ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2003

Negotiating Strangerhood: Interviews with

Homeless Immigrants in Copenhagen

Margaretha Järvinen
University of Copenhagen and the Danish National Institute of Social Research

ABSTRACT
The results from a study on homeless immigrants in Copenhagen are analysed in this article. Based
on 25 life-history interviews with male immigrants living in institutions for the homeless, my focus
of concern is the interviewees’ self-presentations and their attempts to handle their stigmatized
position. Two theoretical approaches are combined. First, the narratives are analysed as
representations of the immigrants’ marginalized status in their new society. Many narratives echo
Bauman’s (1991) descriptions of the stranger as someone constructed as a ‘permanent other’;
someone discredited, blamed and discriminated against because he/she ‘threatens the natural order
of things’. Second, the narratives are analysed as presentations, i.e. as the narrators’ preferred
interpretations of their present and past situations (Scott and Lyman, 1968). The narratives are
therefore read not just as reflections of ‘things that actually happened’ to the interviewees, but also
as reflections of their strategies in handling these incidents and of their attempts to present
themselves in the interviews as persons ‘permanently on trial’, persons who are ‘respectable after all’.

KEYWORDS: alcohol and drug abuse, assimilation, homelessness, integration, isolation, social
exclusion, unemployed immigrants

Introduction among non-Western immigrants was 21 per

Denmark’s immigrants (defined as non-Danish
citizens and Danish citizens born in other coun-
tries) constitute about 6 per cent of the popu-
lation. Of the 310,000 immigrants in Denmark,
about 70 per cent are from non-Western coun-
tries. As reflected in a range of studies, immi-
grants fare badly on most social welfare
variables (Jeppesen, 1989; Hummelgaard et al.,
1995, 1998; Mogensen and Matthiesen, 2000).
Among long-term social security recipients,
immigrants from ‘third countries’ (countries
outside the European Union and North
America) constitute around 30 per cent (Årbog
om udlændinge i Danmark, 2001: 143). In some
groups of immigrants, two-thirds of the popu-
lation live on social security. Housing for 60 per
cent of the immigrants (and descendants) from
‘third countries’ compared to 13 per cent
among native Danes is in the public housing
sector (ibid., p. 156). The unemployment rate
cent in 1999, compared to 5 per cent in the rest
of the population (Husted, 2000). From 1985 to
1998, the rate of employment among immi-
grants (and descendants) from non-Western
countries dropped from 52 per cent to 39 per
cent – the corresponding figures for native
Danes being 73 per cent and 74 per cent
(Mogensen, 2000: 84). In a study analysing
unemployment statistics in 13 European and
North American countries in 1999, Denmark
came out with the largest difference between
immigrant unemployment rates and unemploy-
ment rates in the rest of the population (OECD,
1999).
In the homeless population in Denmark,
which is the focus of this article, the proportion
of immigrants has increased over the past 10
years. In the early 1990s, immigrants
accounted for 14 per cent of persons registered
at institutions for the homeless in Copenhagen;
in 1999 this number had grown to 30 per cent

Acta Sociologica Copyright © 2003 Scandinavian Sociological Association and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
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216 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)
(Københavns Kommune, 2000). This could be
an indication of an increasing social marginal-
ization in certain categories of the foreign popu-
lation in Denmark.
Immigrants in Denmark – especially those
from non-Western countries – are often seen as
both an economic and a cultural problem. In
interviewing a representative sample of Danes
about their attitudes to foreigners, Gaasholt and
Togeby (1995) presented the respondents with a
set of positive and negative statements about
immigrants, and asked them to take a position
on each. Among many interesting results, the
following are of specific relevance for this
article: 65 per cent agreed with the statement:
‘Many immigrants have come to Denmark to
take advantage of our social welfare system.’
Sixty-eight per cent were of the opinion that:
‘Immigration is accompanied by an increase in
crime and violence.’ Forty-four per cent agreed
with the statement: ‘Some races are not suited to
living in a modern society’ and 40 per cent with
the statement: ‘Immigration is a threat to our
national identity’ (ibid., p. 40). As Gaasholt and
Togeby conclude, there is a climate of fear and
aversion to immigrants and foreign cultures in
the Danish population.
This article is based on life-history inter-
views of 25 male homeless immigrants1 living
in five different institutions for the homeless in
Copenhagen, as well as interviews with repre-
sentatives of the staff at these institutions.2 All
except one of the interviewed immigrants came
from non-Western countries, mostly from the
Middle East or Africa. The focus of concern in
the article is the immigrants’ self-presentations
and their attempts to handle their situation as
homeless, social welfare recipients. How do they
perceive their position as foreigners in a country
where public opinion about immigrants,
especially those from non-Western countries,
seems to be characterized by ‘moral panic’ (cf.
Hervik, 1999: 126)? How do they describe the
processes leading them into homelessness and
social marginalization? How do they relate their
working history and their attempts to qualify for
the Danish labour market? How do they perceive
their status as unemployed and homeless in a
socio-political climate where immigrants tend to
be defined as a ‘social welfare burden’ (Gaasholt
and Togeby, 1995)?
In a couple of earlier studies I analysed
homelessness among native Danes in Copen-
hagen,3 but when analysing the interviews in
the present study I could see some immediate
differences. First of all, descriptions of loneli-
ness, isolation and social exclusion were
extremely common in the interviews with
homeless immigrants. Although feelings of
marginalization are often described in inter-
views with homeless people, I have never seen a
sample of interviews in which the narrators
have portrayed themselves as so totally isolated
from mainstream society as the interviewees in
this study. Second, an attitude of self-defence
and self-legitimation seemed to characterize the
narratives. The question of how to explain
homelessness and unemployment turned out to
be important in the narratives (more important
than planned in the interview guide). The inter-
viewees tended to describe their homelessness as
caused by ‘forces beyond their control’,
especially forces related to their status as for-
eigners in Denmark – discrimination in working
life and in the housing sector, for instance. Many
of them explicitly dissociated themselves from
‘homeless people in general’, and/or ‘social
welfare clients in general’, by pointing out that
these ‘others’ (in contrast to the interviewees)
‘had themselves to blame for their homelessness
and unemployment’. The interviewed immi-
grants, as well as the staff at the institutions,
were of the opinion that marginalization among
immigrants followed different patterns from that
among native Danes. Alcohol and drug
problems, for instance, were regarded as less
frequent in the immigrant part of the homeless
population.
The combination of these aspects in the
interviews – pronounced experiences of loneli-
ness, isolation and social exclusion; self-defence
as a recurrent theme in the narratives – led me
to draw up the following theoretical framework.
First, I decided to seek inspiration in Zygmunt
Bauman’s (1991) and Georg Simmel’s (1908a)
texts on ‘the stranger’. Many of the self-presen-
tations in the study – and the hopelessness that
pervades them – seem to echo Bauman’s (1991:
60) descriptions of the stranger as someone con-
structed as a permanent ‘other’, someone dis-
credited, blamed and discriminated against
because he ‘threatens the natural order of
things’. Second, and partly in contrast with this
perspective, I chose a symbolic interactionist
framework analysing the interviewees’ narra-
tives in terms of ‘accounts’. The interactionist
perspective was chosen in order to point out that
although the narratives in the study are reflec-
tions of ‘things that actually happened’ to the
interviewees, they also reflect the interviewees’

strategies in handling these incidents, and their
(conscious or unconscious) attempts to present
themselves as certain kinds of people. Within
symbolic interactionism, accounts are defined
as statements made by social actors to free
themselves of culpability and defend or restore
their position as respectable human beings
(Scott and Lyman, 1968). Accounts are found
in narratives – like the narratives in this study –
where people try to negotiate guilt and responsi-
bility.
What I attempt to present in the following
is a double reading of the interviews with
homeless immigrants. On the one hand, and
inspired by Bauman and Simmel, I analyse the
narratives as ‘representations’ of the inter-
viewees’ marginalized status in their new
society. On the other hand, and inspired by
symbolic interactionism (Scott and Lyman,
1968) I analyse the interviews as ‘presen-
tations’, i.e. as the narrators’ preferred interpre-
tations of their present and past situations (cf.
Buttny, 1993: 21).
The rest of the article is structured as
follows. First, Bauman’s (and Simmel’s) perspec-
tive on strangers, friends and enemies is
described. Then the interactionist approach to
‘accounting’ is introduced, represented by Scott
and Lyman (1968), Austin (1970) and Pastello
(1991). After this, the combined perspective of
Bauman and the interactionists is applied to the
interviewees’ (re)presentations of themselves as
persons ‘permanently on trial’ and ‘respectable
after all’. Subsequently the theoretical perspec-
tive is used to shed light on the interview situ-
ation itself. In an interactionist perspective,
interviews cannot be regarded as neutral data-
gathering incidents. According to Holstein and
Gubrium (1995), interviews are not pipelines
for transmitting knowledge but reality-con-
structing, meaning-making occasions. Inter-
viewers are not just objective listeners and
receivers of knowledge that is ‘already there’
inside the interviewees. On the contrary, inter-
viewers are actively involved in the processes
that turn experience into narratives. In the final
part of the article, I present some examples of
the interaction between interviewers and inter-
viewees to show that negotiations about
‘strangerhood’ may be present in interview situ-
ations as well as in a multiplicity of other
meetings between immigrants and natives in
society.
Järvinen: Negotiating Strangerhood 217
Strangers, friends, enemies
Bauman’s reasoning on strangers, friends and
enemies is inspired by Simmel’s classical essay
‘The stranger’ (1908a). The stranger, according
to Simmel, is a person who is ‘near and far at the
same time’, someone whose position in the
group is ‘fundamentally affected by the fact that
he does not belong to it initially and that he
brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot
be, indigenous to it’ (ibid., p. 143). Simmel’s
stranger is not ‘a wanderer who comes today
and goes tomorrow’, but a ‘potential wanderer,
a man who comes today and stays tomorrow’
(ibid.). Strangers are by their very nature not
owners of land or permanent residence – land
and residence not just in the physical sense but
also in a metaphorical sense as a fixed position
within the social environment. The relation
between a stranger and his/her surroundings is
an abstract relation, not a concrete relation,
according to Simmel. For this reason strangers
are not really perceived as individuals, but as
persons of a certain type. The abstract relation
has the effect of putting special emphasis on
what the strangers do not share with the society
in which they are located, i.e. their alien origin
(ibid.).
Building upon Simmel, Bauman (1991)
describes the stranger as an abstract social
figure, the archetypal member of ‘the family of
undecidables’ (p. 55). In Bauman’s view, the
stranger questions one of the fundamental
binary oppositions of social interaction, that
between friends and enemies. Friends and
enemies stand in direct logical opposition to
each other. The friend/enemy distinction differ-
entiates between good and evil, right and
wrong, tasteful and unbecoming, subject and
object. The stranger rebels against this dual
system. The strangers among us bring the
outside into the inside, the negative into the
positive, the alien into the well known. They
thereby become unclassifiable or, in Bauman’s
words, ‘neither/nor beings’ that militate against
one of society’s most profound ‘either/or con-
structions’ (1991: 56).
In Bauman’s view, strangerhood per defi-
nition represents a problem for the insiders as
well as for the strangers themselves. The
immediate and most consistent reaction to
strangers is exclusion: the insiders attempt to
make the strangers leave the area again. This
equates with turning the stranger into an
enemy, since territorial separation is the natural
218 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)
relationship between enemies. The second-best
solution, according to Bauman, is to isolate the
stranger in functional or cultural enclaves
within the insiders’ territory (1991: 66). Since
strangers cannot be kept at a secure physical
distance they must be tabooed, disarmed and
mentally exiled. If they cannot be made non-
existent, they can at least be made untouchable.
Social intercourse with strangers may be
reduced to such a degree that they become per-
manent ‘others’, locked up in a shell of exoticism
(ibid., p. 67). Unlike true friends, strangers do
not naturally belong to their new habitat. The
territory they have entered was not theirs from
the beginning, and this makes their presence an
event in history rather than a fact of nature. The
best the strangers can hope for is to be treated
like guests. Guests – or strangers ante portas (at
the gate) in Bauman’s (1998: 135) terminology
– are not the equal of insiders; they do not have
the right to dispose of everything in their new
country; they ought not to criticize their hosts or
be too demanding; they are expected to show a
certain gratitude towards their hosts.
Against all this stands the call to assimi-
lation – the invitation and promise that if the
strangers work hard enough to change, they
may become ‘true friends’. In Bauman’s view,
however, there is an inner contradiction in this
call. The game of emancipation is in fact a game
of domination. The harder the strangers try to
become like the insiders, the more they prove the
superiority of the natives. The more they try to
shed everything that makes them distinct from
their hosts, the more clearly they demonstrate
the undesirability and out-of-placeness of their
own background. However hard they try to
assimilate, they are always persons on trial, con-
stantly accused of not being what they ought to
be. Being a stranger means that nothing is
given, nothing comes free, everything has to be
achieved and proven over and over again. A
stranger in the process of being assimilated does
not have the full right to self-definition. The con-
struction of the stranger’s self, the assessment of
his/her resources and shortcomings derives
from the insiders’ ‘critical gaze’ (Bauman, 1991:
90). Strangers have to confine themselves to a
life of constant scrutiny and critique, without
being allowed to pass judgement on their judges.
To the natives, the assimilated stranger will
always and irredeemably remain what he/she is
– a stranger desperately trying to become like
them.
To a certain degree, assimilation is always
false, since strangers can never become insiders
by ‘situating’ or ‘tuning themselves in’. This is
so, says Bauman, because situating and tuning
are performances while true belonging is fate.
The acquired character of the strangers’ traits is
the antithesis of the inherited and ascribed
nature of the natives’ traits, and this contrast
puts the strangers under continuous suspicion
of duplicity and fake. The essence of stranger-
hood then is homelessness and permanent
exclusion; the stranger becomes an eternal
wanderer with no hope of ever arriving
(Bauman, 1991).
Persons under accusation
Archetypal strangers are, in Bauman’s (1991,
2000) view, persons ‘under accusation’ – they
are accused of being out of place, of being a
burden on the majority, of not being able to
tune themselves in completely (although
this, per definition, is impossible). Bauman’s
stranger is a predominantly negative figure, an
archetype that most individuals are likely to
defend themselves against. Faced with the
possibility of being positioned as a stranger, a
person may turn to identity negotiations and
‘accounting’.
According to Scott and Lyman (1968),
accounts are found among (a) persons whose
role, status or actions, observed or imputed, are
perceived as untoward, and (b) persons held in
some way responsible for their status or actions.
Accounts are born out of the distinctive human
capacity to be blamed, charged and held
responsible. In Scott and Lyman’s words (1968:
46), the function of accounts is ‘to shore up the
timbers of fractured sociation, to throw bridges
between the promised and the performed, to
repair the broken and restore the estranged’.
Accounts reflect the fact that our selves are con-
structed in social interaction. An analysis of
accounts presupposes that the meaning of
events and statuses is always socially negotiated
– in interviews as well as in other social settings.
Austin (1970) distinguishes between two
main categories of accounts: justifications and
excuses. The logic of justification is that the
narrator accepts responsibility for his/her status
but denies its negative character. Applied to
immigrants this could mean that a person
accepts the status as ‘stranger’ (cf. Bauman,
1991), but tries to construct a self-portrait
where he/she is seen as a ‘good guest’, i.e. a

person who is not a burden, a challenge or a
threat to his/her new society. The logic of
excuses, on the other hand, is that a person
accepts the negative significance of his/her
status but denies responsibility for it. While the
tenor of justification among immigrants may
be: ‘I am a stranger, but I do not represent a
problem for you’, excuses may be articulated in
ways such as: ‘I may represent a problem for you
(in my position as refugee, as social welfare
recipient, etc.), but I cannot help it, I did not
choose this position’.
Pastello (1991) distinguishes between four
types of accounts: coercion, exception, denial
and concealment. Coercion is used as an
argument by narrators attributing their ‘prob-
lematic’ position or behaviour to factors beyond
their control. Since everyone realizes that people
are sometimes forced to act in a manner
contrary to their liking, problems due to
coercion should not serve as a basis for discred-
iting a person. Hence, persons who have been
forced to leave their country of origin (as
refugees) may be in a better position to negotiate
respectable identities for themselves than
persons who have ‘chosen to leave their natural
habitat’ (immigrants). Exceptions are accounts
indicating that the problem in hand is some-
thing extraordinary in the narrator’s life – or
that the narrator him- or herself is an exception
from an allegedly problematic pattern in a
certain category of people. Immigrants living on
social welfare, for instance, may emphasize that
they have always been able to provide for them-
selves in their country of origin, that they are
novices and misplaced as clients at the social
welfare office, and that they are different from all
other social welfare clients. Denial, according to
Pastello, involves a redefinition of the whole
situation as unproblematic (cf. Austin’s ‘justifi-
cation’ above). Unlike coercion and exception,
denial implies that there is no admission at all
that the individual or group is engaged in
untoward acts (Pastello, 1991: 39). Persons
living on social welfare, for instance, may object
to the label of social client by pointing out that
they have worked and paid their taxes for many
years and hence are entitled to their welfare
cheques. Or they may point to health problems
to show that they are not social clients in the
usual sense of the word, but instead citizens
waiting for a rehabilitation offer or a disability
pension
Concealment, finally, is implied in identity
negotiations where a person withholds
Järvinen: Negotiating Strangerhood 219
information about the problem to be assessed.
As will be shown in the following, withholding
information is characteristic of some of the
homeless immigrants in the study. Some inter-
viewees, for instance, are reluctant to answer
questions about how and why they came to
Denmark. This may be because of the different
status of immigrants and refugees in the official
constructions of persons ‘deserving of help’ (cf.
Gaasholt and Togeby, 1995; Fadel, 1999), but it
may also be related to the fact that the legal
position of some of the interviewees is unclear
(by all appearances a couple of interviewees
have come to Denmark illegally). Other inter-
viewees are reluctant to tell the interviewers
how long they have been employed or unem-
ployed, as the case may be; obviously, the longer
they have been living on social security or
unemployment benefit, the more disreputable
they find their situation. Still others are unwill-
ing to answer questions about how long they
have been living in Denmark. This may (among
many other things) be related to feelings of
linguistic uneasiness. As Schwartz (1985),
Danish/American anthropologist, pointed out
in the 1980s, Danes constantly comment on
how well or how poorly a foreigner speaks
Danish, and these comments are directly related
to questions about the length of stay in
Denmark. Learning the language has more than
an instrumental function, says Schwartz:
‘Acquiring skill in Danish seems more like an
initiation to a secret society’ (ibid. p. 8). The
longer you have lived in the country the more
you have to prove, by your linguistic perform-
ance, that you are entitled to membership. In
our interviews then, the seemingly non-evalu-
ative question ‘How long have you been living in
Denmark’ may have been experienced as part of
an assessment of the immigrants’ ability and
willingness to situate and tune themselves in
(Bauman, 1991).
In the following, three aspects of the inter-
views with homeless male immigrants in Copen-
hagen are analysed. First, the interviewees’
depiction of themselves as persons ‘permanently
on trial’ (cf. Bauman, 1991) is presented. The
interviews count many descriptions of the
immigrants’ attempts to qualify, linguistically
and culturally, for the labour market. That life in
Denmark can be comprehended as a testing
ground where immigrants find themselves
under constant examination – regarding ‘suit-
ability’ for their new country – is clearly
reflected in the data. Second, the interviewees’
220 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)
strategies of accounting are analysed. Accord-
ing to Bauman (1991, 2000), the position of
strangerhood is a collective one, while assimi-
lation is an individual process. In this perspec-
tive, the interviewees cannot strengthen their
position by allying with other immigrants – or
with other homeless persons. On the contrary,
the narratives often advance via accounts where
the interviewees attempt to position themselves
as different from ‘the others’. Third, the best a
stranger can hope for is to be treated like a guest
(Bauman, 1991). As a matter of fact, our inter-
views are filled with host–guest interaction: the
two (native Danish) interviewers tended to act
like ‘representatives of their country’, while the
interviewees were put in the position – and pos-
itioned themselves – as guests. This pattern pre-
sented itself in the interviews regardless of how
many years the homeless immigrants had spent
in Denmark (the range in the material being
4–31 years). With the host–guest casting,
however, come certain anticipations (ibid.): A
guest’s stay in his/her new country is con-
structed as ‘an event in history’, as something
that has a beginning and, supposedly, an end; a
guest is supposed to be unassuming and consid-
erate and not entitled to criticize his/her new
country the way a native citizen is entitled to.
Permanently on trial
The 25 homeless men interviewed in the study
come from a broad range of non-Western coun-
tries, mostly the Middle East and Africa. Their
average duration of stay in Denmark is 14 years.
Most came to Denmark as refugees (nine
persons) or in connection with family reunion
(13 persons), while three came to the country in
the early 1970s as migrant workers. Twenty-
one of the interviewees are divorced (11 have
been married to Danish women); four have
never married; 18 have children. The average
age in the group is 39 years.
Looking back at their working history, only
three of the 25 men report that they have suc-
ceeded in securing regular employment. Most
have alternated between periods of unemploy-
ment, different kinds of municipal job training
projects and temporary jobs as unskilled workers
(five have never been employed in Denmark). At
the time of the interview, the majority (22
persons) were unemployed and living on social
welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, five of the inter-
viewees report that they are university trained:
two are lawyers, two are engineers, and one is a
philosopher. None of them, however, has suc-
ceeded in getting their education accepted in
Denmark: one of the lawyers is working as a
nursery assistant, one of the engineers is a bus
driver, the philosopher is temporarily employed
as a waiter, while the last two university gradu-
ates are social welfare recipients.
The most common road to homelessness
among the interviewees is a divorce and subse-
quent difficulties finding a place to live: 17
persons report that they have found themselves
without accommodation after a separation.
Being social welfare recipients or low-paid tem-
porary workers, they could not afford a flat on
their own, and many of them say that they have
been turned down by landlords who do not want
to rent out rooms to foreigners. The municipal-
ity has not been able to help them either.
Although the social welfare authorities have a
certain quota of non-profit flats reserved for
their homeless clients, most of the interviewees
do not meet the ‘criteria for social housing’: they
are not defined as alcohol or drug addicts, psy-
chiatric patients or disabled. Hence, the social
security office requested they find accommo-
dation on their own and, on failing, offered them
a room at an institution for homeless people.
A, 40 years old, is one of the five university
graduates in the study. After 5 years of law
studies in Turkey he worked as a solicitor until
1995 when he married a Danish woman and
moved to Denmark with her. A quickly realized
that his education would not be acknowledged
in Denmark and found himself a job as an
assistant in a Kindergarten. He has since been
employed in different nurseries. Two years ago
he separated from his wife and two children. He
tried to find a place to live but did not succeed –
‘partly because of discrimination, partly
because [he] could not afford it’. One and a half
years ago he moved in at the hostel where the
interview takes place. The following extracts are
selected from different parts of A’s narrative:
I contacted the university. . . . They told me I would
need four more years of studies to get a lawyer’s
degree in Denmark . . . and anyway, they said, you
cannot study law at the University of Copenhagen if
you don’t speak the language. But I do speak the
language. . . . How do you want me to speak
Danish, I asked them, like a native Dane or like an
immigrant? I can never speak the language the way
you do, I will always speak with an accent. . . . It’s
okay with an accent, she said, but you’ll really have

to master the language. . . . So I really started to
work on the language . . . but even today I’m not
sure I could meet the demands . . . and anyway, I’m
too old for university studies now.
It has been very hard to get these jobs (as a nursery
assistant) but I’ve managed to convince them
somehow . . . and I’ve always got along very well
with my fellow workers, once they have got to know
me. . . . I guess I’m a very open person. . . . But the
older you get, the harder it is to find employment . . .
and you know, with my name and accent . . . it’s
very difficult. So I got myself this new education as
a social assistant, I got my diploma ten months ago
. . . and I’ve applied for some new language courses
. . . I’ll have to improve my Danish, I know that.
I am staying at hostel x . . . it’s hard . . . and I’m a bit
worried . . . how long is it going to take before I find
a place to live? I have been living in Denmark for six
years and I’ve been working all the time and paid my
taxes. . . . I’m all ready for citizenship papers . . .
I’ve worked very hard to learn the language . . . and
I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve no criminal
record. . . . So why don’t they help me now? I don’t
want money. I’ve never been on welfare. I’ve always
been self-supporting. I just cannot find a place to
live.
Many of our interviewees describe the part
of their life history related to Denmark as one
long struggle to qualify and gain access. They
have worked hard to learn the language, they
have attended vocational courses and refresher
courses, they have been in one job training
project after the other. Still, as mentioned above,
most of them have ended up in long-term unem-
ployment. Likewise, they tell us they have
‘fought against’ homelessness. They have stayed
with friends and acquaintances as long as they
could; they have joined associations for social
tenant housing and responded to a large
number of housing ads. This has not solved their
housing problems – at the time of the interview
they have been living at a hostel for an average
time of 13 months and their prospects of finding
a place to live in the near future do not seem
good. Being divorced fathers, many of them
have turned to the social welfare office and
asked for assistance in finding a place to live
where their children can visit them. The only
help they have received is a room at a hostel for
homeless people, where ‘obviously, children
cannot come because of the drug abusers and
psychiatric patients living here’ (as A earlier
says). Because of this, many of the interviewees
Järvinen: Negotiating Strangerhood 221
regard Denmark as a country where ‘the mother
has all rights after a divorce, while nothing is
done to help the father’.
In the popular sense, homelessness, unem-
ployment and social welfare dependency can be
explained in one of two ways. Either these
phenomena are comprehended as ‘individual
problems’ related to maladjustment, laziness,
personal disqualification, alcohol and drug
abuse, or they are comprehended as ‘societal
problems’ related to discrimination, housing
and labour shortage, etc. (see Järvinen, 1992,
for a discussion of different approaches to home-
lessness). This coarse either-or opposition is very
much at work in the interviews, especially in the
parts of the narratives dealing with the ‘reasons’
behind the interviewees’ homelessness. In many
interviews, alcohol and drug abuse turns up as
the central point around which the negotiations
about ‘societal’ versus ‘individual’ problems
evolve. Obviously, in the eyes of the inter-
viewees, a background with alcohol and drug
abuse makes a person ‘guilty’ of his own mar-
ginalization, while a homeless and unemployed
person with no alcohol or drug abuse is entitled
to point to factors beyond his control as the
explanation behind the problems.
B is a 45-year-old man who moved to
Denmark from Iraq 18 years ago. He was
married to a Danish woman for 12 years and
has a 6-year-old child by her. B’s working
history is a long and complicated narrative
about his vain efforts to get a regular job. Over
the years he has attended at least six vocational
courses in engineering and data processing; he
has completed several language courses, job
training programmes and municipal activation
projects. For the past four years he has been
unemployed and homeless. The following
extract is drawn from the beginning of the inter-
view:
Interviewee: I came to Denmark as a refugee. . . . Of
course I know there is no perfect country in the
world . . . but my situation here is very
unhappy. . . . We are all human beings, you know,
wherever we come from . . . and these things may
happen to anybody.
Interviewer: Yes . . .
Interviewee: The reason I become homeless was my
divorce. That was the only reason.
Interviewer (affirmatively): That was the only
reason.
222 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)
Interviewee: That was the only reason. . . . It had
nothing to do with alcohol or drugs. . . . But it’s
natural to start drinking if you’re homeless, isn’t it?
It’s a desperate situation.
Interviewer: So you became homeless after your
divorce. . . . Your wife kept the apartment?
Interviewee: Well, of course. I gave her the apart-
ment. I gave her everything. I left with two suitcases
– after 12 years of marriage.
Three times in the interview B repeats that
his homelessness is a consequence of his
divorce, not a consequence of alcohol or drug
abuse. After a year at an institution for the
homeless, however, he ‘started to drown [his]
sorrows in drink’ and within 2 years, he says, he
had developed ‘almost full-blown alcoholism’.
Clearly, the chronological sequence of these
elements in B’s narrative is important to him:
first came the homelessness (due to the separ-
ation), then came the drinking problems. The
drinking problems and depression in turn led
him into further trouble: he did not manage to
stay in contact with his son. ‘Coercion’ (cf. the
description of different forms of accounts above)
is a recurrent theme in this interview. In fact,
the greater part of B’s life history is structured
by forces and happenings he feels he had no
influence over: the divorce (on his wife’s initia-
tive), unemployment (because of discrimi-
nation, workplace rearrangements, closing
down of workplaces), drinking problems (due to
homelessness and illness) and loss-of-contact
with his son (because of his living conditions at
the hostel and his ex-wife’s unwillingness to
cooperate).
Towards the end of the interview B returns
to the topic of homelessness and alcohol abuse.
Homelessness should be understood in two
different ways, says B, depending on whether
‘we are talking about homeless immigrants or
homeless Danes’:
I’ve met a lot of homeless people here and at this
other hostel [where B used to live] . . . and it’s very
seldom, very seldom that Danes become homeless
because of a divorce . . . But immigrants and
refugees . . . they are exactly like me. It’s the same
pattern. It’s after a divorce, always the same
story. . . . For Danes, it’s more like, you know, they
have alcohol and drug problems. . . . It’s two
patterns, two separate things, but both are called
homelessness. The problem is . . . or the difference is
. . . we didn’t do this on purpose. Neither did they,
but they . . . weren’t strong enough, they could not
control themselves. . . . I mean, some people drink
themselves into homelessness . . . but for me, it was
the other way round.
For the following interviewee as well, ‘non-
abuse’ of alcohol or drugs is the variable that
distinguishes ‘homeless persons who cannot be
blamed’ (the category he sees himself as part of)
from the rest of the homeless population. C, 35
years old, came to Denmark as a refugee from
Somalia 10 years ago. Like so many other of our
interviewees, C tells us that he has attended a
series of vocational courses (for carpenters,
plumbers, etc.) and job training programmes in
order to better his chances on the Danish labour
market but so far has succeeded only in getting
himself a short-term job (as a cleaner). For five
years C was married to a Somali woman whom
he met shortly after his arrival in Denmark. The
couple have three children, but C says he cannot
see them regularly because of his living con-
ditions at the hostel. This extract is drawn from
the beginning of the interview:
Interviewer: As I told you it’s your life history we are
interested in, and I will start with some questions
about . . .
Interviewee (interrupts): About my situation now
when I’m homeless for instance?
Interviewer: Yes, and some other questions . . .
Interviewee: Okay, but you see, there are homeless
people and then there are alcohol and drug abusers
– after all I’m glad I don’t have problems with abuse
...
Interviewer: No . . .
Interviewee: No, no, no, but I stay here together with
these people . . . people who have got themselves
into this mess. I stay here in a terrible neighbour-
hood. . . . I’ve been living in Denmark for ten years,
I’ve gone to all these schools, I’ve done nothing
wrong, I’ve been working and I have three wonder-
ful kids. But I had some marriage problems and
became homeless. . . . I’ve been here at the hostel
for five months but I certainly pay for it here, I pay
my rent, I mean, just like normal people . . .
C does not consume alcohol – ‘being a
Muslim, I cannot accept it’, he says – and he
finds it difficult to live at a hostel in company
with ‘a bunch of boisterous alcoholics’. As to
the question of his relationship to drugs, he
indignantly answers that he does not ‘accept
dope, not of any kind’. Later in the interview, he
suddenly states that he has been using ‘khat’ for

12 years and that his visits to the Somalian
clubs (where he buys the drug) have ‘escalated
somewhat’ since the divorce: ‘It makes you
forget your problems for a while . . . your miser-
able life, your troubles with finding a place to
sleep’. Still, as he points out twice in the inter-
view, he chews khat only at the weekends, ‘just
like people who drink 10–12 beers Saturday
night’. Monday morning he has to get ready for
the week’s activation programme and language
lessons again. At the time of the interview C is
waiting anxiously for the result of his appli-
cation for Danish citizenship. He has passed the
language test, he says, and ‘as far as [he] under-
stand[s]’, he lives up to the requirements:
You have to speak the language very well and know
the country. . . . You are not allowed to owe
money. . . . Now, I have this loan . . . but I am
paying it back to the local authorities. . . . And I’ve
never been arrested, never . . . not once. . . . So, by
the end of December, (laugh) I will be a Danish man.
By analysing the narratives of B and C (and
other interviews) in the perspective of account-
ing, I am not indicating that the interviewees
are lying about their problems. I accept their
reasoning – about the timing of their problems,
the distinction between drug use and drug abuse
and their dissociation from homeless alcohol
and drug abusers – as meaningful presentations
of their self-conception. At the same time,
however, I maintain that the interviewees’ self-
conception and self-presentation cannot be
understood independently of the negative evalu-
ation, they – as homeless immigrants, living on
social security – are liable to in their new
country. By focusing on social exclusion, and the
processes behind it, our questions instigated
identity negotiations where issues of guilt and
responsibility, innocence and blame are central.
In these negotiations the interviewees seem to
defend themselves against the negative identity
of the ‘unwelcome guest’ – the immigrant ‘who
has come to Denmark to take advantage of the
social welfare system’ and/or the immigrant
‘who does not do his/her best to integrate and
become self-supporting’ (cf. Gaasholt and
Togeby, 1995). In Bauman’s (1991) wording,
they defend themselves against ‘the accusations
of strangerhood’ by trying to demonstrate that
they have done their best to situate themselves
and tune themselves in. However much they
have struggled, they feel they are ‘persons on
trial’, constantly accused of not being what they
ought to be.
Järvinen: Negotiating Strangerhood 223
Respectable after all – dissociation from
other strangers
According to Bauman (1991), one way that a
stranger may try to escape social devaluation is
by ‘joining the judges’ and pointing the finger at
other persons who supposedly represent dis-
credited values. In our study as well, the
accounting strategies used by the interviewees
often serve the function of dissociating the
narrator from other stigmatized persons/groups
(‘exceptions’ – see Pastello’s accounting
strategies above). For instance, many inter-
viewees point out that ‘other foreigners’ repre-
sent a great ‘social welfare burden’ or ‘cultural
threat’ for Denmark. On the scale of hierarchy4
that measures the aptitude of different groups
for being integrated (cf. Schwartz, 1985), the
interviewees tend to present themselves as
belonging at the top. Hence, no interviewee
presents himself as ‘less integrated’ than others,
while many explicitly declare that they are
among the most ‘open’, ‘adaptable’, ‘unpreju-
diced’ and ‘adjusted’ of Denmark’s immigrants.
D, 44 years old, is an immigrant from South
America who came to Denmark 20 years ago.
Earlier, he supported himself by working in the
catering trade, but at the time of the interview
he is living on social security. Throughout the
interview, D delineates a rather confusing
portrait of himself as marginalized and isolated
from mainstream society, but nevertheless as an
immigrant who – in relation to other immi-
grants – allies himself with the native majority:
I’ve had some difficulties in Denmark, although I’m
a very open person. . . . My problem is I cannot
speak Danish [D speaks English in the interview]. I
don’t speak Danish because I never was on social
security that long. I didn’t use language lessons as a
weapon for not going to work. We can put it like this.
Many people come here and take advantage of . . .
you know, the greener pasture . . . social
welfare. . . . For example, you are 30 years old, you
go to school, you go to school, you go to school, you
don’t work. . . . Me, I don’t speak Danish but I work.
And why do I work – because I want to work.
There may be some racism in this country. . . . But I
understand it very well. If I were a Dane I would do
the same, I would certainly react, because honestly,
sometimes I don’t like the attitude of the foreigners
. . . if they don’t like it here, why are they here? Why
won’t they go home to their own country, I often ask
them that – and they cannot answer.
224 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)
In X (D’s native country), we are not aggressive, we
are not criminals, you can see that from the statis-
tics. And when I see Danish people in the streets,
night-time, I’m not afraid. . . . If I see foreigners, I
have a second thought. I cannot trust them 100%.
You see the difference? With foreigners, you have to
have this little distance. . . . And by the way, I would
like to ask you: why is it that these asylum seekers all
get their own apartments while we ordinary people
don’t get?
D is the interviewee in our study whose
narrative contains most examples of ‘conceal-
ment’ (Pastello, 1991). He does not want to tell
the interviewer how long he has been living in
Denmark, how and when he became unem-
ployed and homeless, how many times he has
been married or how old his children are. Still,
he is a very enthusiastic participant in the study
and communicates at length about topics such
as his religiosity, his working life in the past, his
everyday life at the hostel, and, above all, about
other foreigners in Denmark.
D uses three lines of reasoning in his
presentation of himself as different from the
others. First, and from the very beginning of the
interview, he strongly emphasizes that he is not
a ‘social welfare refugee’, a person who has
come to Denmark in order to live comfortably on
the country’s generous welfare system. He
moved here ‘because of love’ (family reunion)
and only stays here because of love – for his
children, his wife (whom he divorced in 1996)
and for the country. Although he has been
forced to live on social security himself, ‘mainly
due to language problems’, he wants the inter-
viewer to understand that he is an industrious
and self-supporting person: ‘It’s a question of
character you know . . . if you push yourself to
find a job, you can find it . . . if you hang around
at the courses, you won’t get a job’. Second, he
is intensely concerned about the ‘criminality
and dishonesty’ in the foreign population in
Denmark. Being a law-abiding person himself
he is ‘on the same line with decent Danish
citizens who protest against the flooding of their
country by criminal elements’. Third, being a
Christian, D perceives his religion as a bond that
unites him with Denmark and disassociates him
from immigrants with other religions. He is a
confirmed catholic who ‘missionizes’ at the
hostel, regularly goes to church and strongly
disapproves of certain ‘immoral aspects’ of
modern society (marriage between homo-
sexuals for instance). Although this kind of
religiosity does not fit in with the attitudes of
mainstream secularized (and protestant) Danes,
D repeatedly states that he finds himself ‘very
much at home in Christian Denmark’.
E is another interviewee who constructs his
self-portrait by distancing himself from other
immigrants. E is an Egyptian citizen, 43 years
old, who moved to Denmark in 1990 when he
married a Danish woman. E has been unem-
ployed for many years and became homeless
after his separation two years ago. He has the
following to say about ‘cultural conflicts’, his
own background and other immigrants in
Denmark:
There is a lot of racism in Denmark . . . and fear of
other people. For instance here at the hostel . . . if
we sit together, five or six of us and speak Arabian
. . . they don’t like it. . . . Why do you speak
Arabian, they say, why don’t you speak Danish?
Still, we speak very quietly . . . like we do in my
culture. . . . We don’t rant and rave like some of the
other immigrants. . . . If I take the bus for instance
and some of my friends call me on the mobile, I
would never answer the phone on the bus . . . I just
check the number and call back later. . . . Some for-
eigners have a lot to learn about the Danish culture
. . . they [the ‘other foreigners’] talk like this . . .
bawling . . . on the bus . . . everywhere. . . . It’s
their culture.
It hurts when people talk about my country . . .
They don’t think I have gone to school, they think
we live with camels, they think we don’t watch
TV. . . . But Cairo, you know, where I grew up, is a
very big city. . . . I’m not one of those refugees. . . .
I came to Denmark in order to work . . . and I feel at
home here. . . . But they treat me like a for-
eigner. . . . You know, they put me on social welfare
and make me sit here all day long . . . watching TV
. . . going to courses.
Like D above, E regards immigrants, i.e.
other immigrants than himself, living on social
welfare as persons who do not want to work.
Since E himself has ‘struggled to get a foothold
on the labour market’, and really ‘hate[s] to be
put on social welfare, passivated and treated like
an animal’, he presents himself as ‘somewhat
special’. After all, he has shown his industrious-
ness by going to courses, applying for a diversity
of jobs and participating in job training (but
so, indeed, have most of our interviewees,
according to their own reports) – how could he
be one of these ‘social welfare refugees’?
Furthermore, E substantiates his ‘different

status’ by describing his background as urban,
modern and middle-class. Coming from a
metropolis (Cairo) and from a family of busi-
nessmen and public servants he finds it hard to
be ‘bracketed with shepherds, illiterates and
nomads’. He feels at home in Copenhagen, ‘the
only part of Denmark that is not provincial’, but
he says he is constantly reminded of his status
as ‘not-wanted on the labour market’, ‘not
wanted on the housing market’, however much
he tries to pass as an insider.
Taken together, the accounting strategies
used by interviewees D and E reproduce the
most important negative stereotypes about
immigrants held by a substantial part of the
native population: that many immigrants have
arrived in Denmark because of the country’s
generous social welfare system; that they come
from ‘less developed’ cultures; that their
religious background hampers or renders
impossible their adaptation to their new
country; that they are indolent, unreliable,
aggressive, noisy and distracting (cf. Hervik,
1999). On the face of it, self-construction by
means of dissociation may seem a passable way
for immigrants seeking to convince the natives
that they ‘belong to’ Denmark. By listing the
negative stereotypes and distancing themselves
from them, they may seek to demonstrate their
knowledge of and respect for (supposedly) ideal
ways of being in their new country. If we follow
Bauman (1991), however, this kind of distanci-
ation cuts both ways. In the eyes of the majority,
the interviewees’ negative evaluation of ‘the
others’ may not seem very convincing. Owing to
the logic of assimilation an individual cannot
wash off a potential negative evaluation of him/
herself by imitating the codes of the majority. In
Bauman’s words (1991: 72), ‘the individual
stranger is cast metonymically as a microcosm
of the category at large’; ‘he carries so to speak
his category on his shoulders’. With every
degrading word this individual utters about
immigrants (in general), he/she certifies their
negative stereotypes; after all, being part of the
category, the immigrant must know what
he/she is talking about (cf. Fadel et al., 1999).
Furthermore, in the eyes of the natives the inter-
viewees’ dissociation from those they ‘naturally
belong to’ may seem treacherous or high-flown.
Although their codes of evaluation may be
classified as ‘correct’ (according to the negative
stereotypes), they are really not in a position to
adduce the arguments. From the point of view
of the majority, says Bauman (1991: 121), the
Järvinen: Negotiating Strangerhood 225
adaptation of a stranger is ‘merely a mask
behind which the unregenerate stranger
glowers’. Paradoxically then, the interviewees’
efforts to take over the value system of the
majority may have the effect of making them
seem more incongruous, ambivalent – and
perhaps even unreliable.
Hosts interviewing guests
The final empirical part of the article deals with
the interaction between the interviewers and
the interviewees. As already mentioned, the
homeless immigrants were often treated like
‘guests’ by the two native Danes interviewing
them. This casting of the interviews was not
planned in the study, nor was it deliberately
chosen by the interviewers, who throughout the
study took great care to treat the interviewees in
a non-prejudiced way. The host–guest inter-
action turned up in two kinds of situation. First,
and most importantly, it manifested in
informal parts of the interviews where the
question–answer sequences were abandoned for
a more spontaneous exchange of words – for
instance towards the end of the interviews.
Second, it occurred in some of the interviews
where the immigrants levelled criticism against
discriminatory practices in Denmark. Here the
interviewers unexpectedly took on the role of
defending ‘their country’. Although there are
hundreds of passages in the interviews where
the two interviewers did not question or take a
position on the narrators’ descriptions of dis-
crimination, prejudices or ‘bad treatment’, in
these cases they did.
From an objectivist point of view, dis-
cussion or argumentation between interviewers
and interviewees would probably be regarded as
methodologically problematic. The interviewers
would be criticized for stepping out from their
neutral role as listeners and ‘receivers of know-
ledge’, and for ‘intervening’ in the interviewees’
narrative. From the interactionist (and con-
structivist, cf. Holstein and Gubrium, 1995)
point of view chosen in this study, however, an
active involvement on the part of the inter-
viewers is not necessarily a problem, but rather
a section of the data to be analysed. If one
regards interviews not as recordings but as
interactive sites for meaning making, the inter-
viewers’ role cannot be totally passive and
neutral. Whether planned or not – and whether
we like it or not – the interviewees’ narratives
226 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)
are influenced by the social interaction going on
in the interview, and by the interviewers’ atti-
tudes towards and interpretation of the narra-
tives.
The following extract is an example of a
situation where the interviewer seems to act as
‘representative’ of her country, while the inter-
viewee, G (a 53-year-old man from Iran who
moved to Denmark in 1974) is positioned as a
‘guest’:
Interviewee: I’ve been living at this hostel for a year
. . . and I guess it’s a bit depressing to see that two
thirds of all the residents here are immigrants. . . .
Some of them . . . have been waiting for many years
to get their own place to live . . .
Interviewer: . . . But there are a lot of problems [with
homelessness].
Interviewee: There are a lot of problems, yes . . . but
it’s much more difficult if you are an immigrant . . .
because, I think there are, more or less . . . there are
some problems with racism at the accommodation
bureau. . . . They don’t follow the rules at this
bureau . . . I mean . . . some of us have had to wait
for years in order to find a place to live . . .
Interviewer: There may be some racism, yes . . . But
there are problems in other groups as well. . . .
Students, for example, who move to Copenhagen
from other parts of Denmark, cannot find
accommodation . . .
Interviewee: I know . . . But it’s far more difficult for
foreigners, far more difficult . . . and it’s not only in
Copenhagen, it’s all over the country. . . .
Interviewer: You’re probably right about that. . . .
What’s the reason for this, you believe?
Interviewee: Prejudice . . . I think people are misin-
formed about immigrants. They think they are
different. . . . They don’t know them . . . But we all
have the same needs, don’t we . . .?
Interviewer: But couldn’t you turn it around as well,
and say that it’s mutual . . . when people get to
know each other . . . that some of you foreigners
probably don’t know the Danes . . . that you don’t
quite know who they are . . .?
Although G has lived in Denmark almost as
long as the young interviewer – and been
married to a Danish woman for 18 years – he is
identified as a person who ‘probably doesn’t
understand the Danes’. For some reason (pre-
sumably because she is a student herself) the
interviewer starts to compare the housing
problems of immigrants with those of students.
In doing this she seems to call into question G’s
arguments about discrimination. After all,
‘students cannot find accommodation either’
and these problems are probably related to a
general housing shortage in Copenhagen. With
these comments she puts the interviewee in a
position where he is obliged to prove that his
situation (and that of other homeless immi-
grants) is ‘objectively’ reprehensible, i.e. worse
than the living conditions of certain groups of
the native majority in Denmark. Halfway
through this argumentation, however, she
seems to accept G’s accounts and asks him to
explain the discriminatory practice. Her
question turns the discussion into a negotiation
about reciprocal prejudice and misunderstand-
ings between the category of Danes (to which
the interviewer belongs) and the category of for-
eigners (in which the interviewee is placed).
Host–guest interaction of the more
‘informal’ kind (interaction not related to the
interview guide) can be found in almost all of
the 25 interviews. There is, for instance, the
question ‘How do you like Denmark/the Danes?’
or ‘What do you think of Denmark/the Danes?’
– asked by the interviewers in 8 out of 25 inter-
views (although the question was not included
in the interview guide). As pointed out by other
researchers, this question is very typical of
Danes conversing with tourists and other
visitors to the country. In interviews with
persons who have been living in Denmark for 14
years on average, however, the question seems
rather strange. To ask a person who moved to
Denmark in the 1970s and who today is a
Danish citizen ‘how he likes the Danes’ is clearly
to position him as a ‘stranger’. He is not, nor will
he ever be a true Dane; he represents an
outsider’s perspective – that of his ‘own culture’
or that of guests in general – and is therefore
supposed to bring forward his impressions of
Denmark/the Danes (understood as a totality
that he is not part of).
Another example of host–guest interaction
is centred around the question ‘Do you have any
intentions to return to your own country?’ –
asked in seven interviews, although this
question was not included in the interview
guide either. The following extract is taken from
the final lines of an interview with a 32-year-old
man, H, who moved to Denmark from Pakistan
14 years ago.
Interviewer: How do you like it here in Denmark?

Interviewee: It’s okay
Interviewer: It’s okay? What could be better?
Interviewee (laughing): The weather.
Interviewer: The weather could be better, yes. I agree
. . . How do you like the Danes?
Interviewee: They’re okay, they are nice people, I
have had some Danish friends . . .
. . . ..
Interviewer: And what about the future? Now that
you are homeless and cannot find yourself a job. . .?
Have you thought about returning to Pakistan, or
...
Interviewee: Hmm, I don’t know . . . But no, I don’t
think so, not now.
Interviewer: No. Despite everything, it’s better here
in Denmark, is it?
Interviewee (laughing): Yes.
The question ‘How do you like it here in
Denmark?’ seems unusually misplaced in this
interview. It is posed at the end of a long narra-
tive where H has answered questions about his
education (he has no education), his work
experience (he has never had a job), his housing
situation (he has never had his own place to live)
and his social network (he is extremely lonely).
Thus, there are many negative aspects the inter-
viewee could have brought up in answer to the
question about ‘his view of Denmark’. H does
not put forward any critique or complaints,
however; instead he answers: ‘it’s okay’ (quietly)
– an answer the interviewer seems to find
unsatisfactory. Obviously, in her position as host
chatting with a guest, she was angling for a
more conversational opinion of Denmark. At
this point, the interviewee quickly adapts to his
role as guest by starting to talk about the
weather, the most innocent subject of conversa-
tion a stranger can come up with.
In the other part of the extract, H’s stay in
Denmark is constructed as ‘an event in history’
(cf. Bauman above). Although the interviewee
has been living in Denmark since his late teens
and clearly indicates (earlier in the interview)
that he regards Denmark as ‘his own country’,
the interviewer finds it natural to ask him about
the possibility of his returning to Pakistan.
Being a guest with many difficulties he is obvi-
ously expected to choose, or at least to take into
consideration, the alternative of leaving
Denmark and returning ‘home’.
Järvinen: Negotiating Strangerhood 227
Conclusion
In this article I have analysed the self-
presentations of a group of homeless immi-
grants as narratives of persons ‘under
accusation’. Our interviewees have many lines
of negative evaluation to struggle with. They
have failed in their attempts to gain access to the
labour market, they have not succeeded in
finding a place to live, they are recipients of
social welfare, and they are living in institutions
for people with severe alcohol and drug
problems. Entangled within all of this are the
negative stereotypes of strangerhood. The inter-
viewees have to convince their surroundings
that they are ‘good guests’, i.e. that they cannot
be blamed for being ‘an economic burden’ on
their new countrymen, that they have struggled
to qualify for the labour market, that they are
more ‘adaptable’ than many other immigrants,
that they know the norms and values of the
majority and do their best to live up to them.
When do people turn to accounting, Austin
(1970: 176) asks, and he answers: ‘In general,
the situation is one where someone is accused of
having done something which is bad, wrong,
inept, unwelcome, or in some other of the
numerous possible ways untoward’. That immi-
grants in Denmark – especially immigrants from
non-Western countries – are indeed persons
‘under accusation’ was the starting-point for
this article. As Gaasholt and Togeby (1995)
show, about half of the native majority seem to
perceive foreigners as ‘unworthy encroachers’
in Denmark. Since the immigrants cannot be
‘sent home again’, however, it is their absolute
and unquestionable plight to do what they can
to integrate. Almost half of the respondents in
Gaasholt and Togeby’s (1995) study agreed with
the opinion that ‘foreigners should be entitled to
citizenship only after they have learned to
behave like Danes’ and with the statement ‘for-
eigners should not be allowed to practice and
proclaim their own religion in Denmark’. The
most negative declarations in Gaasholt and
Togeby’s (1995) study were directed at (a) immi-
grants from countries outside the Western
world, and above all (b) immigrants from
Muslim countries (ibid.). In other words, most of
our interviewees – being Muslims from the
Middle East and Africa, and being unemployed
and homeless social welfare recipients – have all
reason to feel ‘accused’. They belong to the
category of foreigners in Denmark for whom the
standard greeting, in Schierup’s (1993: 12)
228 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)
ironic formulation, could be: ‘How does it feel to
be a problem?’
Commenting upon xenophobia in
Denmark, Jørgensen and Bülow (1999: 96)
define ‘good strangers’ in two alternative ways.
Good strangers are persons who stay in
Denmark for a limited time and return home
when the situation in their own country is safe
(refugees) or when their labour is no longer
needed in their new country (unemployed immi-
grants). Or, alternatively, good strangers are self-
supporting persons who stay in Denmark and do
their utmost to assimilate and become like the
natives. Hence, strangers who do not return to
their country of origin are expected to demon-
strate that they are neither a ‘cultural threat’
nor an ‘economic burden’ on their hosts. Only
then can they be accepted – not as insiders, if we
follow Bauman (1991), but as ‘good guests’.
‘In order to know a man’, says Simmel
(1908b: 10), ‘we see him not in terms of his
pure individuality, but carried, lifted up or
lowered, by the general type under which we
classify him’. It is the category and not its indi-
vidual members that is set and seen as the
genuine carrier of disreputed characteristics.
According to Bauman (1991), the individuality
of a stranger under accusation always seems to
be dissolved in the negative category he/she
belongs to. Therefore, the attempts of strangers
to transform themselves via imitation often fail.
The harder they try to tune themselves in, ‘the
faster the fishing-line is receding’, writes
Bauman (ibid., p. 71). The more the strangers
struggle to qualify for membership, the harder
the demands their surroundings seem to make
on them. The more eagerly they strive to dis-
sociate themselves from ‘their own category’,
the more incongruent do their self-presen-
tations appear. Bauman understands the differ-
ence between strangers/outsiders and the
majority as ‘a difference beyond repair’ (ibid., p.
67). The strangers’ dilemma is that they have to
convince their surroundings that they have
acquired the quality of true belonging – a
quality which only fate can guarantee.
Bauman’s perspective on the stranger is
pessimistic and somewhat deterministic.
According to him, strangers are victims of forces
they cannot control; their position as outsiders
is a (more or less) permanent one, transfixed by
some of the fundamental distinctions of human
thought – the distinction between friends and
enemies, good and bad, subject and object.
Whatever the individual stranger chooses to do
with his/her life; whether he/she struggles to
accommodate, integrate – or, in Bauman’s
wording, assimilate – or to associate with other
strangers, the result is the same: the stranger
runs the risk of homelessness (physical or
psychological) and permanent exclusion.
When taking Bauman’s views on the
stranger as a starting-point for the article, I
selected a predominantly negative perspective
on the homeless immigrants’ situation and
possibilities in Denmark. This negativity,
however, is in full correspondence with the per-
vading tone in the narratives. The interviews
are filled with descriptions of futile struggle,
marginalization, discrimination and defeat.
Throughout the article, I have pointed out that
these narratives should be read not only as
representations of the interviewees’ negative
experiences, but also as presentations, i.e. as the
narrators’ preferred interpretations of their
present and past situation. In this double
reading of the narratives I have treated
Bauman’s stranger not as an actual position the
immigrants find themselves in, but as a stereo-
type – or a range of accusations – they strive to
defend themselves against.
Simmel’s stranger does not have to be inter-
preted as negatively as Bauman interprets the
figure. There are other readings that are far less
pessimistic. Schuetz (1944: 499) for instance
draws a clear dividing line between ‘the
stranger’ (an immigrant) who strives for a per-
manent attachment to his/her new country and
‘the visitor/guest’ who only intends to establish
a brief contact. Schuetz describes Simmel’s
stranger as a transitory position, a position
immigrants may leave immediately after they
have learned the language and customs of their
new country. When the adaptation of the
newcomer is over, the insiders’ way of life
‘becomes to him a matter of course . . . a shelter,
and a protection’, writes Schuetz (ibid., p. 507),
‘but then the stranger is no stranger anymore,
and his specific problems have been solved’.
Schuetz’s positive version of Simmel’s
stranger may certainly be applicable to some
groups of immigrants in Denmark: immigrants
from other Western countries, immigrants who
have succeeded in finding a job, immigrants
with an education that is acknowledged in
Denmark, immigrants who do not have to turn
to the social welfare office in the case of sudden
loss of accommodation. For the homeless immi-
grants in this study, however, strangerhood does
not seem to be a ‘transitory position’ (Schuetz,

1944: 409). After an average of 14 years in
Denmark, they still appear to be ‘border cases on
the fringes of their new society’ (Bauman,
2000: 176). Although most of them report that
they regard Denmark as their home country, the
position of ‘the good guest’ is probably the best
they can hope for. In this position they are toler-
ated by – but not equal with – their new coun-
trymen. They live their life at the mercy of their
hosts, excluded from the labour and housing
markets – and ‘locked up in the functional
enclave’ (Bauman, 1991: 67) defined by the
social security system.
Notes
1. Included in the group of interviewees are persons who have
come to Denmark as immigrants and also those who have
come as refugees. For the sake of simplicity, all interviewees
are referred to as ‘immigrants’.
2. The interviews conducted with the 25 men were semi-
structured life-history interviews. The interviewees were
contacted at five different institutions for homeless people in
Copenhagen. These institutions offer their clients accommo-
dation, food and social services. The criteria for selecting
interviewees at these institutions were: (a) the interviewees
had to be refugees or immigrants from non-Western
countries, and (b) they had to have sufficient command of
Danish (or alternatively English) to participate in the inter-
views. Most interviews (21) were conducted by two Danish
female research assistants, both fourth-year students of
sociology. I conducted four interviews myself.
3. Järvinen (1993, 1997).
4. According to Schwartz (1985: 34), immigrants are often
placed on a scale of hierarchy which measures their aptitude
for being integrated. Children are ideal on this scale, while
women and older men are seen as more difficult. In
Schwartz’s view, integration is a moral plight for immigrants:
‘resistance to integration is perceived as a stubborn mule-like
tradition that drags on the intentions of the liberal hosts’.
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230 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 46(3)

MARGARETHA JÄRVINEN is professor at the Department of Sociology, University of

Copenhagen and at the Danish National Institute of Social Research. Address: Department of
Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Linnésgade 22, DK-1361 Copenhagen K, Denmark [email:
margaretha.jarvinen@sociology.ku.dk]