Mary Douglas

8. Mary Douglas – Cultural analyst of modern and pre-modern societies

In 2001, aged 80, Mary Douglas received an honorary degree from Brunel University of London. She has developed herself from a specialist in African anthropology to a broad social scientist, covering many disciplines, ranging from social anthropology to social philosophy. Mary Douglas did show a strong interest in typical Durkheimian topics such as religions, systems of classification, and the differences and resemblances between traditional and modern societies. When she analyzed “thought collectives or thought styles” she built further on ideas presented by Ludwik Fleck, but also on Durkheim’s concept of the collective conscience. Like Claude Levi-Strauss, she observed that binary systems often are at the heart of any culture. The most central one is the opposition between nature and culture. This socially constructed divide distinguishes the civilized from the uncivilized, and the pure from the impure, and also the human from the animalistic, though humans also are biological beings that have promoted themselves to the category above animals. To discuss this cultural phenomenon of discriminating between the pure and the unpure, she made extensive use of her observations of the Lele of the Kasai, an African tribe, but also of the bible book: Leviticus. Her analysis reminds us that many of the choices we make when we eat are based on age-old customs and religious rules. Mary Douglas did not follow Levi-Strauss’ binary model completely. She found this too simplistic to be of use for a broad range of cases. In stead, she has introduced a fourfold scheme as basis for cultural analysis.

8.1    Life and career

Margaret Mary Tew was born on 25 March 1921, in San Remo, Italy, when her parents were en route for home leave from Burma. Her father, Gilbert Charles Tew, was a member of the Indian Civil Service in Burma. Her mother was Phyllis Margaret Twomey. In 1926, she was left with her grandparents in Totness, to attend a proper English primary school. She was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent, a Catholic boarding school in Roehampton. Within the building, spaces were imbued with religious values. Each class room was name after a Catholic saint.  Religious paintings packed the walls of the schoolrooms and dormitories. Notices on school doors and gates restricted access to visitors. The girls did not even meet close relatives without the presence of a female surveillant. Strict rules strict rules governed the meals, including the seating at the dinner tables. Numerous prayers divided the day in a regulated series of activities. Needless to say, a whole system of small rewards – like the right to talk during lunch – and bigger sanctions underpinned adherence to these rules. The years on Roehampton made a strong imprint on Mary Douglas’s view on society and her lifestyle. She found stability and a sense of belonging in this secure and secluded women’s world.[1]

         What did she learn at Roehampton? Mary Douglas recalls that she developed a broad background in the humanities, with an emphasis on Catholic social theory. The girls had to study papal encyclicals that defined the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, in particular Rerum Novarum (Of new things) issued in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII and Quadragesimo Anno (In the fortieth year) issued by Pope Pius XI in 1931. Rerum Novarum was a late attempt of the Church to respond to industrialization and the dismal work and living conditions of manual laborers. It was designed as an alternative for the critical analyses of capitalism by communists and socialists. The Church taught that certain inequalities are inevitable, that to suffer and endure is the lot of human beings; that their final end is not here but in the hereafter. The Church rejected classical laissez-faire economics and argued that the State should not only protect private property but also ought to ensure just wages. It also should issue laws that should improve working conditions. Rerum Novarum supported the formation of trade unions. It also denunciated individualism. Forty years later, Quadragesimo Anno elaborated this line of argument. It sketched an organic model of society in which producers (owners of capital and workers) and consumers were to form functional groups based upon cooperation. These functional groups would determine just policies for each industry. Their hierarchical organization would furnish the charter for a reconstructed social order.[2]  

After leaving Roehampton, in 1938, Mary Douglas spent six months in Paris. There she attended some courses at the Sorbonne and attained a ‘Diplôme de civilization Française.’ To pass her Oxford entrance exam she spent some months at a ‘crammer’ in the Cotswolds. A small bursary and low cost accommodation for students established by The Order of the Sacred Heart allowed her to study at Oxford University. Her first year in Oxford was a rather unhappy one. As a student she ran into a crisis of belief that seems a common lot of cradle Catholics, and especially curious ones like herself.[3] In 1943, she graduated with a BA in Modern Arts.

From 1943 to 1947, she fulfilled her war service in the Colonial Office. There, she became acquainted with anthropologists and developed a special interest in Africa. After a few years, she returned to Oxford and attained a Masters in anthropology. She studied with the famous anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard. Later she wrote a book about his life and work.[4] From 1949 to 1951 she did fieldwork in Belgian Congo. This study rendered the material for her first major book, The Lele of the Kasai (1963). This PhD-thesis was a descriptive and ethnographic, but it presaged more exciting things to come.

In 1951, she married economist James A. T. Douglas, a civil servant, who had just joined the Conservative Party Research Department. Their daughter Janet was born in that same year. In 1954 and 1956 James and Philip were born. The social backgrounds of Mary and James were very similar. His Englishness came from his father and his Catholicism from his French mother. His father had been serving in the Indian Army before serving in France during the First World War. James was born in India and brought up in Paris after his father retired in 1922. His great knowledge of economics and politics, his bilingualism and wide curiosity outside academia constantly stimulated his wife to look beyond the limitations of conventional anthropology.[5]

Purity and Danger (1966) earned her widespread recognition. It is a classic monograph on an African society, in which she forged a synthesis of Western Philosophical ideas, social scientific theories, and the thoughts of the Lele people. The book shed new light on how people deal with purity and pollution. During the sixties, her intellectual curiosity drove her to other social sciences and social philosophy.[6]

From 1951 to 1977, Mary Douglas taught anthropology at Oxford and London. She recalls being happiest at University College London, during the two decades when anthropologist Daryll Forde was head of department. She produced some research reports and wrote many articles. In 1977, she joined the Russell Sage Foundation in New York to become Director for Research on Culture. As president of the foundation, Aaron Wildavsky had secured her appointment. He was an enthusiast advocate of Douglas’s cultural theories, applying them widely in his own work. Douglas and Wildavsky collaborated to write Risk and Culture. In which they studied perceptions of risk and focused on the worries of the American ecological movement.[7] In 1981, she was appointed as Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, just outside Chicago. There she renewed her interest in theological themes. She also became a visiting professor at Princeton University. Her move to the United States had become possible after her children had finished their education and the retirement of her husband James Douglas.[8]

Her breakthrough books were the above-mentioned Purity and Danger, with its brilliant interpretation of pollution and taboo, and Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, published in 1970. In the same year she was offered a personal chair at University College London. The number of books she has published in the eighties and the nineties bear witness to a continued exploration of new fields, and an astonishing productivity: Essays in the Sociology of Perception (1982), Risk and Culture (1982), How Institutions Think (1986), Risk and Blame (1992), In the Wilderness (1993), Thought Styles (1996), Missing Persons (1998) and Leviticus as Literature (1999). Her work is a major point of reference for social theorists, for sociologists and economists dealing with risk and consumption, for biblical scholars, for literary theorists, and for everyone who writes about ritual, institutions, systems of classification, or collective memories.

Dame Mary Douglas died on 21^st of May 2007, aged 86. She was one of the most influential Catholic intellectuals of the 20^th century, and one of the most widely read British social anthropologists of her generation.[9]

8.2 The influence of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss

Mary Douglas showed a strong interest into Durkheimian topics such as religion and the striking differences between modern and pre-modern societies. Like him she favors theories that attempt to explain changes in religion or processes of secularization by changes in social structures. The more open a community, the less its members are coerced by common beliefs. So, from this perspective, secularism is a consequence of a social factor, a consequence of a change in the social structure.[10] Mary Douglas built further on Durkheim’s concepts of a collective conscience. And like Durkheim, she intended to do social science in a positivistic way, based on empirical observations and in search for valid law-like generalizations.

Mary Douglas refers to Durkheim’s work in her foreword to the English edition of The Gift by Marcel Mauss. His book focuses on solidarity and reciprocity. Mauss makes clear that there is no such thing as a free gift. Though charity is meant to be a free and voluntary gift, even a religious virtue, we know that it can hurt a bit. When Douglas worked for a charitable organization she quickly learnt that recipients do not like donors. Donors and volunteers want something in return: gratitude. Gratitude boosts their self-esteem. It gives them a good feeling about themselves.

Mary Douglas believed that Marcel Mauss, student and colleague of Emile Durkheim, did get the idea of a morally sanctioned gift cycle from his knowledge of Hindu religion. According to the Vedic principle, the sacrifice is not a simple gift, but a devotional offering which compels the deity to make a return: Do et dus – I give so that you may give. To Mauss, a gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts. Instead, in Melanesia and elsewhere, anthropologists like Malinowski found that gifts were matched with precisely calculated return gifts. In fact, commerce and gift are similar activities. In both cases fair deals keep the exchange process going. Mauss assumed that during the whole history of civilization the major transfers of goods have been carried out by cycles of obligatory returns of gifts. Gift cycles engage individuals and groups in permanent commitments that articulate dominant institutions. Persons that don’t fulfill their obligations will be ostracized or otherwise disgraced. Soon they will feel bad and fear to be punished by angry spirits or gods. The gift cycle would not work if it did not include social control, personal emotions, and religion.[11] Therefore, Mauss formulated a “collectivist” exchange theory. He posed the question: “What force compels the recipient to make a return?” The answer is society. The social group produces the coercion that forces people to reciprocal acts. “It is groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations.”[12]

The most fertile idea of Marcel Mauss was to present the gift cycle as a theoretical counterpart to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Also in modern societies gift systems complement the market economy in domains where the latter is absent. Douglas noticed that The Gift was part of an organized assault on English utilitarian political theory by Emile Durkheim and some of his predecessors, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alex de Tocqueville. They criticized its impoverished, utterly non-social concept of the person. They reproached utilitarianists for ignoring the role of social norms in shaping individual intentions and making social actions possible.[13]

8.3 Focus on culture

Mary Douglas was much less inclined to separate culture from structure than Durkheim. She focused on culture, concerning herself with its internal patterns, rather than its ultimate causation or determination by external factors. Like Peter Berger, she approaches culture from the angle of everyday life. For Berger, the mundane knowledge of everyday life serves as a vehicle for studying more abstract modes of knowledge and legitimization. For Douglas, everyday life itself is the focus of interest. It is the centerpiece of her investigations.[14] Hers is a world of ordinary symbols, rituals, objects, and activities that constitute and fill our daily life. She has a special eye for the observable artifacts of culture, for its material goods, including food, its ritualized practices, its habits, manners, and tastes. Our attitudes towards these manners and material goods reveal implicit meanings or cosmology of the social group we belong to.[15] For Douglas “implicit cosmology” refers to the beliefs and values that are used to justify our actions.[16] Our attitudes towards food and other material goods manifest our views of what is clean or dirty, good or bad, nice or ugly, decent or indecent, pure or unpure, haram or not kosher. In other words, they reveal some of our basic norms and values. However, most of the differences that are vital for social existence did not emerge in a natural way. Why are some plants seen as weeds and others seen and loved as flowers? Categorizations like these are social constructions. Once they have become institutionalized they tend to be defended vigilantly. They create order and clarity. The only fault of weeds is that they are growing, uninvitedly, in a place which, in our opinion, ought to be neatly cut into lawns, paths, vegetable plots and flower borders. Weeds spoil the harmony we envisaged, even if they have a nice fresh color and smell good. They play havoc with our design and thus we want to uproot or kill them in various ways.

And what is rubbish, what is dirt? Rubbish and dirt are simply things ‘out of place.’ We love to see beautiful hair, clean and shiny, but treat it as dirt as soon as we do find a hair in our soup or on our dinner table. There is a place for everything. This feeling is so strong that chemical companies had to design distinct names and labels for flasks containing identical detergents, after they learnt that people would not dream of using the same detergent for the bathroom and the kitchen. In these as in other cases the obsessive attention devoted to fighting dirt and putting things in their right place is motivated by the need to make our world orderly and hence livable.[17]

8.4 Criticizing Claude Lévi-Strauss.

In many ways, Mary Douglas went further than Emile Durkheim. He wanted to explain all social facts with other social facts, preferably, facts referring to characteristics of social structures. Durkheim analyzed anthropological reports of religion and social cohesion in pre-modern tribes and concluded that humans gradually acquired a sense of these categories. For instance, their experience with the ceaseless cycle of seasons triggered the notion of a generalized experience divided into units of time. This experience was strengthened by the introduction of religious ceremonies connected to change of seasons. And from nomadic travels in search for food came the conception of space.

Douglas realized that there is a social basis for all human thought. The thrust of her work is the application of that insight to modern belief systems.[18] Her theoretical work is also indebted to the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, but she remained very critical of some of its more general assertions. Lévi-Strauss assumed that, since all cultures are products of human minds, all cultures must share some social patterns. In his view, the purely cognitive meaning of myths, rituals, and kinship relations can be found in the basic paired oppositions they reflect, pairs of oppositions that can be analyzed without reference to ethnographic context. However, for scholars like Mary Douglas, who have done a lot of empirical fieldwork, the context always remains an important point of reference. She agrees with Lévi-Strauss that the structuring of experience often comes about through a system of paired opposites: dark/light, night/day, good/evil, purity/dirt, life/death. Even the concepts of male and female tend to be viewed as a pair of opposites. These oppositional patterns are constantly constituted and reconstituted in everyday life. They are frequently affirmed and reaffirmed in customs, rituals, and speech.

         To Lévi-Strauss all classifications are based on paired opposites, balanced against one another; the key to comprehend these classification systems is to identify parallel patterns of opposites in other domains. Mary Douglas agreed that binary classifications can be a useful analytic tool, but knew that reality does not always manifest itself in paired opposites. There are many situations in which we need more complex classifications. Often we encounter phenomena or organizations of a third or fourth kind. Therefore, be suspicious of anyone who declares that there are two kinds of people, or two kinds of reality. To Mary Douglas, it often is problematic whether a symbolic boundary exists at all. The real challenge is to discover how boundaries can be seen, how permeable or impassable they are or whether a similar boundaries existed in the past. For instance, nowadays it is possible to cross the boundary from a male body to and female body (or the other way around) with the help of kilos of pharmaceutical products, surgical operations, and the support of specialized psychologists.

8.5 Classifying the good, the bad, and the holy

Mary Douglas was fascinated by phenomena like dirt and deviancy. What is classified as dirt or deviancy, by whom and why? As anthropologist she has learned that human reactions to dirt and deviancy reveal our systems of norms and values. Cultural classifications add order to our experience of social existence and help to make our social existence meaningful. Classification of norms and values give direction to our actions. They tell us what to do or not to do. They form the very basis of our social demarcations.

Defilement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a systematic ordering of ideas. Hence any piecemeal interpretation of the pollution rules of another culture is bound to fail.[19]

Mary Douglas always got annoyed when the beliefs of ‘primitive’ peoples are mangled in Western attempts to understand them. The history of the ethnographical study of religions offers many instances of a downright pejorative approach to premodern religions and rituals. This constructed opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ between believers of primitive religions and believers of great religions, agnostics and atheists, is in urgent need of deconstruction. And Mary Douglas was eager to lend a helping hand. For this she had two reasons. Firstly, these prejudiced constructions create a theoretical divide that has no foundation in empirical reality. Secondly, this approach can only lead to misunderstanding. Hence, she tackled this problem by contending that so-called primitive religions and rituals have equivalents in current great world religions, and secondly she argued that “primitive” beliefs and rituals fulfil positive social functions, even in a secularized world. In spite of strong tendencies to get rid of all rituals. Also secularized people cherish certain forms of belief, engage in some rituals, and have their taboos.[20]

8.5.2 The Lele of the Kasai and their basic classifications

In the fifties, Mary Douglas studied the Lele, a tribe in the Kasai District of Congo. The Lele grow maize, weave raffia, and draw palm wine. Their most important activity is hunting. So it is no surprising that the richest vein of symbolism is derived from reflections on the animal world, its relations to the human sphere, and the relations between different breeds of birds and beasts. For the Lele the forest contrasts with the barrenness of the grasslands. To them, the forest is the source of all they need: maize, raffia, wine, meat, fish, water, and firewood. To them, the forest also is a place of powerful spiritual beings.  

For the large majority of mankind, including The Lele, the distinction between humans and animals is the most basic one. The Lele express this basic idea by relating it to one dominant value, the virtue of buhonyi, which refers to shame, shyness, or modesty. Animals have no buhonyi. They urinate publicly, eat filth, and mate incestuously. For humans the strongest form of shame is sexual shame. Therefore, all sexual intercourse should be hidden.

Buhonyi is a sense of decency and civilization. It is related to the fear of disrespecting accepted rules of behavior. It is a product of culture and not a natural virtue. Infants do not feel it. They have to learn that parents and elderly people should be respected. They will learn to understand that a Lele father feels constrained in the presence of his son and that sons must  stands silent and respectful before their father or elder brother. Lele women interact less formally. They tend to be less sensitive to buhonyi. Mothers and daughters can go to the stream together and wash each other’s back without the least embarrassment. For fathers and sons this is unthinkable.

         For the Lele all bodily dirt is hama. Everything that leaves the (human) body passes a boundary. That’s why Lele people consider spit, saliva, blood, mucus, milk, urine, feces, tears, sperm, sweat, hair, nails, scabs and flakes of skin as unclean. Within most cultures, all natural functions are embarrassing and should be performed in private. Even eating can be embarrassing. In some cultures men and women eat apart, either in separate rooms or at different times. In the majority of these cases the men eat first and are being served in the best room.

“The importance of hama as a dominant theme in Lele culture can hardly be exaggerated. The avoidance of dirt is the earliest lesson of childhood and forms the constant preoccupation of women in their work in the home, and in cooking. It is natural that it should provide the culture with vivid intelligible symbols. The emotional power of the contrast between human and animal is largely based on the idea of hama, animals, particularly the dog, being unaware of it.”[21]

In any culture insulting terms are the most illuminating indications of accepted values. In the Lele tribe the greatest insult is comparing someone with an animal, that is, with a shameless being, or with excrement, which is the dirtiest of all dirt. To call someone a dog and tell him to eat excrement can lead to murder. So the Lele show awareness of two important cultural themes, man’s superiority to animals, and the need to avoid dirt. This idea of superiority allows them to eat animals, but not all of them. Rats, dogs and cats, snakes and smelly animals such as jackals are considered to be dirty and inedible.[22]

Scheme 8.1: Binary classification of the Lele

Nature	Culture
Animals	Humans
Shameless	Shame (Buhonyi)
Small children	Adults
Dirty (Unclean)	Clean
Danger	Safety
Bad	Good
Barren	Fertile
Left	Right

Rules of cleanliness largely amount to an attempt to separate food from dirt. People should wash their hands before cooking and eating. Cleanliness requires the Lele to use the left hand for dirty work, the right for noble work and for taking food. The left is therefore associated with hama. This very rule is obeyed in many other parts of the world; especially in groups were food is eaten by hand from a collective dish. Over there it is a grave insult to offer anything with the left hand. Also in western societies children learn to present something with their ‘good’ hand. In Europe, in the fifties and sixties of the last century left-handed children were obliged to learn to write with their right hand. Also the origin of the political distinction between left and right is related to a historical distinction between good and bad. In this perspective, the good politicians were the representatives of the nobility and the clerical elite, whereas the revolutionaries, the liberals, egalitarians and socialists were seen as the bad guys.

8.6. What to eat or not to eat?

8.6.1 Premodern classifications of good and bad food.

Menus differ from culture to culture. Westerners may cringe from the thought of eating insects, but we know that grubs and grasshoppers are served as proper food elsewhere.[23]

Normally, the Lele only eat vegetarian animals or animals with a furry skin. To them, carnivorous animals form a special category. They enter the village, steal goats and chickens. They are seen as sorcerers in disguise. Eating them is running the risk of indirect cannibalism. Carnivorous animals fight and kill their fellow creatures. Hence, they symbolize men as warriors. Mary Douglas draws our attention to the fact that the fox does not figure in the diet of any European country. Though, most western people do not think about these matters, they follow similar rules. They stick to eating the meat of cows, pigs, horses, hares, rabbits and deer, as far as mammals are concerned, but scorn the meat of wolves, foxes, dogs, cats, mice, rats, and other carnivores. In several countries outside Europe and the USA people do eat cats, dogs and monkeys. In periods of famine people become less choosy. Anyhow, there seems to be something universally repellent about  animals that prey on their fellows, The divide could be based on distinctions between the type of hooves or in case of water animals, whether they have fins and scales or not. Prescriptions like these can be found in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran.[24]

But why should the camel, the hare and the rock badger be unclean? Why should the frog be clean and why should the mouse and the hippopotamus be unclean? What have chameleons, moles, and crocodiles in common to make them unclean? These rules cannot be based on medical science. People will not get sick by eating forbidden animals as listed in the biblical books of Deuteronomy or Leviticus. For instance, many people all over the world eat pork without damaging their health. Moses Maimonides, the great twelfth-century rabbi, physician, theologian, and philosopher,[25] managed to find hygienic reasons for all the other dietary restrictions of Biblical law, but confessed himself to be baffled by the prohibition on pork. He felt obliged to use an aesthetic explanation, based on the revolting diet of the domestic pig.[26] The strict and forbidding religious laws are designed for pedagogical aims and purposes. The prohibition to eat the flesh of certain animals, birds or insects is expressly associated with the idea of holiness. Its real object is to train the Hindu, Jew, or Muslim in self-control as the indispensable first step for the attainment of holiness.[27] Others have argued that the religious lawgiver sternly forbade all animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, like that of pigs and eels, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of senses, the taste. Some have simply given up all attempts to find a sound explanation. They think that these regulations are not by any means to be rationalized. They believe that their origins are too diverse and go back beyond recorded history.[28]

Mary Douglas opts for another solution. For her it is clear that the positive and negative precepts are held to be effective. They are not merely expressive. Observing them is believed to bring prosperity, infringing on them draws down danger. Thus, she treats them in the same way as ‘primitive’ rituals whose breach unleashes danger to the tribesmen. The religious precepts and ceremonies are founded on the idea of the holiness of God or the gods. In this perspective, men prosper by conforming to holiness and perish when they deviate from it. Justice and moral goodness may well illustrate holiness and form part of it, but holiness embraces other ideas as well, such as avoidance rules and taboos. Holiness means separateness of all that is corrupt, and polluted. Holiness is purity, wholeness, and completeness. Much of Leviticus is taken up with stating the physical perfection that is required of things presented in the temple and of persons approaching it. The animals offered in sacrifice must be without blemish, women must be purified after childbirth, men who have come into contact with unclean animals have to wait until nightfall to get rid of their pollution. Priests may come into contact with death only when their own close kin die. But the high priest must never have contact with the death.[29]

8.6.2 Hebrew classifications of good and bad food.

The wholeness of the body as a perfect container is also extended to signify completeness in a social context. An important enterprise, once begun, must not be left incomplete. Interruption of new projects was held to be bad in civil as well as in military contexts. Other precepts extend holiness to species and categories. Hybrids and other confusions are detestable.

You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth of two kinds of stuff (Leviticus xix, 19).

Mary Douglas concludes that in Ancient Israel holiness is exemplified by purity and completeness. Holiness requires that you shall conform to the class to which you belong. Holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused. Devout believers should not eat pork, nor strive for upward social mobility or marry a spouse from another race, religion, caste or class. They must reject crossbreeding animals and inter-fertilizing plants.[30]

Holiness not only means keeping distinct biological categories apart, but it also involves correct definition, discrimination, and order, because the existing order is believed to be God-given and perfect. This also applies to moral rules. Incest, adultery, and homosexuality are against holiness according to the rulings of the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. It also is unholy to steal, tell lies, give false witness, cheat in weights and measures, and create contradictions between what seems and what is.

Deuteronomy xiv

You shall not eat any abominable things.

These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the hart, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope and the mountain sheep.

Every animal that parts the hoof and has the hoof cloven in two, and chews the cud you may eat.

Yet of those that chew the cud or have the hoof cloven you shall not eat these: The camel, the hare and the rock badger, because they chew the cud but do not part the hoof, are unclean to you.

And the swine, because it parts the hoof but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you. …

Of all that are in the waters you may eat these: whatever has fins and scales you may eat, And whatever does not have fins and scales you shall not eat.

You may eat all clean birds.

But these are the ones which you shall not eat: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey, the buzzard, the kite, after their kinds; every raven after their kinds; the ostrich, the night hawk, the sea gull, the hawk, after their kinds; the little owl and the great owl, the water hen and the pelican, the carrion vulture and the cormorant, the stork, the heron, after their kinds, the hoopoe and the bat.

In Leviticus 11:21-23 more animals are listed as unclean:

Yet among the winged insects that go on all fours you may eat those which have legs above their feet, with which to leap upon the earth. Of them you may eat: the locust …, the bald locust …, the cricket and the grasshopper. But all other winged insects which have four feet are an abomination to you. And by these you shall become unclean; …

And these are unclean to you among the swarming things that swarm upon the earth: the great lizard according to its kind, the gecko, the land crocodile, the lizard, the sand lizard and the chameleon. …

Mary Douglas was convinced that a valid explanation for the clear demarcation between livestock and wild animals can be discovered if we take in mind that pastoral people condemn hunters. They see hunting as a way of life that stands too close to nature and view their own way of living as much more cultivated. So, to them, eating meat of wild animals is a sign of lack of civilization. From this perspective, cloven-hoofed, cud-chewing ungulates are the right kind of food for herdsmen and farmers.

8.6.3 Deviation from the standard form is bad

The main key to understanding religious rules about clean and unclean animals is the degree to which they belong to a ‘normal’ class of animals. Since birds have two legs and two wings they tend to be viewed as the standard, whereas bats and other flying creatures that have more wings or more legs are seen as unholy. Most types of fish have fins and scales. Hence, water creatures without fins and scales are seen as abominations. In general, this is true for all animals that seem to have a rather unnatural way of locomotion, like snakes, slugs, worms, and other teeming, trailing, creeping, crawling or swarming animals. All animals that cannot walk, swim or fly “properly” are defined as unclean. Therefore, most amphibians and reptiles are listed as unclean, though the list is far from complete and not entirely consistent.[31]

         The social function of following the rules to stay pure and clean is separating oneself from the rest of the world. Following specific dietary rules is a meaningful part of the great liturgical act of recognition and worship.[32] The origin for these rules is the idea that things should be as normal and orderly as possible within the context of one’s culture. If people see strange, ambiguous, and anomalous things, then most of them are inclined to see this as a problem that has to be solved soon, because it might spell all kinds of doom. Mary Douglas has listed five options for dealing with events that do not fit in.

1. 1. Reclassification: For example, the Nuer treat strongly deformed babies as hippopotamus babies, accidentally born to humans. They believe that the right action is to put them in the river.

1. 1. Extermination: All over the world women tend to give birth to one child at a time. In some West-African tribes giving birth to twins or triplets is viewed as unnatural. These babies will be killed.

1. 1. Avoiding anomalous things for example by observing dietary rules.

1. 1. Labeling anomalous events as dangerous. Attributing danger is one way of putting a subject above dispute.  

1. 1. Ambiguous symbols can be used in rituals for expanding meanings or call attention to other levels of existence.[33]  

The opposition of men and animals, of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, of cleanliness and dirt, the symbolism of right and left, and the avoidance of bad food and the acceptance of good food, produces a rich body of rules and categorizations. Douglas speaks of secular symbolism. She is convinced that crude symbolism of everyday life, provides a basic vocabulary on which religious symbolism draws.

It took Mary Douglas quite a while before she got an inkling of the metaphysical ideas that underpinned the symbolism of the Lele. At first, she assumed that the connection between the hunting and fertility cults was only a historical one, highly eclectic and based on the assimilation of cult elements of neighboring groups. But, soon she learned that the Lele divide the world in three interacting spheres: humans, animals, and spirits. The whole is regarded as a single system. A major disorder in the human sphere is presumed to disturb the relations with and within other spheres. In principle, the animal sphere does not impinge on the human sphere. Animals will only molest a man, woman, or child unless made to do so by sorcery. Nor will hunters succeed in killing an animal unless the spirits are willing to guide and help them. Hence, people have to uphold harmonious relations with the spirits.

In the hunt three spheres coincide. Its significance far surpasses its primary object – the supply of meat. Food, fertility and health are controlled by the spirits, but they may be thwarted by sorcery. If the hunt fails, the Lele fear that their other enterprises will fail too; that their future will be unfortunate. Unsuccessful hunting parties have a bad influence on the village. Accusations will be heard; rituals will be discussed or speeded up. People accused of sorcery or contact with sorcerers could be expelled or killed, in particular when new hunting parties also fail to bring in the goods.

Fertility cult of the Lele    In the view of the Lele, only fathers have attained full manhood. They form a special category: the Begetters. The Lele believe that eating ribs is rather dangerous, because it could harm your own ribs. But  Begetters can safely risk eating the ribs of young animals.[34] Another privilege of the Begetters is eating carnivorous animals, which is Hama. The cult of the Begetters is ranked below that of the Pangolins. The latter are higher because they have children of both sexes. Rather strangely, this is the only cult group that has an animal as a cult object: the little pangolin. This scaled anteater figures as a symbol for fertility. The highest cult group is that of the Twin cult, which honors men and women who have been blessed with multiple births. Multiple births indicate extraordinary if not divine fertility. The qualification for membership of any of those cults is not something one can achieve by one’s own efforts. The Lele believe that the spirits must have mediated between the human and the supernatural. Without such mediation men and women will remain sterile. In the animal world certain creatures are supposed to mediate between animals and humans. Among them the pangolin is pre-eminent. It is hard to classify. It has scales like fish, but lives on dry land and in trees. Moreover, it does not run away from humans as other hunted animals do. When they are hunted they simply roll themselves into a ball, with all their hard scales as a bullet-free vest. The hunter simply has to wait a while before the pangolin relaxes and shows his head again.

8.7 The demise of ritual life

8.7.1 Anti-ritualism and the apparent death of ritual life

In Natural symbols Mary Douglas is searching for a formula for classifying relations that can be applied to small bands of hunters and industrialized nations.[35] She wanted to find scientific laws that are valid for all humans. In her view, the idea that prehistoric man must be deeply religious is nonsense. She studied a host of anthropological studies and got convinced that all the varieties of skepticism, materialism and spiritual fervor are to be found in the whole range of ancient and present day societies.[36] In the past anthropologists have created the illusion that all “primitives” are very credulous and subject to the teachings of priests or magicians. For example, Fredrik Barth, a renowned anthropologist, started a series of fruitless research activitieswhen he came across the Basseri, a non-religious tribe of Persian nomads who took no interest whatsoever in  religion as preached by the mullahs. They were indifferent to metaphysical questions.[37] In Barth’s perspective every tribal society must have a religion of some kind. So, he redoubled the vigor of his enquiries, and squeezed his qualitative data to make it yield an overall superstructure of symbolism that could be counted as an elementary form of religion. He only found a striking poverty of ritual activities. Yet he felt compelled to write a special appendix to clear himself of the possible charges of insensibility to religious behavior.[38] This appendix is another telling example of the great influence of group think, one of the favorite topics of Mary Douglas, which will be discussed later.

Poverty of rituals aptly describes modern societies too. It is one of the rather mysterious features of modern times that we reject rituals as such. When Mary Douglas wrote Natural Symbols (1970), ritual had become a bad word signifying empty conformity. Those were the days of revolt against formalism and the powers that be. The protest movement of the sixties reminded her of Luther, the monk who, in 1530, about 500 years ago, protested against meaningless rituals of the Catholic Church. For Douglas, the incomprehensible to modern protests against authorities and traditions were echoes of the Reformation and its complaint against mechanical religion, against mindless recitation of litanies in Latin, a language that common people did not understand. Lutheran and Calvinistic Protestants wanted the austere purity of the Gospel, without intervening ritual forms. To Protestants preaching in Latin just was mumbo-jumbo.[39] In wave upon wave the Reformation has continued to thunder against the empty enactment of rituals, repeating that external forms can become empty, mocking the truths they stand for. This has created a long and deep-rooted tradition of vigorous anti-ritualism.[40]

With the help of modern science, further rationalization and disenchantment anti-ritualism has become a major strand of western thinking. It produced a series of homologous distinctions that have organized debate on the distinctions and similarities between ‘great religions’ and ‘primitive religions.’ Thus the relation Protestant/Catholic is analogous to relations such as: Hebrew/pagan, monotheism/polytheism, Muslim/Hindu, religion/magic, and so forth.[41] Yet, Mary Douglas contends that, despite its present day negative connotation, rituals can also have a neutral meaning that is more useful for the description and explanation of certain acts. It is fair enough that mechanical or thoughtless ritual had fallen into contempt. But it is illogical to despise all rituals. Douglas is convinced that social scientists need a word like ritual for actions in the symbolic order. They need a neutral word to analyze symbols of genuine conformity as well as for empty symbols.[42]

How can we explain the modern revolt against ritualism? One of the usual explanations of anti-ritualism and the recurring revolt against established hierarchical religious systems is that they stem from the deprived and the disinherited. These ideas stem from Sigmund Freud and Max Weber. It assumes that the principal function of religion is to cope with psychological maladjustment. Marginalization, insecurity and neglect prompt a need for readjustment that new sects may provide. Mary Douglas rejects this kind of reasoning.[43] To begin with, there is no indication that the first groups of Protestants were poor. As a theory it is too easy. We can add the example of contemporary immigrants who find themselves uprooted and marginalized. What status could be more insecure and anxiety-prone than that of the unskilled worker from rural Ghana, Morocco or Turkey in Western Europe? Yet, they do not rebel against their religion, nor do they create new sects. On the contrary, most of them cling to their religious traditions. But in social science the argument, which seeks to explain behavior as a logical consequence of maladjustment and deprivation, as an logic reaction against oppression, discrimination and deprival, is always fair game. Mary Douglas thinks that social scientists ought to dig deeper. Anyone who uses the idea of strain or stress in a general explanatory model is guilty of leaving his sociological analysis long before it is complete.

Mary Douglas has been digging deeper and has signposted three phases in the demise of ritual behavior.

1. 1. First: disdain for external ritual forms. Disapproval of irrelevant rituals leads to a rejection of ritualism as such. See the start of the Protestant Reformation. Protestants never stop arguing that external forms can become empty and will mock the very truths they stand for.[44]

• • Second: private internalizing of religious experience. Depreciation of standardized expressions goes along with the exaltation of the inner experience. Religious protesters show a strong preference for intuitive and instant forms of knowing religious truths. They reject mediating institutions. Extreme forms of anti-ritualism can very trigger destructive actions. Think of the first wave of angry Protestants. They destroyed  the interior of many Catholic churches, crushing all statues and paintings of Saints.[45] After the initial protest stage, once the need for a coherent system of expression was felt, Protestants re-installed a few sober rituals. Nonetheless, there is a loss of historical continuity.[46]

• • Third: the move to humanistic thinking and philanthropy. When the third stage is under way, the symbolic life of the spirit will be pushed into the background, maybe for good. Humanists are very skeptical about the function of rituals. They do not belief in celestial spirits, reincarnation or an afterlife. They focus on life before death.  

Mary Douglas identified a number of social determinants. The first is breaking through the verbal hedges that arbitrarily insulate one set of human experience from another one. Douglas defines ritualism as a heightened appreciation of symbolic action. Authentic ritualism is an earnest concern that specific acts are carried out in a traditional and precisely prescribed way and that the right words be pronounced in the right order. Only then these rituals are expected to be efficacious. 

As social scientist, Douglas does not differentiate between the faith in sacraments and the belief in magic and miracles. Since Robertson Smith drew a parallel between Roman Catholic rituals and primitive magic, she took the hint. In all religions the power of miraculous interventions is believed to exist. It was as different and as similar as Islamic Baraka or Teutonic Luck or Polynesian Mana. For her, the Christian doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection are highly magical. Hence, it is impossible to make a tidy distinction between sacramental and magical practice. What we learn about the conditions in which magic thrives in primitive cultures should apply to sacramentalism in other religious groups or sects. The devotion to religious sacraments and magic depends on a frame of mind which values external forms and is ready to credit them with special efficacy. Therefore, the search for new symbols or a revitalization of old ones will be a waste of time and energy if the prevailing culture and lifestyle show no real interest in external symbols. The perception of symbols in general, as well as their interpretation, is socially determined.

8.7.2 Decoding British mealtime rituals

There is more to eating than putting food in your mouth. Basically eating is a purely physical affair, but it has become heavily influenced by culture.

Preparing food and what and how to eat it is highly ritualized. The social organization of a meal can be analyzed as a ritual ceremony. Moreover, we can observe to what degree these ceremonies are upheld or seem to whither away. Already Douglas’s own account of mealtime rituals in Britain in the seventies seems to be outdated. She describes how, half a century ago, middle class families organized their dinners together, seated around the dinner table, nicely covered with a white cloth; plates, forks, and knifes neatly arranged in fixed positions. Father and mother both have their own place at table, showing a traditional hierarchical pattern. Dinner itself is structured; it begins with a starter, a salad or soup, followed by a main dish, and finished with a desert. Each dish, in particular the main dish will consist of predictable combinations of staple food, meat and vegetables. This could be examined in terms of structuralist categories and binary opposites such as cooked and raw, solid and liquid, staple food and non-staple food, but as we already have seen, this does not take her strongest interest.

Mary Douglas emphasizes the huge contrast between dinner and breakfast. At dinner everybody is expected to arrive on time, hands washed, hair combed, and properly dressed or tidied up to an acceptable standard. Breakfast is a far less formal and much more individualistic affair. Breakfast is taken at a simple kitchen table. There is no fancy table cloth with napkins, and people eat what they like, if any. There is no fixed time at which all member of the family have to be present. They come individually; some of them still half at sleep. They are allowed to appear in pajamas and to grumble a bit or to hide behind a newspaper. Moreover, they are excused for not taking part in light conversation. All this stands in stark contrast to the rituals that have to be enacted at dinnertime. Here the assembled family resembles a tight community that has come together to reaffirm group sentiments. For that reason there is a general prohibition against discussing topics that might be divisive and would highlight individual views. During dinner the family group should show cohesiveness. Light conversation is a sign of good group membership and enhances the feeling of a tight collective. All this is in striking difference with the breakfast situation, which is a much less formal and much individualized affair, though the behavior of each member of the family is highly predictable. Nowadays, much of dinnertime ritual described by Mary Douglas has vanished, because of huge transformations in society. No longer only fathers have a job outside their home. Furthermore, the number of leisure activities has increased dramatically which means that some members of the family are obliged to eat early or late, depending on the time they have to take part in sports events, training, fitness classes, evening classes, meetings, and etcetera. And, last but not least, there is the arrival of TV, mobile phones and social media. So, nowadays dinner has become almost just as highly atomized as breakfast.

 Like Durkheim, Douglas is a great believer in the function of rituals for the production and maintenance of social relations. Hence modernity should have created alternative forms that keep families together, but did it? It is hard to say whether functional equivalents have been installed for the lost dinnertime rituals and the loss of their potential cohesive impact. It is not hard to acknowledge that familial cohesion has deteriorated during the last four or five decades. The extinction of sharing meals on a daily basis might have further weakened family relations that already were weakening for a whole set of other external and internal reasons.

8.8 Group and Grid

8.8.1 Inspired by Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education

Mary Douglas designed a model to typecast different social settings based on two variables, which she labelled Group and Grid. So far, she has presented and remodeled her group-grid-model in three major works. In Natural Symbols she expanded Basil Bernstein’s work on linguistic codes and social control in middle class and working class families.[47] Bernstein observed two basic speech codes. The restricted code thrives in small-scale social situations, in which all speakers have access to the same “local” experiences. All members of a small community, a tribe, village or hamlet, are familiar with the history of the group. They know everyone’s background, roles, goals and aspirations. In such groups the collective memory and collective conscience cover a very large part of what everybody has experienced. One needs only a few words to communicate with one another, for they all share the same fount of information. In such homogenous groups speech has a solidarity-maintaining function. The other communicative type is the elaborated code. This type is employed in situations where the speakers do not know each other very well. They cannot assume that the other is familiar with all what is relevant to know. Hence speakers need to be much more specific in their use of concepts, in their references to specific events, the period, the time of the day, the people involved, and the things that went on. This kind of speech prevails in what Durkheim called organic societies, where people have very different roles, functions, and positions. When Mary Douglas speaks of strong Group she refers to this collectivistic and homogenous social setting. Group is  weak the setting is more individualistic and less cohesive.

Bernstein observed a strong tendency of lower class people to practice a restricted code. This offered them an explanation for the less successful school careers of their offspring.[48] The restricted code, does not match nicely with elaborated code of the teachers and the vocabulary, grammar and style used in school books, tests and exams. This discrepancy harms the school career of many lower class children.

Bernstein also distinguished between a personal and a positional mode of socialization to explain class differences in school attainments. Douglas built on this differentiation when she spoke of settings with a weak or a strong Grid. The middle class favor a personal mode. Middle class parents treat their children as persons with unique characteristics. They want to understand the feelings of their children and take their level of cognitive development into account, taking time to explain that what they want them to do are in the children’s own interest. Bernstein based his theories on his observations as a young residential family case worker in East-London. He had observed that lower class parents are much less considerate with the uniqueness and feelings of their children. They use what he called a positional mode. They see their children as immature beings, not yet able to understand reason and to oversee the risks of their actions. Children need to be watched and commanded. Parents demand strict obedience. They do not explain. They just tell their children what to do. When a child dares to ask why, the parent will say: “Because I say so.” 

Scheme 8.2: Bernstein’s socialization theories

Linguistic code	Restricted code:  Homogenous, close-knit communities need few words for effective communication Elaborated code: Heterogenous, diversified groups much  has to be explained to avoid misunderstandings.
Mode of socialization	Positional mode: Children have to obey their parents. They must behave as well-trained boys or girls. Personal mode: Children are addressed as unique individuals. Parents want their children to understand that their parental demands make sense.

Mind, that the positional mode requires less words than the explanatory mode. Simply ordering people what to do does not stimulate the expansion of children’s vocabulary. Also, it does not stimulate causal reasoning. Thus, at school, lower class children are being put behind twice.

8.8.1 Reworking Bernstein’s speech codes and socialization models

Mary Douglas reworked Bernstein’s dichotomies into two independent variables: group and grid. At first, she defined “group” as the variable that denotes the experience of a cohesive social unit. Secondly, “grid” refers to the rules that relate persons to other individuals.[49] Splitting both variables in strong and weak, or high and low parts, Douglas produces four types. The horizontal axis or group axis presents the degree to which insiders are insulated from outsiders. Strong “group” settings are castes, classes, and religions. They create sharp divisions between categories of people. The vertical (grid) axis represents the degree to which the group members are insulated from other members. She has applied and further developed this model time and time again.

In The Active Voice (1982), Douglas focused on people’s allegiance to their social group. A military regiment, a church, a learned profession or a political movement show different degrees of group commitment. The  group-variable refers to the arrangements for inclusion and exclusion, and also to the degree of social bonding or social cohesion within the social unit. The stronger the social cohesion, the more people interact with other members of their “group”, the more they will fall back on a collective memory and a restricted code. In High Group settings people define themselves as “we.” There greatest fear is to be being excluded. For instance, the greatest fear of members of right wing extremist groups is to be called a traitor and to be expelled. When Group is low, social bonding is weak, group members are less familiar with one another. People define themselves as “I.”[50] When Group is weak, people need a more elaborated speech code and explicit rules.

Grid concerns the degree of regulation within the group. High Grid organizations have a rigid hierarchy, strict procedures and highly defined roles. Success is defined by compliance and following the rules. People are addressed as representatives of their position, status, and main role. “Grid” closely connects with Bernstein’s positional socialization model. Low Grid settings or organizations have few rules, fluid roles, and flexible procedures.[51] Think of startups and artistic communities. People are treated as individuals with unique traits, views, and wishes. This relates to Bernstein’s personal mode and elaborated code.

The combination of these dichotomous Grid and Group dimensions represent four types of social life. See scheme 4.[52] The qualitative scholar can use the model to interpret and explain how contextual meanings are generated, and transformed. The quantitative investigator is provided with a matrix to classify contexts and draw specific observations about individuals, their values and belief systems, and more.

         Quadrant A (weak grid, weak group) describes the competitive, individualistic social context that allows a large range of pragmatic options for social mobility and for choosing (temporary) friends and allies. Individual sports, markets and liberal-democratic societies are good examples. Other examples of weak-group/weak-grid settings are a democratic government, a parliament or a flea market. The social system of the flea market is in constant flux, as transient individual vendors enter the community, set up shop, move on to another market or leave their trade.[53] The same holds true for cabinet ministers and members of parliament.

Scheme 8.3: The grid-group model of Mary Douglas[54]

	Weak group (Weak cohesion)	Strong group (Strong cohesion)
Weak grid (Weak regulation)	A INDIVIDUALISTIC SOCIETIES   (Markets; the group of Ministers and Secretaries of State)   Individualism	D SECTS / ENCLAVES     (Extremist political parties)     Factionalism Egalitarian collectivism
Strong grid (Strong regulation)	ISOLATES   (Prisons, Refugee camps)     Atomized subordination Mass alienation B	HIERARCHIES   (The convent school; The Marine Corps; Government bureaucracies) Ascribed hierarchy Communitarianism C

Cell B (strong grid, weak group) fits loosely integrated settings in which individuals have few commitments to each other, but are controlled by many rules and regulations. Typical examples are prisons or transfer camps for asylum seekers.

Quadrant C (strong grid, strong group)  is the environment of large institutions where loyalty is rewarded and hierarchy respected. This is the model in which Mary Douglas was raised: the Catholic Church and the convent school. Other examples are the Marine Corps or the Green Berets. Group spirit is enhanced by frequent, long and exhausting training exercises and the collective experience of challenging operations in which these soldiers have to endure much hardship together and learn to appreciate the value of well-coordinated collective actions. The recruits will also be indoctrinated with the idea that they have been selected to become members of an elite corps that demands the highest standards.

Cell D (Strong Group, Weak Grid) refers to settings in which only the boundaries for membership are clear. This is the case in sects, or alternative religious or cultural enclaves. With the exception of the leader of such sects many other statuses are ambiguous and open to negotiation. Sects can emerge through self-definition by a rejection of the wider social environment.[55] Douglas has abjured the word sect, because it has become a term of reproach and replaced it with the neutral term ‘enclave.’ By definition this is a bounded group that is encapsulated within a larger society. However, she still retains the word ‘sectarian’ to describe a cultural bias that favors polarized arguments, dividing the world in two sectors: evil and good, and nothing in between. Sect-members have a very biased approach to political and social problems and ruthlessly reject intellectuals and mainstream science.[56]

8.8.2 The dynamic interplay between grid and group

In The Active Voice, published in 1982, Mary Douglas presented a symbiotic relationship between grid and group. She wanted to underscore the dynamic interplay between individual actions and the social setting. This time she uses ‘grid’ for a dimension of various degrees of individuation and ‘group’ for a dimension of degrees of social incorporation. Again grid refers to the degree to which individual choices are constrained by formal prescriptions such as role expectations, rules and procedures. For instance, everywhere teachers’ and students’ freedom of choice is constrained by national rules that regulate holidays, timetables, curriculum, teaching methods, grading, national exams and standards.

          Classic strong-grid settings have inherent structural networks that insulate individuals from people outside their religion, estate, class, sub-class or caste. The Indian caste system is one of the strongest examples of boundaries between insiders and outsiders. People from the scheduled class, formerly known as outcastes or untouchables, can never mix or interact with members of the Brahmin caste. They cannot even stand in their shadow and are forbidden to let their shadow ‘touch’ the other or his food.

In “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” Paul Theroux writes the fascinating story of his long friendship with Noble Prizewinner Vidia S. Naipaul. The latter descends from an Indian family that migrated to Trinidad a few generations ago. After a long residence in Trinidad and England the Brahmin habitus still is very much alive. Theroux mentions Naipaul’s behavior at some dinner parties in which he refused to take food, although the host had offered special non-vegetarian dishes. Asked why he refused to eat anything Naipaul told Theroux that the vegetables were tainted because one of the dinner guests had touched the vegetables with a serving implement that had come into contact with the meat dish.

Even nowadays, Hindus living in a traditional Indian village are not allowed to mix with members of other classes. They have to follow strict rules. This case of strict group boundaries results in a rigidly regulated system in which social strata and substrata are segregated and reproduced. Scrupulous observation of the rules protect each level of hierarchy from contamination by the levels below it, not to mention the equally scrupulous rules to protect families from the shame that a daughter elopes and marries a boy from a lower caste or a different religion.[57] The caste system resembles the Medieval European system of estates does, but its boundaries were less strong. The European nobility would not easily engage into a marriage with a commoner, though male aristocrats free to impregnate female serfs and servants. In Europe the nobility accepted commoners as servants in their home or castle, as page, soldier, and so on. The class system of industrial societies is one or two rungs further down the ladder of strictly regulated boundaries, but it hasn’t reached complete openness yet.

To estimate autonomy in any setting, one could ask how freely a person disposes his own time, selects his goods, and chooses his collaborators. Strong-grid contexts limit personal freedoms, whereas weak-grid environments promote individual liberty and autonomy. Where roles are ascribed, controls are strong, classificatory distinctions are valued, and there is little or no competition for status. Where roles are achieved, constraints are minimal and individuals can strive for rewards and higher status in open competitive surroundings. Hence, the issues of social control and competition are inversely linked with each other.

          Naturally, both dimensions can reinforce each other or cancel each other out. “Group”-deals with the holistic aspect of social incorporation and the extent to which the life of people is absorbed and sustained by corporate membership. In strong-Group environments the survival of the social unit becomes more important than that of individual members. The primary goal of social interaction is the continuation of the social unit, tribe, organization or society. The strongest effects are to be found where the group-unit incorporates and unites its members by segregated residence, shared work and leisure time, shared resources and recreation, and by inserting control over marriage.[58] Within multi-ethnic and multi-faith societies we see examples of segregated minorities that choose ethnic segregation as a strategy to maintain their own language and culture and ward off assimilation. The result is the emergence of so-called parallel societies.

Extreme cases of strong group can be found in monasteries, religious sects, or social communes where private property is renounced upon entering, and members rely on the social unit for their physical, emotional, and social life support. The kibbutz (a Hebrew word meaning ‘collection’) represents a good example of a strong-group environment. All property belongs to the kibbutz, and members who work in the kibbutz get kibbutz goods and services for their work rather than cash that could be spend outside the kibbutz.[59]  

8.8.3 Pitfalls of cultural analysis

Mary Douglas describes cultures as coherent packages of values. These value packages shape organizations. If social organizations are viable but in a process of change, we can assume that some values are becoming less important while others gain prominence. Organizations require favorable external conditions as well as a strong hold on an appropriate set of values to keep them in being. Since there is no guarantee that these favorable conditions will appear spontaneously and timely, we need the functionalist premise that a stable organization possesses some capacity to stimulate the enforcing conditions that will enable it to survive.[60] If we want to explain social change, we also need insights in changing social conditions or changes in the capacity of social organizations to adjust to new circumstances. However, most cultural analysts take things too easily.  

“In social theory the word ‘culture’ becomes an extra resource to be wheeled in after other explanations are defeated. It is the flexible, powerful residual factor where other reason fails.

You can recognize culture being misused in sociological explanations when you hear behavior being explained by reference to a cultural value cherished by the actors. Enthusiasm for work (or its absence) is explained by saying that the workers subscribe or do not subscribe the work ethic. Authority being successfully exerted is explained by a deferential culture. A difficulty in establishing consensus is explained by the value placed on individualism or independence. The submission that we make here is that any explanation by appeal to a dominant value is tautological. It just says again the thing that is being wondered at. Furthermore the values have not been analyzed. There is no hint about where values come from or about how to explain them. These questions fall outside common discourse, but they should not fall outside sociological inquiry which needs to link a careful analysis of the values to the institutional forms.”[61]

These are strong statements. Maybe they are a bit too strong. Not all purely cultural explanations of cultural facts are completely tautological. It is possible to sketch an explanatory model in which values are seen as the most basic dispositions of individuals or collectivities to prefer certain states of affairs to others. Our values are mutually related and form value systems in which some values have a higher priority than others. Values are inculcated in or minds early in our lives and determine our attitudes, beliefs and opinions, consciously as well as unconsciously. Hence, knowing someone’s value priorities can help explain political party preferences or specific views and opinions. Nonetheless, Mary Douglas advocated that cultural phenomena should always be analyzed with reference to historical and social conditions too.

8.8.4 Secular sects: The case of the British peak labor organization      

Mary Douglas has analyzed salient differences between the political tactics and strategies of the British and the Swedish peak labor organizations.[62] She learned that the British TUC has always been very oppositional against employers and the government, whereas the Swedish Labor Organization (LO) has taken more co-operative stance. A recent based on data extracted from the International Labour Organization show that of all big European cities Paris is most plagued labour strikes, and London comes second. Madrid and Barcelona are 3 and 4. Marseille is ranked number 5. Stockholm is not even mentioned in the top-10 of the list of European strike-prone cities.

How can we explain this difference? Does this have to do with the sectarian character of the TUC? The Swedish labor organizations correspond to hierarchies, but the British TUC and also the British Employers’ Confederation are not hierarchies by any test. They constitute collectivities of autonomous organizations. Mary Douglas found at least one good reason why the TUC acts different than the Swedish LO. They strongly differ with respect to one crucial value: the unwillingness or unwillingness to solve disputes by arranging a compromise with the employers and the government.  This was already so from the beginning of its existence. As an institution survives, it entrenches its values in the minds of its members. Subsequently all members will hammer this attitude in the minds of new generations. When the British labor movement was established at the end of the eighteenth century its enemies compared them with the political cells that preceded the French Revolution. They were seen as secret, conspirative and dangerous societies. Therefore, parliament banned trade unions and the government opposed all their activities. Hence these early “trade clubs” went underground. From the start British labour unions were being pushed in a position to fight for freedom, to fight against government interference.

Isaiah Berlin discerned between two forms of freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from control by others. It is the primary sense of freedom. Positive freedom signifies autonomy, to be in control of your live.[63] The idea of positive freedom or the idea of unrestrained opportunities for personal self-determination and self-realization is connected with the philosophy of Marx. Positive freedom gives humans ample room for conceiving and realizing their own goals and policies, for being an independent thinking, willing and active individual.[64]  

Scheme 8.4: Isaiah Berlin’s types of freedom

Negative freedom	Freedom from oppression and social constraints. Freedom from the demands of other people or the claims they might have on you.
Positive freedom	Autonomy or the freedom to develop your own talents, in particular the talents you enjoy developing most.

Mary Douglas uses these two contrasted ideas as pegs on which to hang an account of the differences between the British and the Swedish labor organizations. The British have embraced the concept of negative freedom and the Swedes cherish the idea of positive freedom. Her analysis connects one particular value preference with two distinct institutional structures, because, in practice, when one form of freedom is entrenched in the mindset of an organization, it tends to exclude the other. The inclination to resist interference from outside will stand in the way of the penchant to co-operate with outsiders. Both labor organizations aimed at a better social security for workers, redistribution of wealth, and political representation, but they ended up with quite different organizational structures and political strategies. 

The Swedish union movement was grounded around 1900, almost a century later than the British. By then, the fear for revolutionary conspiracies had dwindled. Naturally, also the Swedish employers fought the growth of trade unions, but soon they recognized the right of workers to organize labour unions and to negotiate wages and labor conditions. Thus, from the outset the Swedish LO was not driven into an sectarian enclave but derived its power from its ability to negotiate at a national level. Thus it could take control of part of its environment. These initial orientations lay the trail for the development of a hierarchical institution in the Swedish case and for a sect-like organization in the British case.

Sects tend to build a strong wall between insiders and outsiders. Sects have certain problems that require specific solutions. This leads to the adoption of particular values. Originated as a group of dissenters, protesters, or revolutionaries, secular sects have to settle for voluntary membership and will tend to make a virtue of it. Religious sects and revolutionary cells tend to be highly selective. The real problem is how to keep members from leaving the sect. To meet such problems, those committed most strongly to the group and its goals build up a strong moral condemnation of the outside world. This results in the sectarian trap; it becomes morally and politically impossible for any member to deal with outsiders except in a confrontational form. Insiders who co-operate in one-way or another with the enemy will be scolded. These are all manifestations of a high-group, low-grid situation, in which high bonding and strong commitment still imply a few rigid rules like not to fraternize with outsiders. As the community establishes a stable form, it proceeds to redesign its environment. It flourishes on opposition and directs its opponents in a similar pattern of behavior and a similar organizational structure. So, it is no wonder that the British employers are, as they always have been confrontational too. Moreover, they use typical war rhetoric.

         Mary Douglas does not suggest that the TUC is a sect, but merely that the analogy with religious sects help us to understand its distinctive characteristics, why its tactics and strategies tend to be far more adversarial than those of the Swedish LO or why in countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Norway the labor unions and the unions of employers are much more accustomed to co-operation. Or why labour unions are inclined to oppose cooperation with their adversaries in strike-prone countries, such as Cyprus, Finland, France, and Spain.

Often, this long tradition of co-operation is established in regular meetings of representatives of three stakeholders: the government, the employers and the employees. During these meetings most of the issues will be de-politicized to prevent strikes and demonstrations that could harm the economy and social stability. In many other European countries, such as The Netherlands, we see a similar pattern. The Dutch labor organizations are inclined to strive for consensus. Strikes and unrealistic demands for pay-rises will harm the economy, and, indirectly the income position and social security of their members.

Mary Douglas rejects that the differences between both labour organizations can be deduced from class differences, though admitting that the British class system was and still is more oppressive than those of Sweden, Germany, Austria or the USA. Class differences existed and still existed in all these countries, but this does not explain why Swedish, German or Dutch labor unions use significantly more co-operative tactics than the English. Here, we meet again one of the basic research principles of Mary Douglas. For a valid explanation of striking differences between organizations and their success or failure as an organization, we need at least to consider three important aspects. What was the historical setting in which they emerged and came of age. What were the reasons for their emergence and which problems had to be solved and what were the available means to solve these problems? All these conditions will have a lasting impact on them. [65]

 

8.9 Thought collectives: How groups or institutions think

Once a structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many details and relations has been formed, it offers enduring resistance to anything that contradicts it. (Ludwik Fleck)[66]

8.9.1: From Durkheim’s conscience collective to Fleck’s Thought Collective.

In How institutions think (1986) Mary Douglas begins with a discussion of the hostility that greeted Emile Durkheim when he argued that  institutions or social groups acts as if they were objects with one single mind. Among many people the very idea of a supra-individual cognitive system stirs a deep sense of outrage. Unfortunately, the very idea of supra- or extra-personal knowledge domains arouses images of nasty totalitarianism, as if Big Brother no longer was satisfied with watching our deeds, but had developed the ultimate Brain Scan device, scanning and controlling all individual minds. This would boil down to the perfect totalitarian state in which the last illusion, the illusion that at least our thoughts are free, has been shattered. According to Douglas, the whole idea has made many able thinkers so nervous that they prefer to dismiss this topic. However, this has to be faced, because “Institutions Make Life and Death Decisions.”[67]

         It is a widely shared assumption that only individual persons think and that these individuals calculate what is in their best interest and act accordingly. And yet, in practice, we get the contrary impression. We observe that a great many of individuals contribute to the public good generously. That’s why Durkheim imagined the individual is a homo duplex. That humans have an individual and a collective mind. The collective conscience reflects the will of society and often makes people forget their immediate personal interests for the sake of the common good. This internalized collective conscience acts as an inner voice that warns us not to deviate from the prevalent norms and values. However, by upgrading the role of society in steering individual thought, Durkheim downgraded the role of the individual. Since he did not spell out the precise steps of the process in which the collective conscience unconsciously became internalized in individual minds and souls, he seemed to be invoking some mystic entity. Yet, in spite of certain weaknesses, Douglas thinks that his idea still is too good to be dismissed.[68]

         Medical doctor and philosopher Ludwik Fleck already has elaborated and extended Durkheim’s approach.[69] In his book on the identification of syphilis, he went far beyond Durkheim. Both were equally ardent about the social basis of cognition, about the social basis of our most basic categories, such as time, space, and causality. For Durkheim, they represent the most general relations that exist between things. They dominate all the details of our thinking. If humans do not agree upon these essential ideas at any moment, if they do not share similar conceptions of time, space, causality, number, etcetera, all contact between their minds will be impossible, and with that, all social life will come to a halt.

Fleck sings a similar song. In his view, human knowledge is the paramount social creation. We learn from others and others can learn from us. This is excellent, because it helps us to gain infinitely more useful knowledge than we could have gathered as single individuals. On the other hand, it can block scientific progress. General opinion tends to be conservative and inclined to reject new insights that do not square with the prevalent way of thinking. For instance, discovering the cause of syphilis was greatly hindered by the fact that syphilis was seen as a punishment of God for improper sexual behavior. Hence it was not recognized as an illness that could be cured.

         Ludwik Fleck contends that any social community is a “thought collective.” Any social, religious, or professional community develops a consensually agreed set of principles about the world, about what is fact and what is  speculation or simply fake. (What would Fleck have found from the communities of fakers and trolls that are ruthlessly and tenaciously attacking and harassing the prevailing thought collective of current modern societies. These alternative thought collectives are so strongly convinced of their views that they are prepared to use violence in their attempt to topple governments, undermine the judiciary and solid scientific insights and advice.

          Thought styles, whether they are subscribed by the majority or fanatically advocated by oppositional groups, lead human perception, train it, and add new ideas to the stock of knowledge that is gathered by the social group. This (apparently) coherent set of collective representations renders the preconditions of any cognition. It determines what can be counted as a good question and a good answer. It provides the context and sets the limits for any judgment about reality. The individual is hardly ever conscious of the prevailing thought style, which almost always exerts a compulsive force upon his thinking. For Fleck, the collective thought style is directing the individual thinker.[70] This is equally true for group think or tunnel visions based on sets of false ideas.  

Thought styles have a strong influence on the members of a closed society or group. The best examples are religious sects. Group think exist outside religious settings too. Disputes between schools of thought have dominated specific scientific disciplines for many decades or even ages. Think of Isaac Newton, who championed the idea that light is made up from tiny material particles or corpuscles and Christiaan Huygens proposed that we should understand light as electromagnetic waves. Modern science describes light as discrete packets of energy called photons. Quantum mechanics revealed the wave-particle duality of photons.[71] Before this scientific problem was solved, researchers of different schools would think of completely different experiments to prove that their theoretical model was right.

8.9.2 Thomas Kuhn’s theory of shifting paradigms in science.

Thomas Kuhn, who also was influenced by Fleck, has proposed the term paradigm. Any established scientific thought style or paradigm has a strong tendency to resist new notions that do not fit the established system of concepts, basic assumptions, theories, research methods and widely shared opinions.[72] Kuhn distinguishes the history of science as a succession of paradigms. Scientists accumulate a lot of new knowledge based on the basic assumptions of that particular paradigm. However, periodically there comes a moment at which scientists are faced with outcomes that do not fit  their theoretical framework. New inexplainable outcomes are called anomalies. For a while, scientists try to ignore this outcome and blame it on specific conditions or faulty procedures during data gathering, but if the number of anomalies expands this leads to a crisis, which could only be resolved by a revolutionary idea and maybe also a new research plan to present outcomes that will shed a new light at this issue. The new breakthrough also will make clear why the old paradigm was unable to  make sense of the former anomalies. Such a breakthrough might lead to the establishment of a new paradigm. Kuhn’s theory of major developments in science has been summarized as follows.

Paradigm A → Normal Paradigmatic Science → Anomalies → Crisis → Revolution →Paradigm B → … [73]

Fleck observed active impulses to defend one’s well-established paradigm. In many disciplines opposing an established theoretical system or simply appears unthinkable. Long ago, in the fifteenth century, when scientists discovered that the earth must be round and not flat, most people reacted with great disbelief: “Could anyone be mad enough to believe that there are antipodes, that there are people standing with their feet opposite our own. Is there really a region on earth where trees grow downward, and where it rains upward?[74] Later people learned to skip their restricted view on the concepts “up” and “down”. “Down under”, on the other side of the world,  the rain falls down from the sky, just like it does on all the other continents.

There always is a strong tendency to ignore facts and arguments that do not fit the system of collectively shared views. Ludwik Fleck mentions the ignorance of sexuality in young children. Everyone has been a child, yet it took psychoanalysis to reveal children’s sexuality. Thirdly, if a contradictory fact is noticed, it is either kept secret or laborious efforts are made to describe it as an exception and explain it in a way that does not contradict the system. Such effort demonstrates that our first priority is theoretical conformity. Scientific schools of thought try to maintain their well-established logical order and apparently coherent set of classifications at any cost. And even when contradictory views can no longer be overlooked, the members of the thought collective remain focused on circumstances that support the main elements of their thought style.

“The tenacity of systems of opinion shows us that, to some extent, they must be regarded as units, as independent, style-permeated structures. They are not mere aggregates of partial propositions but as harmonious holistic units … determine and condition every single function of cognition.” (Fleck o. c. p. 38)

A thought collective seems to function as an individual mind writ large because a whole group of people possesses it or is possessed by it. Thomas Kuhn shared this discomfort with many liberals who maintain that only individual persons can think. Could other translations of Denkkollektiv, such as “cognitive community” or “thought world,” take away some of the discomfort? In the second half of the 20^th century, we have become familiar with terms like Art Worlds. Howard S. Becker coined this term to elucidate that collective efforts produce a work of art, even though it is attributed to a particular artist.[75] The celebration of the individual artist is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Great and prolific painters like Rembrandt and Michelangelo had taken lessons from other masters and delegated part of their painting, such as filling in backgrounds and clothes to assistants, so that they could concentrate on the most essential parts of picture such as the composition or the faces and their facial expressions.[76] But even the very individualistic contemporary painter depends on an anonymous collective of suppliers of paint makers, framers, distributors, art galleries, the public, and last but not least all the artists before him who have invented certain methods and developed certain styles. In this way, every artist is embedded in a social figuration as Norbert Elias made clear.

Also, it is relevant to acknowledge how path breaking artists still fits in his artistic field. Apparently, they change their field “single-handedly,” by enriching it with a new perspective, style or technique. Often their new approach is a honest attempt to separate themselves from their masters or contemporary colleagues. Only the great masters of art and science create innovations that will be considered as breakthroughs in the evolution of art and science. All the “less great” masters and assistants simply copy or rework them in a highly skillful or masterly way, but fail as real innovators. Only great innovators teach us to look at the world with a fresh view. To rephrase famous statement of Tacitus: “Paintings have changed and so have our eyes”[77]

Sir Ernst Gombrich treated the history of art as a continuing tension between the stability of style and the struggle against it, the struggle of an artist ‘to win freshness of vision’. He gave many examples of the artist’s ambivalence towards tradition, cites the many exercises in copying the masters, and the common fear of becoming a slave of tradition. But the main objective of Gombrich was to explain why innovation is so difficult. A current style imposes a closure on the possibilities of perception. “A style, like a culture or climate of opinion, sets up a horizon of expectation, a mental set which registers deviations and modifications with exaggerated sensitivity.”[78]Each time an artist succeeds to create a new style, despite the pressure of the dominant views and preferences of his day and age, he also succeeds to feature his own approach by highlighting the difference with the prevailing style. Clearly, for most artists it is very hard to create a new style that will convince the connoisseurs and the general public of art lovers that their innovative approach really is of great value and not just a pathetic protest against an existing widely accepted and appreciated  style.

          Now stage is set for some Durkheim-Fleck sociology of knowledge, though first we must warn +against loose functional explanations. For instance, Fleck has his own version of a self-sustaining functional loop.

“The general structure of a thought collective entails that the communication of thoughts within a collective, irrespective of content or logical justification, should lead, for sociological reasons, to the corroboration of the thought structure.”[79]

Not all readers might be convinced that the “sociological reasons” hinted at by Fleck offer a valid explanation of the frequently observed commitment with a larger social whole and its concomitant worldview. Nonetheless, Fleck has explicitly mentioned the widespread psychological need to hold on to traditional views and to share “sensible reasoning” and “consistent theories that seem to be very logic.” People need a strong illusion of understanding the complex world in which they live. Favorite simplifications of the thought collective will support this illusion. People also need a feeling of belonging. Prevailing thought styles confer identity, establish boundaries, similarity and difference, and organize meaning in apparently coherent sets of classifications. In strong, solid, and durable institutions such conceptual systems tend to become naturalized over time. They cease to be mere constructs and turn into essences, into phenomena that can no longer be perceived differently; they turn into social facts that appear just as natural as the warm light of the sun or the cooling shadow of a tree.[80] Besides, social control mechanism help to maintain adherence to a prevailing thought style. Maybe the more interesting question is why some groups or communities, including communities of scientists sharing a paradigmatic approach, have a much stronger influence on the thinking of their members than other groups and communities, and what factors, other than stumbling on anomalies, play a crucial role in opening up closed thought styles to help them come to turns with new insights, new evidence, or entirely new interpretations of former research outcomes?

8.8 Taking risks

8.8.1 The risks of sexual encounters 

Let us be careful not to idealize community. It does not always deal kindly with its members.[81]

Most people detest taking risks, but Mary Douglas purports that, under certain conditions, even very prudent people engage in risky actions. The crux is their attitude to knowledge. To make her point, Douglas presents a cultural analysis of reactions to AIDS. She highlights four types of reactions to the question of the acceptability of the medical profession’s advice on how to protect yourself against a deadly virus.[82]

In 1981, the world was alarmed by the emergence of a new epidemic, caused by an extremely dangerous virus: HIV. At first, it appeared that only homosexuals got ill. Most of these victims died shortly afterwards. Soon medical science established a relationship with promiscuous sexual behavior of gay men. Some prominent gay people rejected this finding. They reacted by  that the causal connection  between aids, promiscuity and homosexuality was just another myth produced by the heterosexual establishment to stigmatize the gay scene.[83] The majority of people got scared of HIV-patients. People diagnosed with HIV got fired because their colleagues no longer wanted to work with them. After a while, scientists discovered that the virus enters the body via the bloodstream. This can happen by sexual intercourse or via contact with contaminated blood or dirty hypodermic needles. Outside the body the virus dies quickly. One does not catch the disease by shaking hands or simply touching each other. Urgently people were advised to be less promiscuous and to use condoms. In Africa and Asia many people could not afford contraceptives. There the number of patients kept rising sharply.[84]

Within a few months the epidemic had spread all over the world, threatening everybody, not only promiscuous gay men. This became very clear after also heterosexual middled class men and women got infected. All this generated a debate about the sources of infection, the priorities of medical science, and the vulnerability of human bodies. Medical AIDS-research got heavily prioritized. It did not take long before a treatment was discovered that stopped HIV-infected people from developing AIDS and dying.

Sociological research had produced a typology of four different perspectives on the body, related to specific responses to medical information. These perspectives ranged from the idea that the body is rather weak and defenseless to the idea that the body is very strong and resilient, endowed with effective natural defense mechanisms.[85]

Scheme 6: Four perspective on the human body

Basic typification of the body	Main characteristics
1 Weak and porous	The body is completely open to every dangerous invasion of viruses and bacteria. Therefore, illness is a fact of life and an early death can happen to anyone
2 Half-protected	The body is protected by the skin. This is a protective layer, but not sufficient. We also need a strong “social skin.” Society must control the level of hygiene and teach us to avoid health risks
3 Repairable	The body has its own protective shield, but this can be pierced. Always take medical precautions. If necessary, seek trustworthy medical help as soon as possible to repair the damage.
4 Strong	The human body is strong and resilient. Its immune system can cope with almost any infection. Too much hygiene can weaken its defense mechanism. Trust natural healing methods and evade modern medicine.

Doing her analysis Douglas used her familiar grid-group model. Thus she arrived at the following typology of group reactions towards AIDS:

The central community (strong group, strong grid)

The central community favors the ideas of the half-protected body and the body as a repairable machine that always needs extra protection by a trustworthy hygienic community. The central community accepts the authority of the established medical profession. Its members avoid unnecessary risks and seek professional help from professional doctors and nurses as soon as the need arises. They separate themselves from persons who are viewed as a great risk for their own health and safety. In ancient history this reflex manifested itself by closing the gates of the castle or the city for people suffering from the plague or leprosy. The central community rejects alternative medicine, folk medicine, and popular ‘panaceas’. Since it sees ‘deviant’ sexual practices as the main cause for the outburst of the epidemic, it focuses on the married couple as the norm and views enduring monogamous relations as the best practice. And if they fail to have enduring stable relations, they tend to commit themselves to serial monogamous relations.[86] In the beginning of the AIDS epidemic they also wanted that the central community and the groups at risk such as prostitutes, drug addicts and promiscuous homosexuals would organize their own segregated lives. Mary Douglas even feared that the central community would be too reluctant to invest a lot of money into medical research that, apparently, would only be of interest for a small category of “deviant” people. By now, we know that responsible governments of modern societies and the pharmaceutical industry have invested a huge amount of financial resources in this line of research, maybe because it was obvious that complete separation between members of the central community and LHGBT-persons, drug addicts and prostitutes was impossible.

Members of the central community criticize those who deviate from  prevailing norms. Local leaders in the liberal professions, law, medicine, and the civil service all belong to this dominant group. The central community has much social influence. In the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu (See chapter 10) they are well endowed with economic, cultural and social capital. Moreover, they share the same view on good health, good food, and, a number of perverts excluded, also on safe sex. Actually, after the emergence of the AIDS pandemic, the use of condoms has increased strongly. (Alas, since the risk of HIV infections and AIDS has been mitigated, condom use has shrunken and the number of sexually transmittable diseases are on the rise again.)

Sectarian enclaves of dissenting minorities (strong group, weak grid)

Sectarian enclaves are present in every society. These dissenters denounce some of the core values of the dominant group, and reject its high level of regulation. Their ongoing protest against the central community marks their attitudes. In their perception the dominant group has pushed them into an enclave by rejecting their non-conformism. Not so long ago, all homosexuals were being categorized as deviants or dissenters. They were stigmatized for their non-conformist behavior and felt a strong urge to oppose all the ideas of central community. They favored the model of the strong and resilient body. Thus these outsiders widened the gap between themselves and the established, driving themselves to other dissenting groups like the people who reject official science and prefer alternative medication. Did the discussions triggered by the AIDS epidemic change the general view on gay men and the LGBT-people? Anyhow, since the 1990s, LGBTI-persons are accepted in many countries and so are same sex marriages. Nowadays, many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons belong to the central community. Presently many of them have important functions.

Dissenting minorities exist or pop up everywhere. Because dissenters see the central community as too hierarchical and oppressive, the strive for  equality. Modern enclaves of dissenters reject the morals and the knowledge base of the central community. These enclaves generated specific styles of knowledge. Some groups of artists, architects, and non-academic intellectuals introduced alternative healthy lifestyles, emphasizing natural products, eating food that was not adulterated by chemicals and other artificial materials. They believed in a strong body; a body that should be taken care of in a natural way. They were and still are highly suspicious of the intentions and products of the pharmaceutical industry and the tests, diagnoses and deeds of doctors. In their view surgeons seem far too eager to cut open everybody’s body and to remove essential parts or to replace them with artificial substitutes. Not all LGBT people belong to this group. Actually many homosexuals belong to the center community. Many do not show their homosexuality, live a respectful public life like ordinary people, and keep their sex-life to their private sphere, whereas others feel no restraint to hide their homosexuality, are completely open about this and often are inclined to show their sexual nature to everyone.

In general, homosexuals support the idea of the two skins. Besides the natural skin one needs an extra skin based on precautionary measures, such as using condoms, but also by avoiding contact with the saliva or blood of HIV infected patients. Many homosexual citizens, after being labeled as groups at risk, developed solidarity in shared adversity. Pressed to give up promiscuous sex, they asked the establishment to grant them the same rights as heterosexual couples, such as the right to be married and to adopt children. However, very few governments did grant them marriage rights. So, for Mary Douglas, it is no wonder that the general mood is one of hostility to the central community. Rejection triggers rejection. In the beginning of the epidemic, when no cure was at hand, they appeared to belong to a doomed community in which friends and buddies were dying or expected to die soon, whereas those who were not ill jet feared to be HIV-positive because they had been in intimate contact with HIV-positive friends in the past. In some cases, this atmosphere led to heroic fatalism. Many homosexuals started to glorify risk and to deride the cult of safety. Who would rightly want to live a safe life if that means no love, no passion, and no ecstasy?

A new group at risk are the MSM’s (men that have sex with men, which could be heterosexuals, for example men in prisons) who, because of condom fatigue or other reasons practice bare backing – a general term for having sex without condoms. This practice, although only executed within a minority of a minority, emerged in the mid-nineties, probably because new forms of medical treatment of AIDS prolonged the life-chances of patients considerably. From then on some MSM’s estimated that the risk of engaging in unprotected promiscuous behavior had become very low. It seemed to have lost its lethal character. Others engaged in this risky behavior just for the sake of getting more media attention, or because they romanticized making love without protection, or because they were stimulated by widely available pornography that showed this kind of sex. Some healthy people take part in group sex HIV-positive patients, or so-called conversion parties, for reasons of solidarity; an act that almost certainly will lead to their conversion to the status of HIV-positive. Prostitutes who offered unprotected sex did this for reasons of attracting more clients. All these developments took place after Mary Douglas did write the essay “The Self as Risk-taker.” This category could be labeled as dissenters of dissenters, because in a way everything is relative.

Individualists (Weak group, weak grid)

Among LGBT-persons the category of support the model of a half-protected body. Individualists are iconoclasts as well as pioneers in taste and fashion, in art and science, and in commerce and industry. From time to time they come up with new designs, techniques, inventions and products that are useful for the central community as well as for the dissenters. They like to take risks and lead a hectic life style that might put too much stress on their body. When they fall ill they will eagerly look for any kind of official, innovative or alternative medical treatment that might help them recover as soon as possible.

As all individualists, homosexual individualists do no belong to any exclusive group. You can find them in every educational and income level, though they tend to prefer types of occupations that offer much autonomy, such as the professions, the arts, show business, and brokerage. They are iconoclasts and innovators, pioneers and trendsetters. They are incurable risk-takers: their lifestyle involves them in a heightened risk of heart failure. But whenever they fall dangerously ill, they tend to remain hopeful and will look for entrepreneurial therapists who will try the latest medical techniques and medication. They will avoid quacks but search for doctors with a high reputation. Their attitude does remind us of the mind of the adventurer, describe by Georg Simmel. On the one hand they are fatalists, but on the other hand they have a strong feeling that they are special and that fate will treat them favorably. Mary Douglas quotes the answer of one of homosexuals with a risky lifestyle:

“I have always had the feeling, since I was a child, that I would live to be old.”

In general, individualists accept that the body is porous. Hence anybody can fall ill; that’s a fact of life. But as to therapy, they are always hopeful. As experienced entrepreneur, innovator or trendsetter, they prefer entrepreneurial therapists, who are prepared to try the latest in surgical techniques and pharmaceutical help.[87] 

• • Isolates (Weak group, strong grid) form a residual category. Like the individualists, they are not incorporated in any social group. This category includes drug addicts and prostitutes, in particular drug-addicted prostitutes. They find themselves in a situation without autonomy. They have lost control over their body. Their whole live is regulated by substance dependency and the need to get enough money to pay for their next shot. They don’t want to take risks but aren’t averting risks either. Their choices are very idiosyncratic. And many of their ideas are completely ad odds with common opinion.

We see that each type shows a different attitude to the knowledge of professionals. This variety is related to differences in level of education and income. In the central community the authority of the medical profession is accepted. They acknowledge its ideas about hygiene and diet. In fact, the norms and prescriptions of the medical professions are generally considered as core elements of the prevailing system of norms and prescriptions. In contrast, the real dissenters reject the knowledge base of the central community along with its authority. For them, the learned professions are suspect. The dissenters have segregated themselves from the center in many respects. They tend to be unimpressed by the prestige of the medical establishment, and stay completely open to alternative medical advice. However, enclaves of aids patients, like all enclaves, tends to gather around charismatic spokesmen, who favor alternative therapies or methods of prevention such as “healthy eating,’ in particular macrobiotic food. Modern ‘enclave medicine’ is based on a long tradition of people, in particular artists and intellectuals of the Arts and Crafts movement that introduced healthy fashions in taking physical exercise, clothing, eating. It emphasized natural products, raw foods, and consistently placed itself against ‘artificial’ food and clothing. It protested against surgeons, which they compared with butchers, plumbers, or constructors, and the pharmaceutical industry that they did not trust at all but saw as greedy profit makers who mistreated animals in all kinds of horrible tests and did not care about the negative side-effects of their pills and potions. The enclave developed a coherent thought style that counseled against adulterated foods, against stimulants and sedatives, against artificial additives and protested against the mass production of fast foods. They prefer homespun, folkloristic remedies.

8.9 After word

Mary Douglas has always advocated a broader scope for anthropological research. In her view, the day that anthropologists give up their attempts to ground meanings in politics and economics will be a sad day. The loss will not so much be for themselves as for the social sciences and social life in general. Anthropology should be relevant for pre-modern as well as for modern societies. She does not think that the natives of premodern countries are fundamentally ‘other’ than us. There is no basic natural difference between us and the people that our predecessors called primitives; the difference is cultural and socially constructed. Human beings, in all their variety, are busying themselves about two things: trying to make sense of the world and trying to coordinate their lives with the people around them. Therefore, things we can learn and discover by studying humans on far away isles in the Pacific Ocean, deep in the heartland of Africa, or in the damp rain forests of South America, can be very relevant for modern societies. This is one of her most cherished mantras. She is convinced that we cannot understand modern societies if we do not understand traditional societies and civilizations. She will often remark that anthropological insights in non-western cultures can be very useful for solving scientific questions about our western society. Hence, anthropologists should engage in all the major social and political issues of the modern world. They should engage in social theory in its broadest sense.[88] I doubt whether the majority of anthropologists have followed her call, but she surely has turned her own advice into good practice.  

Richard Fardon has thoroughly studied the work of Mary Douglas. This resulted in a whole monograph, simply titled: Mary Douglas. Herein he discusses her life and presents her work extensively. He concludes that se has covered a broad range of topics, refusing to be deterred by disciplinary boundaries; always manifesting a startling amount of cultural imagination.[89] He admires the way in which she combines the mundane and the esoteric, the common and the scientific, the funny and the serious in her treatment of the classification of the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, the safe and the dangerous. She has presented valuable new insights in religion and secularization, ritualism and anti-ritualism. She went on investigating topics that most of her colleagues shied away from, because they were deemed to be fruitless or just conservative topics. In the age of individualization she dared to return to Durkheimian topics such as the collective conscience or the thought styles of groups or societies. Precisely, the amount of critique this aroused was a clear manifestation of the existence of a dominant thought style within modern anthropology, sociology and affiliated disciplines. For the moment, I think it is a good thing that some eminent scholars stick to the further analysis and investigation of what it is that binds groups, what does keep them functioning, and what functional equivalents emerge after important institutions appear to loose their grip on society. These issues will always remain relevant, no matter one’s political affiliation.    

Notes

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[1] Richard Fardon: Mary Douglas. London: Routledge, 1999; Antonia White: Frost in May. London: Virago. 1978 [1933]  

[2] Idem: p. 20-21

[3] Idem: p. 22

[4] Mary Douglas: Evans-Pritchard. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980.

[5] Richard Fardon: Mary Douglas. London: Routledge, 1999, p. 50.

[6] Robert Wuthnow et al.: Cultural analysis. The Work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas: London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1984, p. 11-12

[7] Richard Fardon: o. c., p. 144-145

[8] James Douglas had been Director of the Conservative Research Department from 1970 to 1975. When Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party Chris Patton was appointed as the new director. The research department was taken over by a number of right-wing think tanks. John Ramsden: The making of Conservative Party Policy. London/New York: Longman. 1980.

[9] Richard Fardon: The Guardian; 18 May 2007.

[10] Mary Douglas: Introduction to the 1996 edition of Natural Symbols: explorations in cosmology. London, Routledge, 1996.

[11] Mary Douglas: No Free Gifts. Introduction to Mauss’s essay on “The Gift”

[12] Marcel Mauss: The Gift. New York: Free Press, 1954. p. 3.

[13] Mary Douglas quotes Larry Siedentrop: “Two Liberal Traditions.” pp. 153-174 in: Alan Ryan (ed.) The Idea of Freedom (Oxford, Clarendon, 1979) 

[14] Robert Wuthnow et al.: Cultural analysis. The Work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas: London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1984, p. 77

[15] Mary Douglas: Implicit Meanings, Essays in Anthropology. London. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978

[16] Mary Douglas: Essays in the Sociology of Perception. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul. 1982c: 5

[17] Zygmunt Bauman: Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 57

[18] Mary Douglas, 1978:  o. c., p. xi

[19] Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger; an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1966 (Reprinted 1979).  p. 41

[20] Richard Fardon: o. c. , p. 85

[21] Mary Douglas (1978): o. c., p. 12

[22] Not all African tribes obey to the same rules. Some tribes are known as rat-eaters or snake-eaters.

[23] Mary Douglas (1978): o. c.

[24] Believing that Jews (and Christians) have been transformed into apes and pigs and other unclean animals as divine punishment for rejecting the teachings of the Prophet is widespread in the Islamic world. It is mentioned in the Koran, verse 5:60 and referred to in other verses (2:65 and 7:166) as well as in the Hadith. It is widely discussed among Muslim theologians, and still mentioned by renowned imams in their sermons.  Special Report, Nr. 11. MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. Retrieved on 3 august 2006

[25] Moses Maimonides is also known by his Hebrew name Moshe ben Maimon. Posthumously he is acknowledged as one of the foremost rabbinical arbiters and viewed as a cornerstone of orthodox Jewish thought.

[26] Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger, o. c. p. 31

[27] Christians have lifted the ban on biblical food restrictions.

[28] Purity and Danger: o. c., p. 45.

[29] Idem, pp. 50-51

[30] Hence, if the Bible should be updated we could expect to find a law that would forbid genetic engineering for the same reason.

[31] Yet, another way to classify food, which also is found in Asian countries, especially China and Japan, is based on the belief that some kinds of food are very good for sexual prowess and fertility.

[32] Purity and Danger, o. c. p. 57

[33] Idem, p p. 40-41; Richard Fardon: o. c. , p. 88

[34] Idem, pp. 18-19

[35] Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols; Explorations in Cosmology. New York, Pantheon Books, 1970, p. vii-viii

[36] Idem, pp. xi-x

[37] Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols, o. c. p. xi

[38] Fredrik Barth,

[39] Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger, o. c. p.18

[40] Idem, pp. 61-62

[41] Richard Fardon: o. c., p. 87

[42] Idem, p. 3

[43] Idem, p. 5

[44] Purity and Danger, o. c. p. 61-62

[45] Nowadays, we remember the TV-images of the Taliban who demolished age-old Buddhists statues in Afghanistan in the year 2001.

[46] Idem, p. 18

[47] Bernstein sought to apply Sapir’s insight about the controlling influence of language on culture. Sapir asserted that the real world to a large extent unconsciously is built up on the language habits of the group. We see and hear very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. For instance women that have sex with many male friends will be labeled very negatively as easy lays, sluts, whores et cetera, whereas men who show a similar pattern of behavior tend not to be labeled that negatively. The lack of equivalent negative terms for their promiscuous behavior reflects that society uses a double standard regarding the sexual behavior of men and women.

[48] Basil Bernstein: Class, Codes and Control. Vol. 2.  London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1971. Jenny Cook-Gumperz. Social Control and Socialization: A study of Class Differences in the Language of Maternal Control. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

[49] Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols: Explorations of Cosmology. 1970, p. viii

[50] Oliver Payne: Mary Douglas’ Grid-Group Theory supercharges your organization. Strategy & Systems, Dec. 19, 2025

[51] Idem

[52] Mary Douglas: Introduction. In: Mary Douglas (ed.) Essays in the Sociology of Perception. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982 

[53] J. Gross & S. Rayner: Measuring culture: A paradigm for the analysis of social organization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

[54] Richard Fardon has given another enlightening overview of the development of the group-grid model during the course of Douglas’s work and has presented a series of synonyms she has used to describe the different ‘ideal types’. Richard Fardon: o. c., p. 224  

[55] After some sorry misunderstandings of the earlier versions of Natural Symbols Douglas has come to abjure the word ‘sect’, because it had become a term of reproach or even contempt.

[56] Mary Douglas: Introduction to the 1996 edition, o. c. pp. xix – xx

[57] Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy (1993) London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

[58] Mary Douglas: In the Active Voice. London/Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1982, p. 202.

[59] The kibbutz was a very popular social unit during the first decades of the establishment of the state Israel. Then youngsters from various countries came to Israel to help its economic development. Nowadays Israel is individualized just like all other modern western societies.

[60] Mary Douglas: Institutions of the Third Kind. British and Swedish labour markets compared. The Journal of General Management 14, 4: 34-52 (1989)

[61] Mary Douglas. Risk and Blame. P. 167

[62] Mary Douglas: Institutions of the Third Kind. British and Swedish labour markets compared. The Journal of General Management 14, 4: 34-52 (1989)

[63] Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty. In: Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press, 1958

[64] Idem; pp. 130-131

[65] It might be interesting to study whether they have gone through a similar history than the British, pushing them towards sectarianism.

[66] Ludwik Fleck: The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. p. 27

[67] This is the title of the last chapter of “How Institutions Think”

[68] Mary Douglas: How Institutions Think. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986.  p. 9-10

[69] Ludwik Fleck: The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.1935

[70] Idem, p. 41

[71] Brittanica.com/science/light. Retrieved: 12 June 2026.

[72] Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. 1962

[73] George Ritzer: Toward an integrated Sociological Paradigm. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 1981.

[74] There are indications that this fact that the earth was round already had been discovered before, e.g. in Alexandria, which had become the scientific center of the world after Alexander The Great had established this Egyptian town. 

[75] Howard S. Becker: Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

[76] Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think, op. cit. p.14-15

[77] The original aphorism was: Songs have changed and so have our ears.

[78] E. H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. p. 60

[79] Fleck, quoted by Mary Douglas, op. cit. p. 18

[80] Stephan Fuchs: Against Essentialism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. p. 287

[81] Mary Douglas: Risk and Blame, o. c., p. 104 (Originally presented as a paper in 1990. The Self As Risk-Taker. The Sociological Review, 38, 3: 445-464

[82] Idem, p 102-103

[83] Philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault really believed this to be true. Though he came from a dynasty of medical doctors, he ignored the advice to be more careful and did not change his lifestyle. He became an early victim of an AIDS-related disease and died in 1984, 57 years of age.

[84] In 2005, it is estimated that almost 40 million people are infected all over the world. In that same year at least 2.4 million died of AIDS.

[85] Marcel Calvez: Composer avec un Danger, approche des réponses sociales a l’infection au VIH au SIDA, Rennes, IRTS de Bretagne.

[86] The central community in several African countries deviates from this pattern of monogamy and serial monogamy. See: The Wisdom of Whores; Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. 2009.

[87] Idem, p. 106-108

[88] Mary Douglas: Risk and Blame; Essays in cultural Theory. Routledge, London and New York, 1992; p. ix and p. 300

[89] Richard Fardon: Mary Douglas. London: Routledge, 1999.