1 - Otherness, outsiders and larger tents

Summary

This chapter begins with some examples of mundane otherness and its role in interaction. The mechanism here that relates selves to others has been described by various symbolic interactionists. Charles Cooley (1972), for example, coined the phrase “looking-glass self” to describe ways in which our sense of self is clearly related to the perceptions and reciprocal actions of others; indeed, we develop a “social self” almost completely oriented to the real or imagined actions of others. George Herbert Mead developed a cluster of concepts, first splitting the “I” and the “me” (a more reflexive and more objective notion, respectively, of the self), and went on to describe the general mechanism for learning how to orient oneself to the actions of others. One “takes the role of the other” in imaginative play, assuming a reciprocity of perspectives so that if we can experience a situation in a particular way, we can assume it must be experienced like that for others too. Others with most contact with us (both quantitatively and qualitatively) can become “significant others”, an idea that lives on in the currently fashionable talk of “role models”. As our experience grows, we can construct a “generalized other” to orient ourselves towards the actions of strangers: this, in turn, gets incorporated back into the “me”. It is easy to see functionalist assumptions here too that the levels and dimensions will be smoothly integrated.