Urbanites normalize oddity rather than censure it when escape is impossible

Evidence

We have seen in Chapter Seven and in this chapter that persons who behave oddly in the city are likely to be avoided. However, as we also have seen, in situations where avoidance is impossible, normalization is the rule. In the following example, note how hard the more conventional urbanites must work to keep the eccentric from suspecting that her behavior is seen as even slightly odd: A working class woman, late forties or early fifties, is seated at one of the horseshoe counters in a large coffee shop in a bus depot. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1021

Categorization

• XREF: Normalization as the city’s counterweight to civil inattention — the strategy you can’t deploy when avoidance fails, tying back to Lofland’s core stranger-ordering system.