Transcript erikson_1 - Homework Market

Kai Erikson 1931---
• He’s going to try to test Durkheim’s notion
that deviant behavior is a natural and
beneficial part of social life.
• He chooses the path of letting groups in
question define what is deviance
• Deviance is “conduct which the people of a
group consider so dangerous or embarrassing
or irritating that they bring special sanctions to
bear against the persons who exhibit it.
Deviance is not a property inherent in any
particular kind of behavior; it is a property
conferred upon that behavior by the people who
come into direct or indirect contact with it. The
only way an observer can tell whether or not a
given style of behavior is deviant, then, is to
learn something about the standards of the
audience which responds to it.” 6
• It’s important to realize that people who
are labeled deviant are conventional in
most areas of their lives, most of the time
• “Labeling someone as deviant is an
intricate process of sifting out what may be
a fleeting departure or a few deviant
details scattered among a vast array of
entirely acceptable conduct.” 6
• When a person is labeled “deviant” the
label becomes a master status; it tends to
define his or her entire character and
position in society
• People tend to overlook all the ways in
which the “deviant” is still conventional
• How communities label people is an
important part of the social control process
• Studying how this process occurs is as
important to understanding deviance as is
focusing on the “deviant” act or person.
• When deciding whether to apply a deviant
label people take into account a number of
factors which are not immediately related
to the deviant act itself—
– social class,
– race,
– past record as an offender,
– the amount of remorse he manages to
convey, etc.
So Erikson asks:
• How does a community decide which of
these behavioral details are important
enough to merit special attention?
• And why, having made this decision does
it build institutions like prisons and
asylums to detain the persons who
perform them?
• To say we do it to protect ourselves from
harm is too simplistic.
• It’s hard to see how many of the behaviors
that have been labeled as deviant are a
threat to the group’s survival.
• Why does a community assign one form of
behavior rather than another to the deviant
class?
• Different criteria come into play on
different levels of interaction.
• He is focusing on communities, but the
theory should apply to all kinds of human
collectivity.
• Communities are boundary maintaining—both in
terms of geography and culture. Members tend
to confine themselves to a particular radius of
activity and to regard any conduct which drifts
outside that radius as somehow inappropriate or
immoral.
• People who live in a community cannot relate to
one another in a coherent way or gain a sense
of their own status as group members unless
they learn something about the boundaries of
the territory they occupy.
• The only material for marking boundaries is the
behavior of its members.
• The interactions which do the most effective job
of marking boundaries are those which take
place between deviant persons on one side and
official agents of the community on the other.
• When the community calls someone to account
for a “transgression” it is making a statement
about the nature and placement of its
boundaries.
• The importance of publicity in this is evident in
the amount of attention this gets in the news.
• Boundaries are never a fixed property of any
community; they are always shifting.
• They remain a meaningful point of reference
only so long as they are repeatedly tested by
persons on the fringes of the group and
repeatedly defended by persons chosen to
represent the group’s inner morality.
• If groups benefit from deviant behavior, does it
follow that they are organized in such a way as
to promote it?
• One piece of evidence to support this is the fact
that “deviant forms of conduct often seem to
derive nourishment from the very agencies
devised to inhibit them.” Prisons, mental
hospitals reinforce rather than “reform” deviant
behavior.
• We do not expect deviants to change and invest
little in rehabilitation.
• The decision to bring deviant sanctions is not a simple
act of censure; it is an intricate rite of transition.
• An important feature of our society is that these
ceremonies are almost irreversible.
– Most provisional roles conferred by society—student,
conscripted soldier—include some kind of terminal ceremony to
mark the individuals movement out of the role.
– But we don’t do this for deviants. So they often return home with
no proper license to resume a normal life. Nothing cancels out
the stigma or revokes the diagnosis pronounced upon him at the
time of his earlier commitment ceremony.
• Labeling of deviants becomes a self fulfilling
prophecy.
– People believe that deviants never change and treat
them accordingly—with suspicion, distrust, even fear.
– This treatment assures that deviants will not have
opportunities to resume a conventional life, because
conventional people shun them.
– So their limited options often lead to further deviant
behavior—possibly because only other “deviants”
accept them, and because this may be the only way
for the deviant and his community to agree on what
kind of person he is.
– Police policies are an example of this when
they use ex-convicts as a ready pool of
suspects;
– mental health workers when they remain alert
to the possibility of former patients suffering
relapses.
• Thus the self fulfilling prophecy gains
support by both the poorly informed
general public and the better informed
theories of most control agencies.
• This problem has been recognized in the West
for hundreds of years. This should give
credence to the idea that strong forces must be
at work to keep the flow of recruitment of
deviants intact.
• The focus of American sociology has been on
forces in society which seem to assert a
centralizing influence on human behavior,
gathering people together into groups and
bringing them under the jurisdiction of governing
principles called norms or standards.
• Thus they have looked for the uniformities,
rather than the divergencies of social life. How
are unity, shared norms, etc. created out of
diversity?
• We seem to assume the differences between
people can be taken for granted, but the
symmetry which human groups manage to
achieve must be explained by referring to the
molding influence of the social structure.
• But variety is also the product of social
structure.
• So maybe there are two strong competing
tendencies in society—forces which
promote conformity and those which
encourage diversity.
• If so, the deviant would be a natural
product of group differentiation.
Themes to be explored in his
historical analysis:
•
The relationship between a community’s boundaries
and the kind of deviance experienced.
We may expect that each community has its own
characteristic styles of deviant behavior. Societies that
value private property will have a lot of theft; societies
that value political orthodoxy will have a lot of dissent.
This occurs for two reasons:
•
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A community which feels jeopardized by a particular form of
behavior will impose more severe sanctions against it.
The very fact that a group expresses concern about a given
set of values often seems to draw a deviant response from
certain of its members.
• The deviant and the conformist are
creatures of the same culture, inventions
of the same imagination.
• If deviance and conformity are so much
alike, it is not surprising that deviant
behavior should seem to appear in a
community at exactly those points where it
is most feared.
•
The amount of deviation within a community is likely to
remain fairly constant over time.
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The number of deviancies that can come to attention are
limited by the kinds of equipment communities use to detect
and handle them.
The amount of money and personnel assigned by society to
do something about deviant behavior does not vary much over
time.
In this sense agencies of control seem to define their job as
keeping deviance within bounds rather than obliterating it
altogether. Generally speaking we invoke emergency
measures when the volume of deviance threatens to grow
beyond some level we have learned to consider “normal” but
we do not react with as much alarm when it stays within those
limits.
• He is suggesting that the community develops
its definition of deviance so that it encompasses
a range of behavior roughly equivalent to the
available space in its control apparatus.
• Thus when the community calibrates its control
machinery to handle a certain volume of
deviance, it tends to adjust its legal and
psychiatric definitions of the problem in such a
way that this volume is realized.
How does society handle its
deviant members?
•
Each has its own method for recruiting people to
deviant positions and deploying them across the range
of group space.
These he calls deployment patterns and there are
three types that seem to appear frequently:
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Periods of general license
Deviance regarded as “natural” for adolescents or young
people, but they are expected to change their ways when they
move through defined ceremonies to adulthood.
Special clubs or orders whose stated purpose is to infringe the
ordinary rules of the group in some prescribed manner
What these all have in common is not preventing
deviance but exercising control over it in various ways