Symbolic boundary work in schools: Demarcating and denying ethnic boundaries

Abstract

This article examines the symbolic boundary work that is carried out at a school whose student population is heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and class. Based on ethnography, the article demonstrates how the school's staff seeks to neutralize ethnic boundaries and their accompanying discourse, while the pupils try to bring ethnic boundaries back in and place the interethnic encounter prominently on the school's agenda. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.