Pre-urban groups transformed strangers through interrogation, ritual, or hospitality.

Evidence

But they have still required that the stranger somehow be transformed. Direct interrogation, utilized by the mountaineers as well as the Aborigines, is one way. One transforms the stranger by simply asking him straight out for biographical information. More subtle means include long ceremonies, “rites of passage” as Van Gennep called them, through which the strange other can be observed, conversed with in ritual terms, and gradually incorporated into the group as a familiar, known object. More immediate hospitality will also do the trick. Offer a stranger the comforts of one’s home and one acquires the right and the opportunity to “find out” about him, to discover “who he is” in the personal sense. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 128

Categorization

• XREF: Van Gennep’s rites of passage here map onto the reader’s interest in how categories replace personal knowledge — ritual transformation is the pre-urban ancestor of urban coding.