A boundary is a border, a barrier between “myself” and “that around me” – familiar and foreign, intimate and public, safe and unsafe, center and periphery, the rich and the poor, majority and minority, the thing between “us” and “them”. A boundary marginalizes or puts on the periphery everything that is not in the center, divides the established from the “outsiders.” It is an imaginary line that is ritually respected, but in practice it often manifests itself in a physical form as well, depending on what it “separates” or refers to.
Does a boundary generate order or chaos? Is it a necessity or coercion?