This “touching of extremes” holds just as good when its sign is reversed to the negative. The Indian caste is endogamous, but in it there is another very narrow circle within which marriage is forbidden. Marriage prospects are thus confined to the narrower circle, a state of affairs that is also found elsewhere; and indeed, in a certain sense, it may be universal, at least for the behavioral reality of marital arrangements. In the Indian case, both the widest and the ultimately narrowest circles are proscribed. This mode of the correlation is exhibited yet again in historically sequential stages: the strength and extent of control with which the guild formerly grasped the individual is no longer exercised by this type of circle at all, but rather by the family, on the one hand, and by the state, on the other.

XREF: Connects to classic reciprocity and taboo theories about how constraint operates at nested scales of social organization, and echoes Simmel's broader analytical approach.

XREF: Relates to Simmel's broader theme of social circles shaping individual freedom and constraint.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 641