In-Groups and Out-Groups

An in-group is any group that a person identifies with strongly enough to think of its members as 'us' or 'we' — a feeling of belonging that simultaneously marks everyone outside the group as 'them' or 'they'. Students of a particular school, for instance, readily think of themselves as an in-group as against students of any other school. The mirror image of the in-group is the out-group: the set of people who do not belong to one's own group, and who, precisely because of that, can sometimes be met with suspicion or outright hostility from in-group members. Migrants are a commonly cited example of a group that gets treated as an out-group by an already-settled population.

What makes this distinction sociologically interesting is that the line between in-group and out-group is not fixed — it shifts with time and social context, and what counts as 'belonging' is itself something that gets socially negotiated. The sociologist M.N. Srinivas illustrated this vividly through his fieldwork in the village of Rampura in 1948, where he found villagers using two different local expressions to talk about migrants depending on how long ago they had arrived: recent arrivals were referred to almost contemptuously as people who had 'come yesterday or the day before', while those whose families had settled generations earlier were spoken of respectfully as belonging to 'old lineages'. In other words, even within a single category — 'migrant' — some people had, over time, been absorbed into the in-group while more recent arrivals were still treated as outsiders. …