City dwellers are taught from birth to code strangers by appearance, place, and behavior

Evidence

How does the city dweller know what the information he gathers as he moves through urban public space means? How does he learn to connect certain appearances, locations, or behavior with certain categories of being? The answer is both simple and profound. Like all humans, he is taught. From the moment of birth, he is bombarded with instructions. Breasts mean food. Little girls wear dresses. Big people are adults. Black people are poor (or happy or revolutionaries, or whatever). White people are rich (or dishonest or bosses, or whatever). Nice people don’t go there. Nice girls don’t do that. Only the best people come to this place. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 549

Categorization

• XREF: This teaching-of-appearance-coding connects directly to Lofland’s own earlier chapters on appearential order and to Goffman’s work on how we read strangers’ appearances.
• DEFINE: Establishes that the ‘coding schemes’ are learned cultural instruction, not innate — a foundational premise for the whole learning chapter.