A sufficiently large group creates mobile private territory that suspends stranger-negotiation demands

Evidence

As the above passage suggests, in any particular public space when a group is sufficiently large, there is created for the individuals who make it up an area of private space. That is, a sufficiently large group provides for its members a kind of mobile “home territory” which they may move about with them from setting to setting. This is possible because a group is (by definition) made up of persons who know one another well and who identify with one another and who thus reciprocally ensure mutual protection and self-confirmation. … Any need for concern with establishing one’s identity to strangers or with ascertaining the identity of strangers is eliminated. Just as the rural villager, secure in his own territory and surrounded by his own people, may care nothing for the good opinions of persons in surrounding villages (and in fact, may even view a lack of approval on their part as indicative of the superiority of his own group), so too the member of a group in a public setting may be unconcerned about the responses which his behavior elicits from surrounding strangers. The group itself provides all the reassurance and support necessary. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 818

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes Simmel’s observation about small groups and intimacy scale, and the group-within-crowd immunity the reader is tracking across urban-anonymity sources. — connects to: A small organized mob can manufacture consent for the whole community — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 462; Protocol for entering others’ territory is to wait at the edge and ask permission — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 760
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘mobile home territory’ as a technical concept for how group membership overrides public-space stranger protocols.