The changing character of consensus. Cultural mechanisms behind the making and unmaking of boundaries

Demski, Dagnosław

doi:0137-4079

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Title: The changing character of consensus. Cultural mechanisms behind the making and unmaking of boundaries

Abstract:

This paper focuses on the problem of the phenomena of the making and unmaking of boundaries. Apart from the depiction of several types and functions of a border in a general view, the paper tries to analyze what particular mechanism lies behind this social fact. Such preliminary examination results in that culture can be seen as a means of embedding and making visible the deeper cleavages in any social field. In this sense each culture creates its own time-bound selecting mechanism of cultural variables, old and new, to make a meaningful reconfiguration of them, established on the basis that can be labeled as a changing character of consensus. Such a cultural mechanism lies behind the process of making and unmaking boundaries in South Asia. The second part of the paper shows how this cultural device can be applied to changes in the traditional Indian society, especially focusing on the social and cultural borders richly present in this very complex society. Changes can be seen as a transformation of hierarchical castes, divided and bounded by strict boundaries, into sort of social entities treated more as identities loosely connected in the contemporary social field than traditionally separated units of India

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