Kai Erikson

Kai Theodor Erikson is an American sociologist who served as the 76th president of the American Sociological Association and became a leading authority on the social consequences of catastrophic events. Earlier in his career he wrote Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, a 1966 study of the Salem witch trials and the broader pattern of successive deviance crises in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts. Drawing on Durkheimian ideas about the social function of punishing deviance, Erikson argued that a community defines and maintains its own moral boundaries by periodically identifying and formally punishing deviants, making the community's reaction to rule-breaking, rather than the rule-breaking behavior itself, the proper object of sociological study, a formulation that became one of the founding empirical applications of labeling theory to a historical case.