Sociology Plus
Collective Deviance Definition
Collective deviance is deviance attributed not to an individual’s behaviour but to an entire category of people: a person is discredited simply for belonging to a particular racial, ethnic, national, or religious group. It is a form of categorical thinking, acting, and reacting in which the taint of membership alone brings hostility, condemnation, discrimination, stereotyping, ridicule, isolation, or punishment from members of other groups.
Goffman and Tribal Stigma
The concept derives from Erving Goffman’s Stigma (1963), where he identified the “tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion” — imputed blemishes of identity “transmitted through lineages” that “equally contaminate all members of a family.” Tribal stigma was one of Goffman’s three major types, alongside “abominations of the body” (physical deformity and disability) and “blemishes of individual character” (such as mental disorder, alcoholism, or dishonesty). Towards all stigmatised persons, Goffman argued, “normals” practise varieties of discrimination, construct a “stigma theory” — an ideology explaining the stigmatised group’s inferiority — and impute a wide range of further imperfections on the basis of the original one. In tribal stigma, members of one category stigmatise all members of another on the basis of membership alone.
Collective Deviance versus Racism
Although “racism” is sometimes used to describe the phenomenon, it is the narrower concept. Racism as currently understood implies a distinct power differential, substantial hegemony, and a focus on categories defined by genetic or presumed genetic traits. Tribal stigma requires none of these: it does not presuppose that one group dominates another or that one group’s definitions of reality prevail, and it extends beyond race to ethnicity, national background, and religious membership (as distinct from religious belief itself).
Mutual Deviantisation
Collective deviance is frequently reciprocal. The very trait counted normal inside one tribal category is stigmatising outside it, and vice versa, producing what Aho (1994) calls mutual deviantisation, in which opposing groups each regard the other as deviant. Militant Palestinians and militant Israelis, militant Hindu nationalists and militant Indian and Kashmiri Muslims, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, and Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia have all demonised one another during periods of violent conflict.
One-Sided Deviantisation
Mutual deviantisation requires that competing groups can marshal political, economic, and cultural resources against each other. Where power is overwhelmingly lopsided, deviantisation runs one way only: Jews under Nazi rule were stigmatised, demonised, persecuted, and murdered with no possibility of reciprocation, and the same asymmetry marked African American slaves before the Civil War and North American Indians before the twentieth century relative to whites.
Significance
Throughout recorded history, members of one racial, ethnic, national, or religious category have deviantised members of another purely on the basis of membership, treating everyone in the inferiorised category as less than fully human. Because research on deviance has focused almost exclusively on individual behaviour, any complete account of stigma, condemnation, and inferiorisation must give collective deviance an equally central place.