Symbolic boundaries
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Symbolic boundaries are a theory of how people form social groups proposed by
Symbolic boundaries are a necessary but insufficient condition for social change. Only when symbolic boundaries are widely agreed upon can they take on a constraining character and become social boundaries.[1]
Durkheim
Émile Durkheim saw the symbolic boundary between sacred and profane as the most profound of all social facts, and the one from which lesser symbolic boundaries were derived.[2] Rituals - secular or religious - were for Durkheim the means by which groups maintained their symbolic/moral boundaries.[3]
Mary Douglas has subsequently emphasised the role of symbolic boundaries in organising experience, private and public, even in a secular society;[4] while other neo-Durkheimians highlight the role of deviancy as one of revealing and making plain the symbolic boundaries that uphold moral order, and of providing an opportunity for their communal reinforcement.[5] As Durkheim himself put it, "Crime brings together upright consciences and concentrates them...to talk of the event and wax indignant in common",[6] thereby reaffirming the collective barriers that have been breached.
Transgressing boundaries
Prejudice is often the result of crossing the symbolic boundaries that preserve a group's sense of itself - boundaries that as with a nation's frontiers may in fact be real as well as symbolic.[7] (The ancient ceremony of beating the bounds highlights that overlapping of real and symbolic bounds).[8] Salman Rushdie has emphasised the role of the migrant as a postmodern representative, transgressing symbolic boundaries, and (potentially at least) demonised by their upholders in the host nation as a result.[9]
Marjorie Garber has explored the role of the transvestite in crossing the symbolic boundaries of gender - something which she considered tended to challenge those of race as well.[10]
Symbolic/social boundaries
Symbolic boundaries are distinct from “social boundaries" that are "objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to an unequal distribution of resources… and social opportunities.”[1]
Play
Playing may be seen as a way of testing social boundaries - the unspoken frames set about social activities.[11] Humour too provides a way of illuminating, testing and perhaps also shifting symbolic boundaries.[12]
Cultural examples
- Michael Jackson, in Garber's opinion, erases and detraumatises not only the boundaries between male and female, youth and age, but also between black and white internalising cultural category crises.[13]
See also
References
- ^ Lamont, Micheleand Virag Molnar. 2002. "The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences" Annual Review of Sociology. 28:167-95
- ^ Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1971[1915]) p. 38
- ^ Kenneth Allen, Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory (2009) p. 120
- ^ Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (2002) p. 50-1
- ^ Annalee R. Ward, Mouse Morality (2002) p. 38
- ^ Quoted in Peter Worsley ed., The New Modern Sociology Readings (1991) p. 480
- ^ C. Cunningham, Prejudice (2000) p. 18
- ^ François Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World (1991) p. 13
- ^ Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (1991) p. 278-9 and p. 402
- ^ Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (1994) p. 125
- ^ Gerry Bloustien, Girl Making (2003) p. 117
- ^ P. Morey/A. Yaqin, Framing Muslims (2011) p. 199-204
- ^ Quoted in Phillips, p. 128
Further reading
- Michèle Lamont/Marcel Fournier eds., Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (1992)
- Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order (1987)