Ulrich Bielefeld: Aliens - Friends or Enemies, from the Serbian translation












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            * Selma Muhič - Dizdarevič
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            Ulrich Bielefeld: Aliens - Friends or Enemies, from the Serbian translation, Stranci - pri

            neprijatelji, Bibilioteka XX vek, Beograd 1998



            The book by Ulrich Bielefeld, a sociologist who works at the Institut für Sozialforschung 
            was published in a Serbian translation as a collection of lectures, contribution to debate
            from which majority was published in German in a magazine of the Institute "Mittelweg 36".

            will not find in the book a focus on a single subject, but a fascinating insight into and 
            main theme, which is constitution of various "us" and "them" dichotomies based on nation, 

            domicile and alien inhabitants. As author says himself, discussing this problem should lea
            of a sociology of alien following sociological insights of Weber and Simmel (let's remembe
            definition of the latter: alien is the one who comes today and stays tomorrow) and a whole

            authors who after them dealt with this subject, frequently from a very different angles. T
            crucial contribution for all those who, in the light of current events whose extremes we p
            political events, want and must allow themselves a theoretical distance and ask a question

            groups individuals into nations and ethnic groups and creates basis for conflicts.

            In the first article, titled "Exclusive Society and Inclusive Democracy", Bielefeld, refer

            points at emergence of a new phenomenon: conflicts were usually organized around the "us a
            However, Chernobyl showed that the difference in the light of danger from a nuclear catast
            It means that we all become "them", although it is questionable how much that becomes obvi

            political consciousness. As most modern author, Bielefeld also inclines to interpretation 
            a nation or an ethnic group as a fiction. Namely, we have to fictive collectives, collecti
            collective of the other. This, of course, is not to say that fictions are less efficient b

            fictions, nor does it mean that members of a collective see them as fictions. But it does 
            is no successful primordial-essentialist basis for interpretation of grouping on the basis
            or ethnicity. Moreover, classification of who is an alien, as author claims, stems directl

            in power relations, where the center is moved on the side of domicile inhabitants.

            It is also worth mentioning, as Bielefeld noticed, that European sociology does not see is

            as a central one, in a tradition from Durkheim and Weber, whereas the same problem is cons
            American sociology, from the Chicago school on. Interest in the other moved from "a savage
            "a Barbarian" to internal alien. That process makes a nation more colorful within and "its

            although they do not change in reality."
            P. 42


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