Mary Douglas - Essays on the Sociology of Perception

MARY DOUGLAS: COLLECTED WORKS

VOLUME I

VOLUME II

VOLUME III

VOLUME IV

VOLUME V

VOLUME VI

VOLUME VII

VOLUME VIII

VOLUME IX

VOLUME X

VOLUME XI

VOLUME XII

First published in 1982 by Routledge

This edition published 2003

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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First issued in paperback 2010

introduction and editorial matter Mary Douglas 1982

all other matter Routledge 1982

Typeset in Times by

Keystroke, Jacaranda Lodge, Wolverhampton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-415-29111-8 (hbk) (Volume VIII)

ISBN 978-0-415-60666-0 (pbk) (Volume VIII)

ISBN 978-0-415-28397-7 (set)

eISBN 978-1-134-55750-9

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

David Ostrander

Anthropologist, Russell Sage Foundation, New York

Michael Thompson

Research Scholar, The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria. Anthropologist

James Hampton

Lecturer in Psychology, Department of Social Science and Humanities, The City University, London

Celia Bloor

Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh. Sociologist

David Bloor

Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh. Philosopher

George Gaskell

Lecturer in Social Psychology, Department of Social Psychology, London School of Economics

George A. Kelly

Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University

Professor Kelly is also Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities

Katrina C.D. McLeod

Research Associate, East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, and Special Humanities Fellow, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Don Handelman

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Martin Rudwick

Visiting Research Fellow in the Social History of Science, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh

Steve Rayner

Research Associate, Russell Sage Foundation, New York

Dennis E. Owen

Department of Religion, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Florida

Anything whatsoever that is perceived at all must pass by perceptual controls. In the sifting process something is admitted, something rejected and something supplemented to make the event cognizable. The process is largely cultural. A cultural bias puts moral problems under a particular light. Once shaped, the individual choices come catalogued according to the structuring of consciousness, which is far from being a private affair. This book is an attempt to systematize the cultural constraints. The method of exploration derives from anthropology, though very few of the contributors are anthropologists.

I broached the idea in Natural Symbols (1970), which was only an impressionistic account of cultural controls upon consciousness drawn from anthropologically reported examples from all over the world. I tried to refine and to systematize it in Cultural Bias (1978). In this new volume of essays, various contributors unfold the possibilities of the method, each applying it to a different field. The book divides into three sections. The first four essays directly address problems in the method. The second part consists of comparative studies in history and the history of ideas. The last part comes into close focus on selected case histories showing in detail how the method can be used for better insight. We can say that this book is an argument between the authors, and at the same time a book about kinds of argumentation. It starts from plausible assumptions about the sociological effects of arguments going on in social gatherings of all kinds. In families, in churches, in boardrooms, in sports committees, there are discussions of what should be done, and allocations of responsibility. Such argumentation defines social categories. Its outcomes are enforcements or suspensions of rules. The method tried out is devised to trace these arguments to the fundamental assumptions about the universe which they invoke; its objective is to discover how alternative visions of society are selected and sustained. Its first simplifying assumption is that the infinite array of social interactions can be sorted and classified into a few grand classes. The object is not to come up with something original but gently to push what is known into an explicit typology that captures the wisdom of a hundred years of sociology, anthropology and psychology. Then we can hope to ask new questions.

A famous social psychologist, when I mentioned the word typology, shrank in dismay. He sought to defend methodological purity against my concern to make sense of the larger scene. Typologies, he said, allow anything to be fitted into their boxes; they become an over-powerful interpretative tool. Wondering how one is even to make the smallest progress without developing any typology, I could have quoted from Katrina McLeod the Confucian rebuke to those who shirk their obligations in the name of purity. If the methodologically pure psychologist had also read her chapter below, he might have had to confess that he would prefer to be ranked with the pure, clean, mixed with nothing; still, unified and unchanging; limpid and inactive. If we eschew explicit typologies which can be criticized and improved, we may stay in a celestial harmony and escape from having to deal with the relation between mind and society, but the cost of our private purity is to expose the whole domain to undeclared, implicit typologies. Either way, behaviour is going to be fitted into boxes. Take, for example, the common attempt to explain religious movements in terms of relative deprivation. The implied typology of more deprived and less deprived stalks unchallenged in the textbooks for lack of more explicit schemes with better explanatory power. Implicit typologies are also allowed at deeper levels of disagreement, as, for example, between the possibility of an economic determinist explanation of behaviour and an alternative, which (since the term ideational is aesthetically impossible) one can call the free will or voluntaristic set of explanations. Convinced economic determinists treat values and beliefs as epiphenomena, secondary to and dependent on the pattern of economic constraints; their opponents rightly do not wish to see the realm of the spirit and the source of values and thought relegated to a dependent role. A systematic cultural analysis can save the sense in both camps by bringing the implicit typology of explanations to the light of day. The analysis of the relations between individual judgments and perceived economic pressures clearly needs to be improved. The sociologist who focuses only on the outcome of long historical arguments is tempted to adopt the local perception of economic pressures. Yet opportunities depend to some extent upon how they are perceived at the time. Sociology should not naively accept the natives theories and believe in ghostly vengeance or in the power of a gift to harm the ungenerous recipient. Yet to judge local economic pressures post hoc by the solutions contemporaries thought fit to adopt is to make an error of that type. We do not have to accept the native version of the controlling powers in the universe. We should not adopt a simple economic determinism, judging the pressures by their observed effects. Between the costs and rewards that our ancestors measured and their resulting action there lay the mediating screen of their own perceptions of what their options were. A way of estimating the local perceptual bias would help to resolve the struggle between economic determinists and the free will camp. Grid/group analysis does this by reducing social variation to only a few grand types, each of which generates necessarily its own self-sustaining perceptual blinkers. The fewness of the types is the encouraging simplification. It saves the cherished assumptions of the free will camp by starting from the apparently free argumentation that allocates responsibility as if it were a real power to be exercised. Beyond that start, this form of analysis does not promote any view of the reality of the freedom of wills. It merely notes that the assumption that persons can be held to account is necessary for interpreting the social argumentation about roles and responsibilities. Consequently, the effective ability to hold others to account must be treated as a necessary assumption for analysing the intellectual strategies in the clash of will that gives rise to society. This approach further protects the favourite tenets of the free will camp by not needing to assume any restrictions upon the individuals freedom of choice. Just because we describe the package of ideas and values that are going to surround anyone once a pattern of social relations is chosen, we do not offer any theory about personal scope for liking or evading the local cultural bias. We only say that this choice between a few social patterns is inevitably a choice between a few kinds of cultural bias. We know nothing in advance that would stop a person who finds the cultural bias uncongenial from choosing another set of social relations - otherwise revolutions would never erupt. The cost-benefit analysis of economic and political power patterns are the factors which lie beyond the scope of this approach. We can only identify what might seem attractive or repulsive about the way of life, seen from a particular standpoint.