Strayness

Superfluous preamble

Words can refer to entities or relationships. Different kinds of words typically refer to either of them. Thus, nouns typically refer to entities (including people, objects and ideas) while verbs, adjectives and prepositions tend to refer to relationships. This correspondence, however, is not perfect.

For instance, nominals derived from action verbs maintain the reference to the action. Consider, for example, the pair to destroy and destruction. The nominal form promotes an interpretation whereby the action is construed as some sort of entity. Nonetheless, the original meaning — x destroys y — remains, although inside a conceptual wrap imposed by the nominalization.

A similar situation can be observed in the case of the word strayness, which derives from the adjective stray, which in turn derives from the homonym verb.

Stray (adj.) is a quality, which, within the entity-relationship dichotomy previously introduced fits in the latter category. Concretely, it relates entities (typically animals) to the concept of “not being where one belongs”, but also “lacking a home”, “wandering aimlessly”, and “some kind of permanent (and stable) randomness”.

Strayness is an abstraction of the quality expressed by stray. It refers to the relationship between a certain entity (again, typically an animal) and the many related meanings mentioned above, which we will unfairly reduce, for the sake of simplicity, to “belonging nowhere”.

Belonging and places

Strayness is related to the concept of belonging and the idea that everything and everyone has an appropriate place — both in the physical and mental dimensions.

I do not wish to focus here on the subjective properties of belonging, i.e., how agents experience being part of a community and what are the elements that constitute this experience and define the mental concept of belonging phenomenologically. Instead, I am interested in concept of belonging seen from an external perspective. For this, I raise the questions: What do we mean when we say that a thing belongs to a certain place? And how is this relationship of belonging established?

I believe that, ultimately, the idea of entities having an assigned or appropriate place derives from the concepts of order and identity. In this sense, every time one says anything about belonging, there is inevitably a tacit deonticity (i.e., a prescriptive sense) implied. This is evident in some cases, for example, when the belonging is established by the speaker him/herself, as in we belong together. In other cases, the belonging appears to be purely descriptive, such as when someone says this leaf belongs to that tree. However, an order of things, or a structure, is still implied. Could this be due to the human tendency to see function-structures everywhere?

Any order that implies possession relationships requires abstract thinking and the ability to grasp social facts (and function-structures). Moreover, to the extent that possession goes beyond physical possession, it requires the ability to comprehend institutions. Indeed, possession tends to be regulated institutionally.

Parenthood is an institution that involves the possession of children. The possession of land is regulated by a complex series of procedures, typically brokered by governments. Friendship and any other sort of interpersonal relationship is also an institution to the extent that it is an established practice within a society; an established practice that comes with rights and obligations, and whose fulfillment will be enforced by the members of the society themselves. By doing this, they keep the social order and maintain a structure that, in exchange, provides them with a sense of security. A society without institutions is simply not a society, and no one can really knows what is going on.

At the same time, societies are not just a big unordered blob of people. They subdivide. Within a society, people form smaller groups according to their kin, their personal interests, or many other reasons. Both the groups themselves and the tendency to form groups are institutions.

Subjectively, people feel attached to these groups, and their belonging becomes part of their identity. Most people feel attached to their family, and the things they learned from their elders are an important part of who they are.

As any other institution, belonging is maintained through costume. In some cases, the sense of belonging and group cohesion is created and maintained through material rituals. Thus, supporters of sports team group together before a match wearing the colors of the team to sing chants.

But, foremost, belonging is maintained simply by prolonged proximity. Families are kept together by being together. And this seems to be part of our biology. Were humans like other mammals that abandon their offspring just a few days or weeks after their births, the institution of family might not even exist.

Stray dogs

Let us now return to the concept of strayness.

Not everyone has a place in the world. Stray dogs are a perfect example of this. A stray dog can be a lost dog (i.e., a dog that went astray) or a dog that has simply never belonged anywhere and to anyone.

Is a stray dog a nomad dog? Not quite. A nomad is someone whose lifestyle is based on moving from one place to another, never permanently establishing anywhere. A nomadic lifestyle, however, implies some degree of intentionality. On the contrary, stray dogs are not stray by choice, instead, they have been forced into their condition. Strayness is an involuntary identity trait.

However, both strays and nomads tend to be regarded negatively by others. Excluding the eventual romanticization of strayness/nomadic lifestyle by the privileged classes (but what isn’t romanticized in this world, really?), both are seen as unwanted by the society as they do not fit within the constrictive system of labels that it imposes on individuals.

Strays and nomads lack a master and a proper private space; as a result, they tend to temporarily appropriate public spaces. This transgresses social order; specifically, it transgresses the notion of private property and private life. Hence, it is a way of being that goes against social hygiene.

I believe that the definition of ‘dirt’ provided by Baumaun in his article Dreams of purity can be productively applied to out-of-place beings such as stray dogs:

It is not the intrinsic quality of things which makes them into ‘dirt’, but solely their location; more precisely, their location in the order of things envisaged by the purity seekers.

There are, however, things for which the ‘right place’ has not been reserved in any fragment of man-made order. They are ‘out of place’ everywhere. […] More often that not these are mobile things, things that would not stick to the assigned place, that change places on their own accord. The trouble with such things is that they will cross boundaries whether invited or not.

Hence, strayness appears to be, at least at first sight, intrinsically opposed to social cohesion and order. Indeed, if every member of the society lacked a home or a place within it, one could not talk of a society per se, but an unordered and dissociated group of individuals who share a space (but isn’t this what contemporary society feels like anyways?).

And is there a solace for strays? When (if ever) does strayness cease to be a burden? Is it when “belonging nowhere” is accepted and embraced and consciously integrated into one’s identity?

Along these lines, one could argue that strayness means not belonging nowhere but belonging anywhere. Indeed, stray dogs live anywhere and everywhere. They own the streets. Strayness grants certain liberties that other do not have. This is, however, at the expense of lacking a positively-defined identity. By this I mean that, in the end, being stray is defined by the lack of a permanent place, i.e., it is defined negatively. Is strayness, then, an institution?

And so stray dogs have access to spaces that are forbidden to the rest of the population. Lacking a properly private space, they turn public spaces into private. Any space that can provide some degree of shelter looks like home when you are astray, just like clouds tend to resemble food when you are hungry, and just like strangers appear to be friends when you are alone.

Stray dogs group together. They see themselves reflected on the others, and they serve as mirrors where the others can see themselves reflected. In a pack, stray dogs can be alone together.

This can also be observed in humans. Homeless people, for instance, group together simply because they share this unfortunate condition of lacking a home, and not because they enjoy spending time with one another. In some way, they also group together to increase their chance of survival. Similarly, in “ex-pat’ communities, the only thing that members have in common is not being from the host country. In a way, they are all stray dogs looking for connections and companionship in an unknown land.

And as the barrier dividing the private and the public space vanishes for strays, the whole known world becomes home and, at the same time, home becomes ever more unpredictable. The outerness of the outside world inescapably invades their private world.

Stray dogs long a home, while always being at home. They may get attached easily, but they can also never trust anyone fully but themselves. Stray dogs belong anywhere, but nothing belongs to them. They wish to belong, yet no one wishes them.

Would you give up your place in society for a chance to having your identity dissolved, suddenly finding yourself belonging nowhere and owning nothing (but also not owing anything to no one)?

Final remark

In outer space — where nothing ever falls in place — we are all stray dogs.

It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here
And I’m most obliged to you for making it clear
That I’m not here
(Pink Floyd: Jugband Blues)