Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and MoralsSumner, William Graham
General
Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
Sumner, William Graham
Manners and customs
that the brute in it may awake again at any time. It is all a question
of time, custom, and occasion, and the individual is coerced to adopt
the mores as to these matters which are then and there current.
+182. Selection by distinction.+ One of the leading modes by which the
group exercises selection of its adopted type on the individual is by
distinction. Distinction is selection. It appeals to vanity. It acts in
two ways and has two opposite effects. One likes to be separated from
the crowd by what is admired, and dislikes to be distinguished for what
is not admired. Cases occur in which the noteworthy person is not sure
whether he ought to be proud or ashamed of that for which he is
distinguished. When a society gives titles, decorations, and rewards for
acts, it stimulates what it rewards and causes new cases of it. The
operation of selection is direct and rational. The cases in which the
application of distinction is irrational show most clearly its selective
effect. School-teachers are familiar with the fact that children will
imitate a peculiarity of one which marks him out from all the rest, even
if it is a deformity or defect. Why then wonder that barbarian mothers
try to deform their babies towards an adopted type of bodily perfection
which is not rationally preferable? A lady of my acquaintance showed me
one of her dolls which had wire attachments on its legs in imitation of
those worn by children for orthopedic effect. She explained that when
she was a child, another child who had soft bones or weak ankles, and
who wore irons for them, was brought into her group of playmates. They
all admired and envied her, and all wished that they had weak bones so
that they could wear irons. This lady made wire attachments for her doll
that it might reach the highest standard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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