Will Buckingham
Will Buckingham is a novelist, non-fiction writer, educator, philosopher, and a lifelong traveler and explorer. He’s the co-founder and co-director of Wind & Bones, a community interest company exploring the intersection of writing and social change, and has run multiple activist writing projects in several countries.
Will’s newest book Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World weaves together anthropology, philosophy, and personal stories from all over the world. A vivid study of our relationship with strangers, it explores how we trust, why we fear, and the endless possibilities in connecting with the people around us.
Will’s newest book Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World weaves together anthropology, philosophy, and personal stories from all over the world. A vivid study of our relationship with strangers, it explores how we trust, why we fear, and the endless possibilities in connecting with the people around us.
Petkova: Will, you worked on Hello, Stranger in very interesting times. While you were writing about opening our doors and hearts to strangers, all around you walls were being built: Trump, the pandemic, Brexit. How did that feel?
Buckingham: It was when I was researching the book that I realized how much that was the case. There was obviously the Trump wall. But also how, for example, Europe has strengthened its borders: around the edges but also within. The building of walls is massively replicated all around the world, to an astonishing degree. And that shook me. But at the same time, it made me realize that there's something seriously awry in the way we imagine strangers in relation to ourselves, and the way we imagine risk and danger as well.
We assume that our border regimes are natural, we assume that it's always been like that. And this is quite curious, all these procedures for triaging who's permissible and who's not permissible, who's desirable and who's not the most desirable. As if this is a natural thing that has always been there. But it hasn't. It's incredibly recent.
Petkova: You begin Hello, Stranger with a personal tragedy, with your story of grief and loss. This is a very notable way to start a book about opening up and connecting to strangers.
Buckingham: The book starts in the hours after my partner Elee’s death: coming back from the hospice, letting myself into an empty home. At that point in my life, I did feel a kind of maximum isolation. And this is what grief is. Because all grief is, I think, individual. You're grieving for a unique specific relationship, and you're doing it as a unique specific person, and you're grieving for another unique specific person. So every grief is different and unique. And from that point of view, it is isolating.
Also, I was absolutely terrified of what would become of me at that point. I'd been together with Elee for 13 years and hadn't been able to think past her death. And then it happened. And the future was just utterly, utterly, utterly unthinkable. And that is terrifying. Unknowability is terrifying. And that’s a deeply human fear that we have, in the face of the unfamiliar.
But in the 24-48 hours after Elee died, I made a very conscious decision. The way we'd always chosen to live was by welcoming people into our home. And I made the conscious decision that this was the best possible response to that grief. And through that I began to see that grief is also very strongly shared. So it is both individual and it is shared. And it is a gateway to connecting.
Petkova: What is really striking in your story is how, after such a devastating loss, you approached the world with a lot of trust. Asylum seekers and refugees, through different circumstances, experience loss on a profound level as well and are forced to put their trust in strangers.
Buckingham: I think that is definitely true. And particularly, when you're exposed in one way or another, trust becomes absolutely essential. You need to trust to remain as safe as you possibly can. And if you're in a vulnerable position, then that's made even harder because the risks are greater. But the need to build connections of trust is greater as well. And that's a hugely difficult thing for refugees and asylum seekers, for people who are for one reason or another isolated, alone, disconnected from their home and their networks.
So how do you build trust? I think there are many ways people negotiate trust: through ritual, through joking, through play. And in the work that I've done working with refugee and asylum seeker writers, it's really interesting how much there is a sense of play, and curiosity, and fun. If you are, to some extent, vulnerable, exposed, at risk, connecting in those ways can be a very good way of sounding people out and building trust, as well as networks.
Petkova: The book has several fascinating chapters on how to build trust, through all the ways we negotiate being guests and hosts. You draw from personal experience, philosophers, anthropologists. Is there a unifying thread that you have found: something uniquely human that translates everywhere?
Buckingham: I think there probably is no one thing. I talk a lot about ritual in the book, because I think ritual is often seen as something dispensable or something that is only to do with wearing fancy hats and reciting ancient texts. But ritual underpins all human interactions.
One of the examples in the book is how to be a good guest in Mongolia back in the day. You step over the threshold with your right foot first. And before you get to the threshold, you call out 'Mind the dog!' Which protects you from the dog but it also is a way of alerting your hosts there’s a stranger there. And people are very careful about observing those codes and looking for any points at which people slip up, because that may be a sign somebody is not completely trustworthy.
Which is fine if we all share a single culture. But in most of my travels that took place in the book and, I’ll say, in a lot of refugee journeys, people are cutting across cultures.
I talk about ritual quite a lot as a dance. If you're in Mongolia, you're doing the same dance, but if I'm in Mongolia, then it's like you're pairing a Tango dancer with a Clog dancer. We both have our own ritual dances and we need to negotiate these connections, but we're doing totally different dances in totally different ways. And that can be perilous. But also, I think, there can often be a greater understanding when you're not doing quite the same dance. There's creativity and finding ways of connection. And there's a sense of absurd fun as well. What is this mashup of Tango and Clog dancing going to be? I think fun is underrated, generally, as an important element of negotiating connections with each other.
Petkova: A common stereotype against refugees and asylum seekers is that foreigners come to take away from us. But in Hello, Stranger there is a powerful quote by anthropologist Andrew Shryock that speaks to that fear and highlights the many examples of generosity you share in the book. Sovereignty is manifest in the ability to act as a host.
Buckingham: Alicia Stallings, the poet, talks about working in Greece with asylum seeker writers. They were pressing tea on her and she realized she had to accept because the ability to offer a cup of tea is a thing that returns us to our full humanity. And I think part of what it is to be human is to have that degree of moral agency to be able to act as host, to be able to give, to enter into those kinds of relationships through generosity and gift giving.
And that's why certain kinds of Aid programs from the classical model that is all about 'How can we give to these people in need?' are problematic. Because actually, the really humanizing question is 'What do you want to give?' How can you give if you were in the position to? How do you want to actively build your world?
Often we like to think in the popular discourse that people are inherently selfish. But I think, very, very strongly, that people have an inherent need to give to others, to do things for others, to be a benefit to others. That is one of the essential elements of human wellbeing, I think.
So the press narratives of asylum seekers as people who are simply making demands: not only is this wrong, there's a huge missed opportunity. Having worked with groups of people in the UK, I’ve seen they have extraordinary talents and gifts that they desperately want to give, but the UK asylum system isn't allowing them to do that. And that's an utter, utter, utter human tragedy.
Petkova: This reminds me of the part in the book about gift giving, how exchanging gifts is not an act of cancelling out debt but something much more nuanced.
Buckingham: I feel in the book I’m working against a set of quite outdated, popular ideas about who we are as human beings. One is the idea that gift giving is something that somehow boils down to a self-interested rigorous account keeping. And it's just simply not true.
There's a nice Burmese proverb that you can never repay in full the debt when somebody gives you a meal when you're hungry. You can give them a meal when they're hungry. But then you've got two non-repayable debts. And you can move it up a notch and everybody's life has been augmented but they don't enter it into an accounting system.
Petkova: You've traveled a lot and you have lived for long periods of time in different cultures. How do you, as a stranger, recognize the moment when you start to belong? Is there a moment when you feel the 'click'?
Buckingham: A big part of moving between cultures is simply learning whole sets of bizarre bureaucratic rules. A lot of particular concerns with identity and the way they play out have to do with bureaucracy. Our national myths, the imagined communities, and the sense of our national belonging, is all underwritten by bureaucratic mechanisms of the state. Passports are obviously signs of how you belong or don't belong. Filling in forms and being able to fill in the form in the right way, is a huge part of belonging but also is a way of separating out people into different kinds of belonging.
So bureaucracy plays a big part in how we think about identity and what it means to belong. And I think it goes right into our souls as well. It shapes and fashions how we see ourselves and how we see the world.
Petkova: How do you cross this border from being a stranger to belonging? In the book you say: 'What marks the passage from outsider to insider, stranger to intimate, is the possibility of a shared future.'
Buckingham: We often think of belonging retrospectively in terms of our past and our roots. So this is a part of it.
But back when I was a trainee anthropologist in Indonesia, what they said to me was 'You’ll be Tanimbarese if you do these few things: if you take up smoking, if you learn how to recite pantuns, which are a kind of little playful rhymed poems; and get married and have children. And we'll find you a wife.'
There is the being-able-to-fit-in-with-the-culture bits of that: smoking and the little poem thing. But there's also the investment in the future, which is getting married and having a child. And I feel that that sense of belonging as being tied with the future is something we don't think about enough.
Petkova: This is a powerful statement. Because there's a fear of losing identity when you start belonging somewhere else.
Buckingham: I think people belong in more ways, and more places, and to more frameworks, than they think they do. And you move from one to the other, and you don't notice how complex it is. So I don't think it's ever that straightforward.
Buckingham: It was when I was researching the book that I realized how much that was the case. There was obviously the Trump wall. But also how, for example, Europe has strengthened its borders: around the edges but also within. The building of walls is massively replicated all around the world, to an astonishing degree. And that shook me. But at the same time, it made me realize that there's something seriously awry in the way we imagine strangers in relation to ourselves, and the way we imagine risk and danger as well.
We assume that our border regimes are natural, we assume that it's always been like that. And this is quite curious, all these procedures for triaging who's permissible and who's not permissible, who's desirable and who's not the most desirable. As if this is a natural thing that has always been there. But it hasn't. It's incredibly recent.
Petkova: You begin Hello, Stranger with a personal tragedy, with your story of grief and loss. This is a very notable way to start a book about opening up and connecting to strangers.
Buckingham: The book starts in the hours after my partner Elee’s death: coming back from the hospice, letting myself into an empty home. At that point in my life, I did feel a kind of maximum isolation. And this is what grief is. Because all grief is, I think, individual. You're grieving for a unique specific relationship, and you're doing it as a unique specific person, and you're grieving for another unique specific person. So every grief is different and unique. And from that point of view, it is isolating.
Also, I was absolutely terrified of what would become of me at that point. I'd been together with Elee for 13 years and hadn't been able to think past her death. And then it happened. And the future was just utterly, utterly, utterly unthinkable. And that is terrifying. Unknowability is terrifying. And that’s a deeply human fear that we have, in the face of the unfamiliar.
But in the 24-48 hours after Elee died, I made a very conscious decision. The way we'd always chosen to live was by welcoming people into our home. And I made the conscious decision that this was the best possible response to that grief. And through that I began to see that grief is also very strongly shared. So it is both individual and it is shared. And it is a gateway to connecting.
Petkova: What is really striking in your story is how, after such a devastating loss, you approached the world with a lot of trust. Asylum seekers and refugees, through different circumstances, experience loss on a profound level as well and are forced to put their trust in strangers.
Buckingham: I think that is definitely true. And particularly, when you're exposed in one way or another, trust becomes absolutely essential. You need to trust to remain as safe as you possibly can. And if you're in a vulnerable position, then that's made even harder because the risks are greater. But the need to build connections of trust is greater as well. And that's a hugely difficult thing for refugees and asylum seekers, for people who are for one reason or another isolated, alone, disconnected from their home and their networks.
So how do you build trust? I think there are many ways people negotiate trust: through ritual, through joking, through play. And in the work that I've done working with refugee and asylum seeker writers, it's really interesting how much there is a sense of play, and curiosity, and fun. If you are, to some extent, vulnerable, exposed, at risk, connecting in those ways can be a very good way of sounding people out and building trust, as well as networks.
Petkova: The book has several fascinating chapters on how to build trust, through all the ways we negotiate being guests and hosts. You draw from personal experience, philosophers, anthropologists. Is there a unifying thread that you have found: something uniquely human that translates everywhere?
Buckingham: I think there probably is no one thing. I talk a lot about ritual in the book, because I think ritual is often seen as something dispensable or something that is only to do with wearing fancy hats and reciting ancient texts. But ritual underpins all human interactions.
One of the examples in the book is how to be a good guest in Mongolia back in the day. You step over the threshold with your right foot first. And before you get to the threshold, you call out 'Mind the dog!' Which protects you from the dog but it also is a way of alerting your hosts there’s a stranger there. And people are very careful about observing those codes and looking for any points at which people slip up, because that may be a sign somebody is not completely trustworthy.
Which is fine if we all share a single culture. But in most of my travels that took place in the book and, I’ll say, in a lot of refugee journeys, people are cutting across cultures.
I talk about ritual quite a lot as a dance. If you're in Mongolia, you're doing the same dance, but if I'm in Mongolia, then it's like you're pairing a Tango dancer with a Clog dancer. We both have our own ritual dances and we need to negotiate these connections, but we're doing totally different dances in totally different ways. And that can be perilous. But also, I think, there can often be a greater understanding when you're not doing quite the same dance. There's creativity and finding ways of connection. And there's a sense of absurd fun as well. What is this mashup of Tango and Clog dancing going to be? I think fun is underrated, generally, as an important element of negotiating connections with each other.
Petkova: A common stereotype against refugees and asylum seekers is that foreigners come to take away from us. But in Hello, Stranger there is a powerful quote by anthropologist Andrew Shryock that speaks to that fear and highlights the many examples of generosity you share in the book. Sovereignty is manifest in the ability to act as a host.
Buckingham: Alicia Stallings, the poet, talks about working in Greece with asylum seeker writers. They were pressing tea on her and she realized she had to accept because the ability to offer a cup of tea is a thing that returns us to our full humanity. And I think part of what it is to be human is to have that degree of moral agency to be able to act as host, to be able to give, to enter into those kinds of relationships through generosity and gift giving.
And that's why certain kinds of Aid programs from the classical model that is all about 'How can we give to these people in need?' are problematic. Because actually, the really humanizing question is 'What do you want to give?' How can you give if you were in the position to? How do you want to actively build your world?
Often we like to think in the popular discourse that people are inherently selfish. But I think, very, very strongly, that people have an inherent need to give to others, to do things for others, to be a benefit to others. That is one of the essential elements of human wellbeing, I think.
So the press narratives of asylum seekers as people who are simply making demands: not only is this wrong, there's a huge missed opportunity. Having worked with groups of people in the UK, I’ve seen they have extraordinary talents and gifts that they desperately want to give, but the UK asylum system isn't allowing them to do that. And that's an utter, utter, utter human tragedy.
Petkova: This reminds me of the part in the book about gift giving, how exchanging gifts is not an act of cancelling out debt but something much more nuanced.
Buckingham: I feel in the book I’m working against a set of quite outdated, popular ideas about who we are as human beings. One is the idea that gift giving is something that somehow boils down to a self-interested rigorous account keeping. And it's just simply not true.
There's a nice Burmese proverb that you can never repay in full the debt when somebody gives you a meal when you're hungry. You can give them a meal when they're hungry. But then you've got two non-repayable debts. And you can move it up a notch and everybody's life has been augmented but they don't enter it into an accounting system.
Petkova: You've traveled a lot and you have lived for long periods of time in different cultures. How do you, as a stranger, recognize the moment when you start to belong? Is there a moment when you feel the 'click'?
Buckingham: A big part of moving between cultures is simply learning whole sets of bizarre bureaucratic rules. A lot of particular concerns with identity and the way they play out have to do with bureaucracy. Our national myths, the imagined communities, and the sense of our national belonging, is all underwritten by bureaucratic mechanisms of the state. Passports are obviously signs of how you belong or don't belong. Filling in forms and being able to fill in the form in the right way, is a huge part of belonging but also is a way of separating out people into different kinds of belonging.
So bureaucracy plays a big part in how we think about identity and what it means to belong. And I think it goes right into our souls as well. It shapes and fashions how we see ourselves and how we see the world.
Petkova: How do you cross this border from being a stranger to belonging? In the book you say: 'What marks the passage from outsider to insider, stranger to intimate, is the possibility of a shared future.'
Buckingham: We often think of belonging retrospectively in terms of our past and our roots. So this is a part of it.
But back when I was a trainee anthropologist in Indonesia, what they said to me was 'You’ll be Tanimbarese if you do these few things: if you take up smoking, if you learn how to recite pantuns, which are a kind of little playful rhymed poems; and get married and have children. And we'll find you a wife.'
There is the being-able-to-fit-in-with-the-culture bits of that: smoking and the little poem thing. But there's also the investment in the future, which is getting married and having a child. And I feel that that sense of belonging as being tied with the future is something we don't think about enough.
Petkova: This is a powerful statement. Because there's a fear of losing identity when you start belonging somewhere else.
Buckingham: I think people belong in more ways, and more places, and to more frameworks, than they think they do. And you move from one to the other, and you don't notice how complex it is. So I don't think it's ever that straightforward.
Martina Petkova is a Bulgarian writer with a lifelong passion for equality and social justice. She’s worked on projects for refugee inclusion, non-formal education of children living in poverty and in institutions, and women with disabilities. In her writing, Martina explores the topics of racism, scapegoating, and mental health.
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