Wayward Puritans

Discussion of Durkheim's view of deviance. That it is normal and even necessary in society. It gives non-deviants something to bind together in opposition of.

Deviant individuals are difficult if not impossible to identify. There are no "... natural boundaries" to tell us who or what we should designate as deviant(Erikson, 2005, p.5). This problem has made it difficult for sociologists to study this issue so they began to let the societies in which they studied deviance to define it for them. Erikson tells us that "[f]rom a sociological standpoint, 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 ... contact with it" (2005, p.6). So to understand deviance within a society you must first understand that society and their standards. Why do they label some things as deviant and others as normal and accepted?

We all know and recognize that communities have physical boundaries, what we aren't as aware of automatically is that they also have strict outlines about what kind of behavior is acceptable and what is not.