Week 7
Boundaries

SOCI 229

Sakeef M. Karim
Amherst College


FAR RIGHT POPULISTS, TRUMPISM, AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF EXCLUSIONARY POLITICS

October 16th

A Quick Reminder


Response Memo Deadline

Your fifth response memo—which has to be between 250-400 words and posted on our Moodle Discussion Board—is due by 8:00 PM today.

A Quick Reminder

Midterm Paper

Midterm Paper Deadline(s)

Your midterm papers are due either—

  • 8:00 PM on Friday, October 25th
  • 8:00 PM on Friday, November 1st

The choice is yours.

A Quick Reminder

Midterm Paper

A module for the Midterm Paper is now available via Moodle.

The module will be open to submissions in 4 days.

A Quick Reminder

Midterm Paper

Please submit the paper as a .docx or .doc file.

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Conceptualizing Boundaries

What Are “Boundaries?”

In recent years, the idea of “boundaries” has come to play a key role in important new lines of scholarship across the social sciences. It has been associated with research on cognition, social and collective identity, commensuration, census categories, cultural capital, cultural membership, racial and ethnic group positioning, hegemonic masculinity, professional jurisdictions, scientific controversies, group rights, immigration, and contentious politics, to mention only some of the most visible examples.

(Lamont and Molnár 2002, 167, EMPHASIS ADDED)

What Are “Boundaries?”

Great! But what are boundaries?

What Are “Boundaries?”

Any takes?

What Are “Boundaries?”

Symbolic Boundaries

Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. They are tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality. Examining them allows us to capture the dynamic dimensions of social relations, as groups compete in the production, diffusion, and institutionalization of alternative systems and principles of classifications. Symbolic boundaries also separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership … They are an essential medium through which people acquire status and monopolize resources.

(Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168, EMPHASIS ADDED)

What Are “Boundaries?”

Social Boundaries

Social boundaries are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities. They are also revealed in stable behavioral patterns of association, as manifested in connubiality and commensality. Only when symbolic boundaries are widely agreed upon can they take on a constraining character and pattern social interaction in important ways. Moreover, only then can they become social boundaries, i.e., translate, for instance, into identifiable patterns of social exclusion or class and racial segregation.

(Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168–69, EMPHASIS ADDED)

What Are “Boundaries?”

[S]ymbolic and social boundaries should be viewed as equally real: The former exist at the intersubjective level whereas the latter manifest themselves as groupings of individuals. At the causal level, symbolic boundaries can be thought of as a necessary but insufficient condition for the existence of social boundaries.

(Lamont and Molnár 2002, 169, EMPHASIS ADDED)

What Are “Boundaries?”

Consider the process of collective identification.

What Are “Boundaries?”

Although collective identity formation is commonly conceptualized as a self-referential process, it usually also involves self-conscious efforts by members of a group to distinguish themselves from whom they are not, and hence it is better understood as a dialectical process whose key feature is the delineation of boundaries between “us” and “not us.”

(Zolberg and Woon 1999, 8, EMPHASIS ADDED)

What Are “Boundaries?”

Examples

Freshmen | Seniors

Amherst students | UMass students

Immigrants | Native-Born

Democrats | Republicans

Proletariat | Bourgeoisie

Tamils | Sinhalese

Palestinians | Israelis

Etc.

What Are “Boundaries?”

Examples

For a relevant paper, see Kuran (1998).

Group Discussion I

Boundaries and Democracy

How are symbolic and social boundaries related to
populism and democracy?

Boundary-Making

Boundaries in Flux

Crucially, boundaries are mutable and dynamic. Moreover, the distribution of people on either side of a boundary is not set in stone
(see Abascal 2020).

Boundaries in Flux

But how do these evolutionary shifts take root?

Let’s consider Zolberg and Woon’s (1999) influential typology.

Boundaries in Flux

There are three basic strategies that individuals and social groups can pursue to navigate—and perhaps remake—the social and symbolic boundaries that pervade greater society.

  1. Boundary Crossing

  2. Boundary Blurring

  3. Boundary Shifting

Boundaries in Flux

Individual boundary crossing … (occurs) without any change in the structure of the receiving society and leaving the distinction between insiders and outsiders unaffected. This is the commonplace process whereby immigrants change themselves by acquiring some of the attributes of the host identity. Examples include replacing their mother tongue with the host language, naturalization, and religious conversion.

(Zolberg and Woon 1999, 8, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Boundary blurring … (is) based on a broader definition of integration—one that affects the structure (i.e., the legal, social, and cultural boundaries) of the receiving society. Its core feature is the tolerance of multiple memberships and an overlapping of collective identities hitherto thought to be separate and mutually exclusive; it is the taming or domestication of what was once seen as “alien” differences. Examples include formal or informal public bilingualism, the possibility of dual nationality, and the institutionalization of immigrant faiths (including public recognition, where relevant).

(Zolberg and Woon 1999, 8–9, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Boundary shifting … denotes a reconstruction of a group’s identity, whereby the line differentiating members from nonmembers is relocated, either in the direction of inclusion or exclusion. This is a more comprehensive process, which brings about a more fundamental redefinition of the situation. By and large, the rhetoric of pro-immigration activists and of immigrants themselves can be read as arguments on behalf of the expansion of boundaries to encompass newcomers, while that of the anti-immigrant groups can be read as an attempt to redefine them restrictively in order to exclude them.

(Zolberg and Woon 1999, 9, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Boundary Crossing

Boundary Blurring

Boundary Shifting: Contraction

Boundary Shifting: Expansion

Further Reading

For a more sophisticated model, feel free to review the work of Wimmer (2008a, 2008b, 2013).

Group Discussion II

Constraints

Limits on Boundary-Making

Individuals and social groups are not free to pursue any boundary-making strategy they desire. There are constraints that powerfully bound the range of legitimate possibilities.

Endogenous Shocks

The accretion of individual-level boundary-making pursuits can, for instance, give rise to mass reactionary movements that
stifle evolutionary change.

Endogenous Shocks

Both boundary crossing and boundary shifting involve an in-between phase, occasionally fraught with awesome tension because it involves an “unnatural act”—the transformation of strangers into members, of the not us into part of us. Thus, an acceleration of boundary crossing and of boundary shifting can provoke negative reactions on the part of the hosts, leading to a crystallization of boundaries, the imposition of conditions that render crossing more difficult and blurring impossible, and perhaps even a redefinition of the host identity amounting to a shift of the boundary in a more exclusive direction.

(Zolberg and Woon 1999, 9, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Bright vs Blurred Boundaries

Boundaries vary widely in their brightness or rigidity.
This is another major constraint.

Bright vs Blurred Boundaries

Alba (2005) explores this property of boundaries through
the prism of ethnicity.

Bright vs Blurred Boundaries

Some boundaries are ‘bright’ — the distinction involved is unambiguous, so that individuals know at all times which side of the boundary they are on. Others are ‘blurry’, involving zones of self-presentation and social representation that allow for ambiguous locations with respect to the boundary. The nature of the minority-majority boundary depends on the way in which it has been institutionalized in different domains, some of them correlated with an ethnic distinction rather than constitutive of the distinction itself. In turn, the nature of the boundary affects fundamentally the processes by which individuals gain access to the opportunities afforded the majority.

(Alba 2005, 21–22, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Bright vs Blurred Boundaries

How ethnic individuals, parts of ethnic groups, or even entire groups narrow the social distance that separates them from the mainstream and its opportunities depends on the nature of the boundary. One case is that the boundary is bright and thus that there is no ambiguity in the location of individuals with respect to it. In this case, assimilation is likely to take the form of boundary crossing and will generally be experienced by the individual as something akin to a conversion … with all the social and psychic burdens a conversion process entails.

(Alba 2005, 24, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Bright vs Blurred Boundaries

The counterpoint to a bright boundary is one that is or can become blurred in the sense that, for some set of individuals … location with respect to the boundary is indeterminate or ambiguous. This could mean that individuals are seen as simultaneously members of the groups on both sides of the boundary or that sometimes they appear to be members of one and at other times members of the other. Under these circumstances, assimilation may be eased insofar as the individuals undergoing it do not sense a rupture between participation in mainstream institutions and familiar social and cultural practices and identities; and they are not forced to choose between the mainstream and their group of origin.

(Alba 2005, 25, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Bright vs Blurred Boundaries

But how can we know whether a boundary is blurred or blur-able? To answer this question, we must look to the way in which it is institutionalized, that is, the ‘web of interrelated’ normative patterns that govern the way that the boundary is manifested to social actors … These normative patterns, exemplified by widely shared and often taken-for-granted expectations … determine the social distance between majority and minority group(s) and the difficulties associated with bridging it.

(Alba 2005, 26, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Bright vs Blurred Boundaries


When this complex of distinctions is manifest in many domains (implying that participants enact it with regularity in their everyday lives) and is associated with salient asymmetries in social status and power, then it is unlikely to be blur-able; in the opposite case, it is already blurred or is at least blur-able.

(Alba 2005, 26–27, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Group Discussion III

Constrained Boundary-Making

How can we link this idea of constraint—i.e., that individuals’ boundary-making pursuits are limited by endogenous and exogenous forces—to last week’s discussion about the
politics of gender and sexuality?

Group Discussion IV

The Assigned Readings

Let’s briefly review the substantive arguments advanced in this week’s readings. In groups of 2-3, discuss—

  • What kinds of boundary-making strategies do White Americans pursue in the face of demographic threat (cf. Abascal 2020)?

  • What is the link between (country-level) income inequality, boundary-making and the radical right (cf. Lukk 2024)?

See You in 12 Days

References

Note: Scroll to access the entire bibliography

Abascal, Maria. 2020. “Contraction as a Response to Group Threat: Demographic Decline and Whites’ Classification of People Who Are Ambiguously White.” American Sociological Review 85 (2): 298–322. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122420905127.
Alba, Richard D. 2005. “Bright Vs. Blurred Boundaries: Second-Generation Assimilation and Exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (1): 20–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141987042000280003.
Kuran, Timur. 1998. “Ethnic Norms and Their Transformation Through Reputational Cascades.” The Journal of Legal Studies 27 (S2): 623–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/468038.
Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (Volume 28, 2002): 167–95. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141107.
Lukk, Martin. 2024. “Politics of Boundary Consolidation: Income Inequality, Ethnonationalism, and Radical-Right Voting.” Socius 10 (January): 23780231241251714. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231241251714.
Wimmer, Andreas. 2008a. “The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory.” American Journal of Sociology 113 (4): 970–1022. https://doi.org/10.1086/522803.
———. 2008b. “Elementary Strategies of Ethnic Boundary Making.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, September. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870801905612.
———. 2013. Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199927371.001.0001/acprof-9780199927371.
Zolberg, Aristide R., and Long Litt Woon. 1999. “Why Islam Is Like Spanish: Cultural Incorporation in Europe and the United States.” Politics & Society 27 (1): 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329299027001002.