By Bruno Manno
There is nothing abnormal about deviance. This is a lesson I learned growing up during the 1950s and early 1960s in an Italian American neighborhood called Collinwood on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. While the neighborhood had plenty of conformity, there was also sufficient forbearance for enough deviance to make life interesting and educational.
Years later in the early to mid-1970s, I found myself a Ph.D. student in a seminar on the works of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. I was pleasantly surprised that the lesson I learned growing up was one of Durkheim’s important sociological insights into our common life.
Durkheim showed that deviance performs at least four important functions in society. It affirms our cultural values and norms; clarifies our moral boundaries; brings us together; and encourages social change by challenging our views. Moreover, our neighborhood was a good example of what’s called the Durkheim Constant: there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior that a community will tolerate since deviant behavior causes conflict.
