ELSEVIER Poetics 24 (1996) 31-56 POETICS Cultural and moral boundaries in the United States: Structural position, geographic location, and lifestyle explanations 1 Mich~le Lamont *, John Schmalzbauer, Maureen Waller, Daniel Weber Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Abstract Using the culture module of the 1993 General Social Survey, this study proposes a multicausal model to assess the determinants of moral and cultural boundaries in the American population. We find that structural position - education, income, class, and gender - affects the likelihood that individuals draw one type of boundary rather than another. Furthermore, geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters play an important role in supplying cultural repertoires that affect the drawing of boundaries. While both cultural and moral boundaries are predicted by structural position and geographic location, cultural boundaries are predicted by participation in high culture lifestyle clusters and moral boundaries are predicted by participation in religious lifestyle clusters. Geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters have a stronger effect on the boundaries of non-college graduates than on those of college graduates, suggesting that local cultural repertoires have a less important impact on the boundaries of individuals who share a homogeniz- ing educational experience. I. Introduction Postmodernist, feminist, and multicultural theorists have argued that identities are increasingly defined around dimensions other than class (Lemert, 1993; Seidman, 1994; * Corresponding author. 1 All earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles, August 1994. For their generous assistance and suggestions, we would like to thank Frank Dobbin, Bruce Western, and the members of the Princeton GSS group: Courlney Bender, Bethany Bryson, Paul DiMaggio, Timothy Dowd, John Evans and Brad Verter. We also thank Judith Blan and Richard Peterson for helpful comments. 0304-422X/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved Pll S0304- 422X(96)00005- 8