Cultural premises determine whether a stranger is even seen as human.

Evidence

After the storm the people went down to the beach and found, washed up by the waves and almost dead, a large white monkey of unknown species. The religious experts explained that this monkey had been a member of the court of Beroena, the God of the Sea, and that for some offense the monkey had been cast out by the god whose anger was expressed in the storm. The Rajah gave orders that the white monkey from the sea should be kept alive, chained to a certain stone. This was done. Doctor Stutterheim told me that he had seen the stone and that, roughly scratched on it in Latin, Dutch, and English were the name of a man and a statement of his shipwreck. Apparently this trilingual sailor never established verbal communication with his captors. He was surely unaware of the premises in their minds which labeled him as a white monkey and therefore not a potential recipient of verbal messages: it probably never occurred to him that they could doubt his humanity. He may have doubted theirs. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 49

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete anchor for the book’s founding insight: strangers are meaning-categories first, individuals second.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated purpose — here a stranger’s humanity is entirely a function of the locals’ category system, the extreme pole of Lofland’s stranger-ordering thesis. — connects to: Cross-cultural encounters reveal that one’s own life-world is not beyond question — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 428