Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

“Deviance” and its companion words, deviant and deviation, have their roots in Latin and point to a straying from the via , road or path. Some of its variants have a long history: the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose , for example, talks of “deviant” in the sense of being out of the way; “deviation” appeared in publications in the sixteenth century; and Durkheim powerfully foreshadowed its sociological usage in Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (1895), where he took deviance (which he did not name as such but rather awkwardly referred to as crimes against religion, ceremony, etiquette, tradition, “and so on”) to be the pivotal concept for what turned out to be his founding theory of functional analysis. (Durkheim contrasted his own approach with a more limited notion of crime he somewhat misleadingly attributed to Garofalo's La Criminologie , 1890.) But “deviance” itself is a neologism with multiple meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first appearance in English to a piece written in 1944 by the psychologist Gregory Bateson, who presented it as a corollary of “standardization” (and see Bateson 1972 ). The English sociologist Walter Sprott employed it ten years later to refer to departures from culturally expected rules of conduct ( Sprott 1954 ). And the most celebrated, if not the most elusive, description was offered nine years later still in 1963 ... log in or subscribe to read full text