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Symbolic boundaries are a theory of how people form social groups proposed bycultural sociologists.Symbolic boundaries are “conceptual distinctions made by social actors…that separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership.”[1]
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]
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 ofdeviancy as one of revealing and making plain the symbolic boundaries that uphold moral order, and of providing an opportunity for theircommunal 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.
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.[7] (The ancient ceremony ofbeating the bounds highlights that overlapping of real and symbolic bounds.)[8]Salman Rushdie has emphasised the role of the migrant as apostmodern 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 thetransvestite in crossing the symbolic boundaries of gender - something which she considered tended to challenge those of race as well.[10]
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]
Playing may be seen as a way of testing social boundaries - the unspokenframes set about social activities.[11] Humour too provides a way of illuminating, testing and perhaps also shifting symbolic boundaries.[12]