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((footnote))
i. It is remarkable that those who live around the social sciences have so quickly
become comfortable in using the term `deviant', as if those to whom the term is
applied have enough in common so that significant things can be said about them as a
whole. Just as there are iatrogenic dis-orders caused by the work that physicians do
(which then gives them more work to do), so there are categories of persons who are
created by students of society, and then studied by them.
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such as to withstand restructuring by virtue of the deviation. (When the group is large, however,
the eminent may find they must fully conform in all visible ways.) The member who is defined
as physically sick is in somewhat the same situation; if he properly handles his sick status he can
deviate from performance standards without this being taken as a reflection on him or on his
relation to the group. The eminent and the sick can be free, then, to be deviators precisely
because their deviation can be fully discounted, leading to no re-identification; their special
situation demonstrates they are anything but deviants in the common understanding of that
term.2
In many close-knit groups and communities there are in-stances of a member who deviates,
whether in deed or in the attributes he possesses, or both, and in consequence comes to play a
special role, becoming a symbol of the group and a performer of certain clownish functions, even
while he is denied the respect accorded full-fledged members.' Characteristically this individual
ceases to play the social distance game, approaching and being approached at will. He is often
the focus of attention that welds others into a participating circle around him, even while it strips
him of some of the status of a participant. He serves as a mascot for the group although qualified
in certain ways to be a normal member of it. The village idiot, the smil-town drunk and the
platoon clown are traditional examples; the fraternity fat boy is another. One would expect to
find only one of such persons to a group, since one is all that is needed, further instances merely
adding to the burden of the community. He might be
((footnote))
2.The complex relation of a deviator to his group has recently been reconsidered by L.
Coser, `Some Functions of Deviant Behavior and Normative Flexibility', American Joss of
Sociology, LXVIII (1962),
1qs-181.
3.On these and other functions of the deviant, see R. Dentler and K. Erickson, `The
Functions of Deviance in Groups', Social Problems, VII (1959), 98-10-
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called an in-group deviant to remind one that he is deviant relative to a concrete group, not
merely norms, and that his intensive if ambivalent inclusion in the group distinguishes him from
another well-known type of deviator the group isolate who is constantly in social situations
with the group but is not one of their own. (When the in-group deviant is attacked by outsiders,
the group may well rally in support; when the group isolate is attacked, he is more likely to have
to do his own fighting.) Note that all the types of deviators considered here are fixed within a
circle in which extensive biographical information about them a full personal identification
is widespread.
It has been suggested that in smallish groups the in-group deviant can be distinguished from
other deviators, for unlike these others he is in a skewed relation to the moral life that is
sustained on the average by the members. Indeed, if one did want to consider other social roles
along with the in-group deviant, it might be useful to turn to those roles whose per-formers are
out of step with ordinary morality, although not known as deviators. As one shifts the `system of
reference' from small family-like groups to ones which can support greater role specialization,
two such roles become evident. One of these morally mis-aligning roles is that of minister or
priest, the performer being obliged to symbolize the righteous life and live it more than is
normal; the other is that of law officer, the performer having to make a daily routine out of other
people's appreciable infractions.4
When the `system of reference' is further shifted from a face-to-face local community to the
wider world of metropolitan settlements (and their affiliated areas, resort and residential), a
corresponding shift is found in the variety and meaning of deviations.
((footnote))
4. This theme is developed in H. Becker, Outsiders, New York, Free Press of Glencoe, 163,
pp. 145-63.
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One such deviation is important here, the kind presented by individuals who are seen as
declining voluntarily and openly to accept the social place accorded them, and who act
irregularly and somewhat rebelliously in connexion with our basic institutions5 the amity,the
age-grade system, the stereotyped role-division between the sexes, legitimate full-time
employment involving maintenance of a single govern-mentally ratified personal identity, and
segregation by class and race. These are the `disaffiliates'. Those who take this stand on their
own and by themselves might be called eccentrics or `characters'. Those whose activity is
collective and focused within some building or place (and often upon a - special activity) may be
called cultists. Those who come together into a sub-community or milieu may be called social
deviants, and their corporate life a deviant community. 6 They constitute a special type, but only
one type, of deviator.
If there is to be a field of inquiry called ` deviance', it is social deviants as here defined that
would presumably constitute its core. Prostitutes, drug addicts, delinquents, criminals, jazz
musicians, bohemian%, gypsies, carnival workers, hobos, winos, show people, full-time
gamblers, beach dwellers, homosexuals,7 and the urban unrepentant poor these would
((footnote))
5.A general point suggested to me by Dorothy Smith.
6.The term `deviant community' is not entirely satisfactory because it obscures two issues:
whether or not the community is peculiar according to structural standards derived from an
analysis of the make-up of ordinary communities; and whether or not the members of the
community are social deviants. A one-sexed army post in an unpopulated territory is a
deviant community in the first sense, but not necessarily a community of social deviants.
7.The term `homosexual' is generally used to refer to anyone who en-gages in overt sexual
practices with a member of his own sex, the practice being called `homosexuality '. This
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