The Origins of Stigma, Essay Example

This article discusses stigma from a social psychological approach and its etiology across various geographical and cultural contexts because of the difficulty to understand stigma’s origins. While there are some universally stigmatizing attributes, others are idiosyncratic according to temporal and cultural contexts. Scholars have broached this topic from a variety of theoretical approaches, and an examination of the literature on stereotyping and discrimination as a broad category. Indeed, stereotyping involves various forces and perceptions that emanate from the perception of stringent group boundaries. The authors proffer a theory about stigma, postulating that it initially germinates from a desire to avoid future danger, which is then followed by the perception of traits that forward threat whether tangible or symbolic. The specter of threat is usually exaggerated, enhanced, and/or distorted. Such threats catalyze a process of negotiation at the micro and macro levels: face to face; amongst groups of friends; within social groups and organizations; regionally; and traversing various societies and cultures. Ultimately, these perceptions are socially shared with others. Rather than being universally-accepted physical attributes, stigma–from the point of view of stigmatized and stigmatizers–is a socio-cultural construction.  As such, individual approaches to understanding stigma cannot be deployed in order to answer the question of where stigma comes from due to their inefficacy in explaining certain phenomena associated with stigma. Such a theoretical approach to stigma does not render individual approaches to stigma obsolete. Nonetheless, a theory about the origins of stigma requires a full understanding of both the individual and the context in which stigma germinated. The process of stigmatization develops because of a threat, but stigma also requires the social sharing of such perceptions with others in order to solidify it.

This paper makes an interesting point that connects the purported origin of stigma–as a natural response to a threat, thereby hoping to reduce harm–and how stigma has been used in the present day, to inflict harm on others. What could be improved is a short discussion about stereotyping and how stereotyping and stigma share certain similarities as well as differences. While your theoretical discussion is insightful, it would be more effective to provide tangible examples that model such paradigms.