ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates a framework of how culture in the form of group narratives and symbolic boundaries feeds into practical social actions, interactions, relations, and institutions. The framework elaborates how the character of intergroup violence, in terms of communality, publicity, and brutality, depends on whether it unfolds on the individual or collective level of analysis. Symbolic group boundaries have, in addition to the categorical dimensions defining and separating the ingroup from outgroups, a normative dimension prescribing and proscribing appropriate intragroup and intergroup actions, interactions, and relations. Bringing violence into considerations of group formative practices and processes suggests an opportunity for elaborating and extending recent sociological theorizing on the link between status and interpersonal violence. The chapter considers how different forms of lynching can be conceptualized as collective and interpersonal intergroup violence, respectively. Collective identity-building intergroup violence does not revolve as much around interpersonal confrontations between individual members of different categories or groups as around group-level collective concerns and conflicts.
