Cannibalism and Bulimia:

Abstract

The transition from the modern world of the postwar period into late modernity involves a movement from an inclusive to an exclusive society. This is concomitant with a change in tolerance from a society which abhors difference and attempts to reform difficulty to one which celebrates difference and attempts to exclude the difficult. Two motifs of exclusion coexist uneasily in late modernity, the actuarial and the demonizing: one calculative and cool, the other essentializing and judgemental.

Social exclusion is concerned not only with the social control of deviance but with its genesis. The two deficit models, cultural and economic exclusion, are criticized. Instead, the Mertonian notion of inclusion followed by exclusion as the source of discontent is developed into the notion of a late-modern bulimia. Using the black underclass as an example, the manner in which a series of inclusions and exclusions generate disaffection is traced and the fashion in which social exclusion is facilitated and self-fulfilled by essentialist depictions both of the self and the other is analysed.