Strangers to the Shore

To understand intergroup relations, we must recognize that differences among various peoples cause each group to look on other groups as strangers. Among isolated peoples, the arrival of a stranger has always been a momentous occasion. Reactions might range from warm hospitality to conciliatory or protective ceremonies to hostile acts. Numerous studies have explored the extent to which a person likes others because of similar attitudes, values, beliefs, social status, or physical appearance. One excellent technique for evaluating how perceptions of similarity attract closer interaction patterns consists of ranking social distance.

People perceive strangers primarily through categoric knowing which is the classification of others on the basis of limited information obtained visually and perhaps verbally. People make judgments and generalizations on the basis of scanty information, confusing an individual's characteristics with typical group member characteristics. Georg Simmel theorized that strangers represent both nearness, because they are physically close, and remoteness, because they react differently to the immediate situation and have different values and ways of doing things. The stranger is both inside and outside. Simmel suggested that strangers have a higher degree of objectivity about the natives because stranger's geographic mobility reflects mobility in their minds. Simmel approached the role of the stranger through an analysis of the funeral structures of life. Alfred Schutz analyzed the stranger as lacking "intersubjective understanding." He meant that people from the same social world mutually know the language, customs, beliefs, symbols, and everyday behavior patterns that the stranger usually does not. Strangers experience a lack of historicity, a lack of the shared memory of those with whom they live. Migration is the general term that refers to the movement of people into and out of a specified area, which could either