Surprising strangers
Surprising strangers
Societies have always allocated a special place to the stranger who comes to them from elsewhere. In Antiquity he would have been a navigator, a merchant, or an exile. In Athens, before the city-state made a distinction between "barbarians" (foreigners) and "metics" (resident aliens) strangers were protected by the gods, especially Apollo, himself a god in exile, and to enjoy the "inviolability of supplicants" they had to carry in the crook of their left arm freshly cut olive branches bound by narrow white strips of cloth. In those far-off times a Phoenician who found himself in Athens, a Cypriot who sailed to Delos, was a man apart, not necessarily regarded sympathetically. For Aristophanes, a false and rascally individual was someone who "behaved like an Egyptian". One of the first great heroes of mythology was Odysseus, an outsider who sailed from island to island, blown far from home by the wind of fate.
Then the dimensions of the world grew wider. Great conquerors like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Arab Muslim general Khaled Ibn al-Walid, Genghis Khan and the Mogul emperor Akbar redrew the map of the earth. The quest for the Indies took Marco Polo to China and Christopher Columbus to the Americas, dreaming of the gold of Cipango. When in the present century the Malian sage Amadou Hampâté Bâ said that "the whole universe is our planet", he was only one small step ahead of today's media explosion in which image-hungry cameras capture dramatic events as they happen and beam them instantly to the four corners of the earth. Bui barriers aplenty still continue to exist... great walls, iron curtains, homeless peoples and travellers without papers.
This double issue of the Unesco Courier contains reports of encounters between people from different lands and cultures. It explores the freshness and spontaneity of their reactions as they find themselves at close quarters with unfamiliar ways of life. A Siamese ambassador visits the court of the Sun King. A member of Trinidad's Indian community feels at home in Canada. The Inuit are seen through Russian eyes. A Dayak traveller from Borneo meets the Koreans of China. In Paris, a group of young women from countries of the South talk among themselves of love and marriage. . . .
Here are travellers intrigued by new ways that they try to translate into their own terms, getting to know strangers through an effort of comprehension that, however slightly, changes their own way of seeing the world.