Who Is My Neighbor?

Proximity

A greeting, a casual conversation, a request, or small act of spontaneous assistance are the start as we explore the terms and limits, the demands, costs, and rewards of encounters with neighbors. These initiate contact and normally elicit a response, however tentative or delayed. Once we address one another we have created an opening. We are no longer strangers having random encounters. In the jargon of sociology, words can act as a "relationship wedge":

Once an individual has extended to another enough consideration to hear him out for a moment, some kind of bond of mutual obligation is established ... once this new extended bond is granted, grudgingly or willingly, still further claims for social or material indulgence can be made.

We feel out our neighbor's potential for generosity or exploitation, and our own. We anticipate ongoing interactions — proximity guarantees it. Neighbors may be more or less familiar to us, but these are not chance encounters. We are in the background (or foreground) of one another's daily lives at home.

Who is my neighbor? The answer is more elusive and more interesting than first appears. The old English roots of the word ("neah" as in near and "gebur" as in dweller) and the medieval reference to farming strips of common land ("the man who tills the next piece of ground to mine") are historical reference points. But for us personally and individually, who counts as our neighbor is not automatic with proximity. Location is not enough. We don't assign the status neighbor to everyone residing in an officially designated neighborhood. We don't define our neighbors by police precincts, census tracts, school districts, mail carrier routes, or the historic and aesthetic contours of the place where we live. Nor is neighbor associated in our minds with sociologists' "spatial logic" and the social mechanisms that go by the name "neighborhood effects." For neighbor is a matter of both location and personal knowledge, of recognition. The people we identify as our neighbors are people we encounter regularly, even if the only acknowledgement is a nod or its opposite — a regular, rude display of disregard.

My neighborhood "is a known area of social space in which, to a greater or lesser degree, he or she knows himself or herself to be recognized. ... an area of public space in general ... in which little by little, a private, particularized space insinuates itself as a result of the practical, everyday use of this space."

We assign neighbors a spot on our personal map of the lay of the land around home. That doesn't extend to everyone living nearby, and the person residing closest to us may fall outside the domain of "actual contacts, connections, alliances." The designation is not inclusive, then. Neighbor applies to those close to home who emerge from the background to affect the quality of our lives. We elect the good neighbors with whom we have willing encounters, though bad neighbors, the worst, often elect us.

Sentimental representations of neighbor emphasize the sense of belonging to this place. The stock image is a small town with neighbors of long-standing. Harper Lee's Atticus Finch was

Maycomb County born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him ... The present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time.

That was rural Alabama in the 1930s. The longevity and familiarity built into the notion of neighbor are rare today. Within the limits of mobility and financial means, we resist randomness in electing where to live, still, the particular people next door fall to us without our choosing. Sorely or gratefully, we are aware of the accident of proximity. In Frost's poem, "Mending Wall," farmers must try to balance "the boulders that have fallen to each," and the phrase reminds us that who our neighbors are and the stuff of encounters is a matter of chance. There are exceptions of course, famous ones:

"It was a strange coincidence," I said.

"But it wasn't a coincidence at all."

"Why not?"

"Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay."

In sum, "who is my neighbor?" emerges from personal interactions in the course of life around home, and a map of our lay of the land, were we to draw one, would reflect this vantage point. We can conjure up this home-centric perspective by thinking about the territory we inhabited as children. Scout, the nine-year-old narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, can trace her boundaries: "Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south." Place matters, the physical location of home vis-à-vis neighbors, its distance or closeness.

Commonplace references to globalization, the valorization of cosmopolitanism, universal moral norms that often seem to float high off the surface of everyday relations, media that bring us images and voices from across the world, tempt us to understate the significance of place. We become accustomed to "neighbor" as a sort of shorthand for "humanity" when speaking about events that affect everyone. Specific effects of climate change are experienced locally, for example, but we know that the forces disturbing our habitat are everywhere and have global consequences. We are metaphorical neighbors in crisis. Science and culture and morality invite us to diminish the significance of home as a personal place and our actual, unmetaphorical neighbors.

Then there are virtual neighbors. "What about them?" I'm asked. The seemingly infinite universe of online sites is unbound by earthly geography, yet networking sites propose to deliver what the term "site" implies, a physical space in which to enact virtual life — intergalactic wars, medieval fantasy games, and neighborhoods. In Second Life, for example, where "living, not winning" is the object of the game, "you can live anywhere." Players are invited to "Get Settled," to build and furnish a dream house, and to "meet the neighbors." Scholars of Internet connectivity observe that simulated relations may be compensatory for the lack of relations in real life. For Molly, fifty-eight, a retired librarian who lives alone, her urban neighborhood "is not the kind of place people know each other. ... I don't even recognize the people in the Shaw's [a local supermarket chain] ... Online I have found some...