Setting Boundaries: The Anthropology of Spatial and Social Organization

Proxemic studies concentrate on the structure and organization of space, its design and use, allocation, and the relations encoded in it as aspects of cultural communication. Space is perceived through the senses, and since cultures use the senses differently, they create boundaries differently. Pellow, in her edited collection of boundary studies, focuses on the social conception and production of boundedness. The essays by 10 scholars, eight of them anthropologists, explore the nature of boundaries in terms of change, space and place, society and culture, politics, class, urbanization, housing, and secular and spiritual life.