ABSTRACT
This chapter describes five overarching principles that research has unearthed and detail a number of the uses to which they are put and explores some of the complexities that an appreciation of historical and cultural variation brings to our understanding of these principles. The five overarching principles are cooperative motility, civil inattention, audience role prominence, restrained helpfulness, and civility toward diversity. The chapter addresses misunderstandings about the normative system that ensue when researchers confuse public realm spaces with parochial realm spaces and misread their own data. Strangers may use their understandings of the "legal" system of the public realm, then, not only to deal deferentially with one another. Finally, the public realm's governing principles may be employed to express, to create, to re-create, to fabricate, or to refashion societal or regional or local systems of equality and inequality. Many occasions to confront the variations that history and culture bring to the public realm.
