American Southern Mountaineers give strangers full, deliberate attention unlike city dwellers

Evidence

As you approach a cross-roads store, every idler pricks up to instant attention. Your presence is detected from every neighboring cabin and cornfield. Long John quits his plowing, Red John drops his axe, Sick John … pops out of bed and Lyin’ John … grabs his hat with “I jes’ got ter know who that feller is!” Then all Johns descend their several paths, to congregate at the store and estimate the stranger as though he were so many board-feet of lumber in the tree or so many pounds of beef on the hoof. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 55

Categorization

• XREF: The sharpest folk illustration of Lofland’s core dichotomy: small-community absorption versus urban civil inattention; anchoring material for the reader’s analytic frame.