who commit crimes are seen as enemies of society, loners. Collectivities
differ in terms of how they handle individuals. Some societies are more
individualistic than others. And so on. All of these analytical devices
depend on the assumption that there are individuals who belong to
societies and that people as individuals are socialized into conforming to
the norms of society, expressed by way of cultural values. While there is
obvious truth in this scheme, it is also obvious that it is greatly over-
simplified. Conformity with norms, deviation from norms, and social
control form one part of human social life, but creativity, innovation,
conflict between norms, and patterns of variation in personal adaptation
form the other side of the coin.
When we employ an expression like the above,‘the other side of the
coin’, we need to explain what we intend by it. The category of life called
‘society’tends to be seen as emblematic of social norms, as opposed to
deviance from such norms; but the reproduction of a viable way of life
equally involves changes in these norms via strategies of survival or success
in particular ecological circumstances, as Fredrik Barth pointed out in his
studies of ethnicity and identity (Barth 1969 , with contributors). Change
and continuity not only do, but must, coexist in the wider context of
ecological survival and dispersion of peoples. That is why we say they are
two sides of the same coin, that coin being survival and the evolution of
new forms over time, modified even further by chance, history, and con-
tingent confluences of events.
Here, we are taking again a processual view. Processes tend to alter the
terms of binary forms of identity or political struggles over these identities.
An easy example to hand is the alteration in the People’s Republic of
China’s politics towards families. A rigid one child policy was established
to limit what was seen as the threat of population growth. Processes,
however, negated this policy, which in any case ran deeply counter to
more old established norms regarding the family. The Chinese industrial
economy expanded, demographic aging set in, and from January 2016 the
government began to officially allow couples to have two children, to
produce enough workers to sustain the economy, pay taxes, and support
retired persons with pensions or family leave.
At the level of norms and established ways of doing things, arguments
about what is customary or traditional typically involve conflicts between
social actors who have a history of factional disagreement. Custom then
becomes embedded in politics, and since politics is about competition for
power over resources, custom itself becomes an object of contention, as
34 BREAKING THE FRAMES