If wandering, considered as a state of detachment from every given point in space, is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociological form of “the stranger” presents the synthesis, as it were, of both of these properties. … The stranger will thus not be considered here in the usual sense of the term, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man who comes today and stays tomorrow—the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a certain spatial circle—or within a group whose boundaries are analogous to spatial boundaries—but his position within it is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it.

DEFINE: Distinguishes the sociologically formal stranger from the mere wanderer: one who stays but retains the potential for mobility and brings non-indigenous qualities into the group.

DEFINE: Georg Simmel redefines the sociological stranger not as a temporary wanderer but as one who stays while preserving the freedom of coming and going.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 387