Symbolic boundaries
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Symbolic boundaries are a theory of how people form social groups proposed by cultural sociologists.
Symbolic boundaries are “conceptual distinctions made by social actors…that separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership.”Lamont, Michele and Virag Molnar. 2002. "The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences" Annual Review of Sociology. 28:167-95
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.
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.Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1971[1915]) p. 38
Rituals - secular or religious - were for Durkheim the means by which groups maintained their symbolic/moral boundaries.Kenneth Allen, Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory (2009) p. 120
Mary Douglas has subsequently emphasised the role of symbolic boundaries in organising experience, private and public, even in a secular society;Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (2002) p. 50-1 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.Annalee R. Ward, Mouse Morality (2002) p. 38 As Durkheim himself put it, "Crime brings together upright consciences and concentrates them...to talk of the event and wax indignant in common",Quoted in Peter Worsley ed., The New Modern Sociology Readings (1991) p. 480 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, like a nation's frontiers, may in fact be real as well as symbolic.C. Cunningham, Prejudice (2000) p. 18 (The ancient ceremony of beating the bounds highlights that overlapping of real and symbolic bounds.)François Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World (1991) p. 13 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.Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (1991) p. 278-9 and p. 402
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.Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (1994) p. 125
Symbolic/social boundaries
Play
Playing may be seen as a way of testing social boundaries - the unspoken frames set about social activities.Gerry Bloustien, Girl Making (2003) p. 117 Humour too provides a way of illuminating, testing and perhaps also shifting symbolic boundaries.P. Morey/A. Yaqin, Framing Muslims (2011) p. 199-204
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.Quoted in Phillips, p. 128
See also
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- Boundary-work
- Cognitive schemata
- Imagined communities
- Liminality
- Microsociology
- Moral panic
- Personal boundaries
- Social capital
- Social identity theory
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References
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Further reading
- Michèle Lamont/Marcel Fournier eds., Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (1992)
- Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order (1987)
External links
- [http://educ.jmu.edu/~brysonbp/symbound/papers2001/LamontEncyclo.html Symbolic boundaries (general)]