Symbolic and Social Boundaries

As we will see in the empirical chapters of this thesis (Chapters 4and 5), the differences that exist between the north and the south of Ghana are not simply a matter of economics but also symbolic and social boundaries play a role. The case of Ghana in relation to the research question of how the colonialists supplied minimal education to the northern part of the country was partly precedent on the

‘divide-and-rule’ strategy (by the colonialists) which clearly was boundary work at play. As we will see later in this thesis, borders and boundaries were drawn that

brought about categorical pairs among the people of the Gold Coast where the northerners were symbolically kept as one people and given less education. As pointed out by Tilly (1999), when categorical pairs are institutionalised, it generates durable inequalities. These boundaries may not have necessarily and directly produced unequal share of resources but they played the role of demarcating where more resources should go.

The world is full of borders and boundaries, visible or invisible, social or economic and physical or imaginary which keep people apart. Boundaries serve a useful purpose despite the fact that they separate people, nations, things and geographical locations that may be difficult to crossover. It is by this reason that Zerubavel argues that we draw boundaries because of our fundamental need for orderliness and the fear of chaotic scenarios without boundaries that make us to ‘’grasp’’ entities ‘’visually as well as mentally’’ (Zerubavel 1993: 119). She avers that the world would have been unpredictable without boundaries and drew the analogy that: ‘’only in the highly compartmentalized world of the supermarket, the encyclopaedia, or the Yellow Pages do we always know where to find things’’ (Zerubavel 1993: 119). In the same vein, one could imagine how void the world would have been without boundaries, markers and borders. Notwithstanding the argument of the usefulness of boundaries, they can be said to put people apart and have the potential of instituting social inequalities. For instance, the symbolic boundaries and borders that were created by the colonialists between the north and south of Ghana as we will read more about later in this thesis have lived with the country till date.

Weber, Max and Durkheim have been among the first Sociologists that had interest in boundary work and how boundaries shape society (Lamont & Molnár 2002).

Marx Weber’s work on Economy and Society tells us how status groups monopolise economic resources at the expense of the subordinate groups (Weber 1978). Karl Marx pointed out that society is dualised into boundary demarcations of the bourgeois and proletariat where the former did not give the latter its fair share of the resources (Marx 2008). On the part of Emile Durkheim in his book, ‘Elementary forms of Religious Life’, he shows how communities have been given identities by

virtue of their internal segments and their external parameters Durkheim & Fields (1996). In recent times, ‘’boundaries‘‘ have been on the radar of the social sciences in general and sociology in particular and scholarly works are in the areas of

‘’cognition, social and collective identity,[…] census categories, racial and ethnic group positioning’’ and so on (Lamont & Molnár 2002: 167). Thus, contemporary sociologists largely focus on finding meaning of how different forms of social differences, which include boundary work do make impact on the social setting in which they find themselves. I will show later in this thesis that there has been a

“bourgeois” and a “proletariat” relationship in the area of education in Ghana where these boundaries have separated the north from the south with uneven educational opportunities. Lamont and Molnar are also known to have made notable contributions in the discourse of ‘’boundaries’’. In one instance, they called for greater integration in the study of the concept of boundaries in order to bring about the ‘’identification of theoretically’’ revealing connexions and variances in how ‘’boundaries are drawn across contexts and types of groups’’ (Lamont &

Molnár 2002: 168). They have defined symbolic/social boundaries as follows:

Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space [……]. Social boundaries are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities. (Lamont & Molnár 2002: 168)

Just as some scholars have pointed out that while social boundaries are recognized markers, symbolic boundaries move through classification struggles where bigger groups try to uphold their hegemony in relation to their status as symbolic boundaries change to social boundaries (Eliasoph & Lichterman 2003; Blokland 2017). In the light of this, I will like to point out that, this notion of boundaries play well in education in relation to the exclusion of some individuals, categories and groups. This is manifest in the situation where the powerful design the national curricula which are largely to the advantage of the privileged group and determines

who should benefit from the share of resources in the education sector of the economy. Again, schools are graded which puts boundaries that are not easily crossed by the less privileged social group as there is a ‘sieving mechanism’ which is designed and monitored by the power bearing group in society. Thus, as claimed by Domina et al. (2017: 5), “The decisions of educators and educational policy makers, as well as the structure of educational organizations, drive the allocation of resources and status among categories. As such, the categories that are forged in schools are the foundations upon which many lasting social inequalities are constructed in contemporary societies.” In other words, as Charles Tilly pointed out, it is the actors in either boundary side that make a boundary real by ‘’naming it, attempting to control it, attaching distinctive practices to it, or otherwise creating a shared representation’’ (Tilly 2005: 134).

In a fundamentally materialist position, symbolic and social boundaries sound metaphorical in that they are not real (physical) boundaries. Real boundaries are physical or natural hindrances that thwart you from moving from one place to the other or crossing into one territory from the other. However, that sounds simplistic in the sense that social life is not solely dealing with matter but the very meanings and constraining nature human beings make of scenarios. The constraining nature of boundaries makes them difficult to cross even though they are not physical. For instance, in the area of education in Ghana, most northerners are not able to send their children to the south (where education is comparatively better) to be educated not because there are physical barriers that prevent them from doing so, but because of the socio-economic boundaries that exist between the north and the south. Once it is expensive to send children from the north to school in the south, many parents from the north would not be able to afford that. This brings about such boundaries between

‘’we’’ and ‘’them,’’ the “haves” and the “have-nots”. Even though these are symbolic and conceptual boundaries, their constraining effects are like “real boundaries” and I argue that they should be conceived as such.

One will agree with Lamont & Molnar (2002) that symbolic boundaries are conceptual in that they come with some moral consciousness. As we will notice later,

we may ask about the relevance of moral ideas or moral consciousness in the inequality of education in Ghana. This is because there is arguably a shared blame in the said inequality when education at a point in time was open to the northerners but they did not want to send their children to school. It is important to add that if we do not treat symbolic boundaries as ‘’real’ ’boundaries, we must be in for trouble. The world would have been a chaotic place to live if we considered symbolic boundaries as

‘’non-real,’’ completely void. I aver that in the era of communism which Marx predicted as society’s final stage of evolution, we could have still found boundaries therein.

However, the issue in question is how such boundaries put some groups in a disadvantaged position thereby creating social inequalities.

In the case of Bourdieu (1984), he has been much particular about how class differences are formed because of consumption and life-style practices, whereas most studies on symbolic boundaries try to draw a broader logic and understanding into the kinds of people who make meaning of their social context;

which informs us of the subject matter of how social distinctions are made (Barth 1969). This speaks to the issue where most secondary school students in southern Ghana do largely have a “bourgeois lifestyle” as compared to their northern counterparts. This is because they are fed well and do have the needed resources that will make them perform well in their exams. This life-style practices put them in a different domain which is different from those in the north. A case in point is Tilly (1999), where he asserts that categories are relational and are made up of actors who have a common boundary; making them different from others who are excluded by the said boundary.

These scholarly ideas of boundaries play very well to (re)produce inequality of education in most parts of the world but not only in the developing world like Ghana.

By the foregoing assertion, recent scholars argue on the determinants of segregation in the school and see it as a form of social closure where dominant groups exclude out-groups from getting their full and equitable access to resources related to the school (Fiel 2015). As in Charles Tilly’s study where he found out that migrant network draw boundaries that exclude others, schools also provide similar

boundaries for the benefit of valuable resources as school segregation brings about the ‘’exclusion of some groups from the formal educational experiences of other groups’’ (Hanselman & Fiel 2016: 4; Tilly 1999).

The process of national development is a place where social boundary making can be found. This is because the state assumes a hegemonic position where it takes charge of sharing recourses and determining who gets what and where to place what. In this process, geographical and social boundaries are drawn. To this effect, Wimmer Andreas argues that a: “political sociology approach allows us to explain where in a social landscape the boundaries of the nation are drawn; or, to put it differently, which ethnic communities are included in a national project and which ones remain outside of its imaginations”. (Wimmer 2011: 723). Therefore, in the next section, I will discuss the nation state and how the process of state formation can produce social exclusion, especially in the area of education.