Social spaces and the micropolitics of differentiation: An example from northwestern Turkey

Through a focus on the forging of social spaces through difference, this essay shows how the concept of stranger looms large and forms a critical part of people's lives in the ethnographic context of northwestern Turkey. It explores how the unfamiliar is thought of in diverse ways, through the methodological techniques of either vision, reason, or empathy. In this regard, encounters with strangers are not merely about relations between self and other, the outside and inside, but about the practices, perceptions, and politics of space.