ABSTRACT
This chapter distils a series of debates which I had with myself, and with successive groups of undergraduate students, while I was teaching in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Wales, Swansea.1
The catalyst that precipitated these thoughts was the departure in the mid-1980s of the colleague who had been teaching “crime and deviance” in the department. I had a long-standing interest in deviance, as a consequence of research that I had done on historical witchcraft in Ireland (Jenkins 1977) and working-class youth and the transition to adulthood (1982, 1983). I was also teaching the coursefocusing primarily on the early modern European witchcraft persecutions-that was administratively linked to the crime and deviance course. So, I ended up teaching both. The ideas in this chapter, then, evolved in an immediate sense out of my desire to produce courses-one on witchcraft, one on deviance and social control-that were as integrated as possible, conceptually, and out of the need to teach about deviance in such a way as to speak successfully to students of both social anthropology and sociology. In other words, I wanted to offer a properly interdisciplinary view on the social construction of deviance. If the evidence of student coursework was anything to go by, I only ever partially achieved that ambition. However, the attempt inspired me to bring to bear on the analysis of
