of migration .
content
The sociological form of the stranger is not the wanderer who comes and goes, but the one who comes and stays. It brings new qualities into the spatial environment that do not originate from it. The stranger appears as a trader throughout the history of the economy. Because traders have to be strangers when economic production is no longer solely for personal use. They bring something from the outside into the business community. At several passages in the text, Simmel mentions Jews as classic examples of foreigners and traders. Typical of the stranger is his objectivity, because he has an outside view and yet is there.
Further development
Robert Ezra Park , who had studied with Simmel, ties in with his marginal man (marginal rider) to Simmel's excursus on the stranger . Ernst Grünfeld provided the first German-language elaboration of the problem in his posthumously published work Die Peripheren .