[7] Boundary setting is the practice of openly communicating and asserting personal values as way to preserve and protect against having them compromised or violated.
[2] Values are constructed from a mix of conclusions, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning.
[10][11] Jacques Lacan considers values to be layered in a hierarchy, reflecting “all the successive envelopes of the biological and social status of the person”[12] from the most primitive to the most advanced.
[20] Almost a century later, Steven Pinker took up the theme of the loss of personal boundaries in a communal experience, noting that such occurrences could be triggered by intense shared ordeals like hunger, fear or pain, and that such methods were traditionally used to create liminal conditions in initiation rites.
[22] Rave culture has also been said to involve a dissolution of personal boundaries, and a merger into a binding sense of communality.
[23] Also unequal relations of political and social power influence the possibilities for marking cultural boundaries and more generally the quality of life of individuals.