ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the actors' social positioning in a zone of spoiled civil identity, with little or no effective control over their social identity and minimal protection against arbitrary government action, shapes their narrative understanding of the self and of their own position as social subjects within a distinctive social milieu of power relations. Drawing on practice theory and a praxeological account of violent action as a social fact in a neo-Durkheimian sense which emphasises the relations between individual behaviour and group-making social processes, it outlines the general argument that the impact of these relations upon the actors is achieved through their collective understanding of their position as social subjects. The chapter elaborates this general argument with details of the theoretical framework in which the concept of symbolic boundaries is used as an analytical tool perfectly suited to developing a praxeological account of the social positioning of actors and their actions within a particular social milieu or action environment.
