Land of Strangers

The more social relationships become impersonal and looser, the more we seem to want to return to a world of closer personal ties, and as a means of negotiating diversity and difference. A nostalgia for a time of interpersonal ties and human acknowledgement has grown, in the belief that this will help to overcome contemporary problems such as alienation, disenchantment and xenophobia. This book offers a counter-argument, by looking to habits of living that are not reducible to social ties to explain contemporary malaises of social integration and to offer new suggestions for living in diversity.