A more paced regulation of contact with strangers characterized various groups of Australian Aborigines (Peterson, 1975). Typically, messengers or visitors remained at the fringes of an encampment or community until an escort was sent out to receive them. In some instances the escort presented the visitor with a fire stick to symbolize a welcome, or there was a brief symbolic feinting and clash of shields and weapons to welcome the visitor. Thus, both visitors and occupants had a system to regulate interaction in advance of its occurrence, whereas the Lapps and Pygmies had to alter the pace of interaction following its initiation.
Another type of relationship deals with interfamily contacts among neighbors or communal residents. For example, Anderson (1972) did a case study of Chinese families in Malaysia who lived in communal dwellings. While there was considerable contact and occasional tension, Anderson noted that families maintained separation by means of several cultural practices. These included strong taboos for entering (or even looking into) other families’ sleeping areas, separate family storage areas and family stoves in various parts of the communal kitchen, clear status relationships among the elderly and young and between men and women, freedom for anyone to discipline children (with particular emphasis
on punishment for invasions of privacy), and the maintenance of neutral and unemotional relationships with people from other families.
Other instances of interfamily regulation of contact appear in the ethnographic descriptions presented earlier in this article. For example, Mehinacu families lived in communal dwellings but avoided entering others’ areas; they also erected partitions during periods of seclusion (Gregor, 1970; Roberts & Gregor, 1971). The Ngadju Dayaks of Borneo (Miles, 1970) resided in multifamily units but maintained separate sleeping areas and possessions, ate at different times, and had strong norms against intrusion.
In summary, an analysis of social relationships among strangers, acquaintances, or different family units suggests that when social contact is high or when certain interactions are forced, compensatory behavioral mechanisms are available that permit people to regulate their social contacts, to be open or closed as circumstances warrant. Again, these illustrations are compatible with our concept of privacy as a culturally pervasive dialectic process, with differences among cultures revolving around the specific mechanisms used to achieve desired levels of privacy.