Since the subject offers that many opportunities to derive …show more content…
1). However, what does an individual need to have to be able to be part of a coherent group? They often define themselves with the help of common ideas, values, history and experience but also by visual variation i.e. skin colour, clothes or economic success. In the example at hand, people only differed in terms of their past and the collective experience connected to it (Elias & Scotson, 1994, p. XVII). Hence, the newcomers were not able to identify themselves with the established group and the latter obviously saw them as a threat to their social position. It is important to realize that the identifications attributed to the established group were not given to them by the newcomers. On the contrary, it was the group itself that characterized themselves as being people of greater virtue, higher status and superiority compared to the low standing, worthless …show more content…
An uneven distribution of power is the requirement for the more powerful to be able to discriminate the other group in order to maintain its own power. The tool for such an exclusion is the stigmatisation driven by prejudice with the goal to keep the group’s identity and culture as well as to secure one’s own position within society. Such preconception often originates by choosing the characteristics of a group’s worst member and attributing this later to the whole group. The same also happens contrariwise meaning that members of a more superior group accredit themselves the values and characteristics of the association’s best follower. This is exactly what happened in Winston Parwa and what in most cases still happens in our world today. People who have lived in one place for generations feel threatened by newcomers. May it be that they see their work, living or simply their position within their group endangered, members start to try to exclude people from their fellow associates. Only if the established achieve to maintain a strong position in their class hierarchy, will they be able to exclude the newcomers (Elias & Scotson, 1994, pp.