Kai T. Erikson has produced a creative and fascinating look at the Puritans of 17^th-century Massachusets. What can this unique social world tell us about deviance or social control in ours? A lot, as Erikson illustrates.

Eriksonâs theoretical basis comes from Durkheim and the functionalist school. The bookâs argument hinges on the latent functions of crime in defining deviant behaviour for the community, bringing the community together in a ritualized separation of deviant members (or their behaviour) from the convention-maintaining majority and, most importantly, defining the communityâs very boundaries.

By boundaries, Erikson is referring to the way a community defines itself, itâs self-identity. Erikson posits a link between the uniqueness of a given communityâs identity, as expressed by its boundaries, and the styles of deviance characteristic to it (19). This is accredited to the attention a community pays to deviance that it feels threatens its boundaries as well as to the additional deviance (Goffmanâs notion of secondary deviance?) created by this attention (20).

One result of this circular relationship is that "pairs of adversaries are so well attuned to one another that they can and often do reverse roles" (ibid.), or that deviant and conventional behaviour so closely resemble each other that they are, in fact, difficult to tell apart (21).

Erikson points out that deviant behaviour often appears precisely when it is most feared ö "it is not always easy to know whether fear creates the deviance or the deviance creates the fear (22)." This idea seems to express what others have defined as a "moral panic" (see Goode, 1994).

Erikson also points out that the amount of deviance experienced by a community is limited by its capacity to detect and handle deviants ö which means that the rate of deviation is "in part a function of the size and complexity of the social control apparatus (24)." This in turn leads social control agencies to view their mission as keeping levels of deviance within acceptable bounds rather than eliminating it outright (ibid.), which has interesting implications for the "failure" of such agencies and their contribution to the perpetuation, reinforcement and production of deviance.

"Deviance can be defined as behaviour which falls on the outer edge of the groupâs experience (26)." The obvious question then, is how the edge of group experience comes to be defined, and by extension, what role social control agents play in forming this definition.

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Erikson carefully explains how the Puritans viewed themselves as a body separate from other forms of Protestantism and how circumstances in England led them to set off on their bold "experiment" in the New World ö attempting to live in a purely theocratical fashion (43). Part of the consequences of being a Puritan was living with a series of paradoxes (50-53) that somewhat muddied the issue of identity as Puritan. These paradoxes came to light in the difficulties experienced by the Saints of Massachusets Bay in their attempts to erect a usable legal code based entirely on scripture. One way out of the problems that resulted from this ö legal problems and questions of identity ö was "to find some way of measuring what one is not (64, italics in original)." From this came a series of what Erikson terms "crime waves" having more to do with the communityâs attempts to define their boundaries than with any actual increase in deviance.

Erikson notes that these crime waves tend to occur when a communityâs identity is in crisis and its behavioural boundaries obscured (68). The Antinomian crisis is an excellent example. The waning political influence of the communityâs old leaders coincided with a small group of Boston Puritans (led ö by a WOMAN! See 82-83) calling into question the suitability of some of the communityâs religious leaders, who were charged with "walking in a covenant of works" (83).

This Antinomian uprising amounted to a group of Puritans testing the boundaries of the community, necessitating a communal re-focussing of boundaries, which ensued in the form of show trials and political represssion of the Antinomians by the invigorated political leaders of the community. The trial against Mrs. Hutchinson, leader of the Antinomian contingent, served primarily "as a public statement about the new bounaries of Puritanism in Massachusets Bay (107)."

Though Erikson illustrates his points with a clever historical portrait of the Puritans of Massachusets Bay, much of what he reveals can be applied to any culture or time period.

Affirming group identity in "finding ways of measuring what one is not" seems especially applicable to the issue of Canadian identity, which is often defined by how we differ from Americans (free health care, less guns, hockey). When and how does this identity come to be sharpened and/or re-defined? The Québec referendum would seem a highly-appropriate period to examine how Canadians (and Québecois) came to define themselves and what role boundaries, deviants (I am thinking about Jacques Parizeauâs famous speech blaming the "ethnic vote" for the loss of the Oui side), and social control agents played in re-establishing the boundaries by which people in Québec and in Canada identify themselves.