Symbolic boundaries
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.”
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
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 derives.[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]
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.”[6]
See also
References
- ^ Lamont, Michele and 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
- ^ Lamont, Michele and Virag Molnar. 2002. "The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences" Annual Review of Sociology. 28:167-95
Further Reading
Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order (1987)
External links
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