Natural Symbols was an immediate follow-up on Purity and Danger and, as a product of the 1960s, the sense of urgency, the desire to join an intensely exciting worldwide conversation, shows. That was twenty-five years ago, and rereading it now I discover the mine of ideas that I have been quarrying for practically everything that I have written since. So I am grateful to Routledge for deciding to reprint it and glad to have the chance to write a new introduction. I should add however that the diagrams I used seem very complicated now: later versions are much simpler. Whom should I imagine myself now to be addressing? Any one who is interested in ritual, anyone interested in theology, in shifting values, or stable values, in personal identity, or in history. I still would like to persuade them not to try to do their work without establishing a basis for comparisons.
So many things have changed since 1970. In the 1960s it was understood that social anthropology would have to be comparativist or nothing. Obviously a method would be necessary to avoid subjective bias. Anyone writing about emotions needs to establish the basis for their comparisons, lest they fall into the trap of being surprised that Frenchmen talk French. This is Joyce Carey's phrase, worth quoting, from the novel Prisoner of Grace (1952):
You would say he was a sentimental man, and so he was, but so were most young men in those days. They would cry like fountains at a play called East Lynne when a little boy died. Of course, it is sad when little children die, I mean permanently sad; and so I can see why young people nowadays laugh at plays like East Lynne – they don't want to lose their dignity. But I think they ought to excuse men like Jim for crying, for, after all, they would not laugh at a Frenchman for talking French . . . (1952: 51)
Comparison depends on theory for saying what should be compared and how. Where religion is concerned there is no theory comparing dogmas that does not take its own position for dogma. This will be abundantly illustrated in the pages to follow. Where psychology is concerned it is still acceptable to sound off about emotional responses without taking local thresholds into account. The central project of this book is to enable comparison to be less subjective and relativist by establishing something about different social environments.
This book started as a comment on student revolt against dead ritual and meaningless forms. But it was not only students who protested, nor only students who transformed the Western world through the 1970s and 1980s, until we found ourselves where we are now. This world we are in still longs for sincerity, and for simple and direct dealings between equals. It still rejects the outward forms of social distinction, and still finds that differences of power and wealth are as effective as barriers to direct communication as ever.
At that time, in America, the battles were about Black and White segregation, on buses, in swimming pools, in schools. In the background of all of this they were about guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. In the Catholic Church they were ostensibly about anti-ritualism, about how the Letter lived while the Spirit died. Vatican II attended to the rituals, but in the background the strife was about a hierarchical Church that was too remote to hear the voice of its congregation.
I saw the problem, but as an anthropologist I doubted the remedy. The mood was to sweep away rituals, sweep away the institutions, and let the people be free to speak from the heart . . . as if they would automatically love each other if not prevented by institutional dead wood. Attacking rituals was attacking the surface. The real problem for everyone was to find better institutions. For social theory the problem was to find a better way of thinking about institutional life. And for me it was a route for developing the analysis that I had started with Purity and Danger (1966) and which I have been working on ever since.
Looking back on it now with an invitation to write a new introduction I see that my intentions with regard to the sociology of religion were subversive and with the times. I wanted to free it from subservience to confessional loyalties embedded in ancient institutions. At the same time my intentions with regard to anthropology were distinctly reactionary. Instead of turning over the old order the aim was to rehabilitate an old theoretical approach, Durkheimian, and make it available for our understanding of ourselves. In one sense the book was counter-cultural, since I was less interested in attacking forms when they have lost their meaning and suffocate the people involved in them before they die, and much more interested in discovering how they ever get any meaning at all in the first place.
It is situated as a book about religious cosmology, but I sometimes wonder whether religion is too sacred a topic for sociological enquiry. When Natural Symbols first appeared the sociology of religion was very much a world of its own, and somewhat under suspicion from the other students of religion – historical or literary or denominational. Admittedly to some degree the other specialized sociologies were equally enclaved in the mainstream of their subject. The sociology of science and the sociology of art, for instance, occupied and still do occupy small niches each dealing with a specialized field. Someone coming in from outside that field is understandably bewildered by the special language and concepts and only a lot of reading and talking will enable him to find out what it is all about. But religion is a big unspecialized field and needs more than a niche. In social anthropology it permeates the whole subject.
When I wanted to turn the experience of anthropology to modern industrial society I was balked by the separate and isolated compartments within the social sciences (Douglas and Ney, forthcoming). There was an enormous literature on religion in the modern world, but little guidance on how to relate its understandings to the other branches of social thought. The historians understandably enough tended to identify the social events and institutions in the contemporary confessional terms of their period, a practice largely followed by sociologists writing about sects, churches, denominations. The movements within and between these units were described in the vocabulary that is used for the local controversies – Manichaean, pelagian, monophysite in ancient history, revivalist, millennial, traditional in modern times. To move out of a religious congregation was to ‘lapse’, recruitment was ‘conversion’, new recruits were ‘neophytes’ or ‘novices’. The varieties of religions were described in doctrinal terms – mystical, monotheist, polytheist – or by the names of founders – Calvinist, Lutheran – or by the form of ministry, such as evangelist, sacramental – or by the relation of one unit to the others, such as non-conformist, primitive or protestant. And naturally the objectives of religion were defined by doctrine.
This is very understandable, but a separate vocabulary implies a separate conversation, and it is fair to say that the sociology of religion, despite the work of great masters, was a separate enclave in the mainstream of social thought more deeply embedded and less interested in making any abstraction from the subject under study. To a large extent this is still true to this day. The study of religion is mainly located in the seminaries, or else, if it is deliberately freed from denominational bias so as to be offered as a university subject, it is located in the humanities, with literature, history, philosophy, and oriental languages. Though the journals which are consecrated to the sociology of religion are not obviously preaching higher values, they do clearly dissociate themselves from market and politics by writing in the special language of religion.
A fence protects virtue from the rougher world of socioeconomic and political studies, but the fence is kept up from both sides. Max Weber drew his ideal types from the prominent secular institutions of his own culture, market and legislature, each operating with its distinctive institutional rationality. The two voices of market and bureaucracy confronted one another in European political controversy in those days as they still do now. Many churches are very bureaucratic in both doctrine and structure, as Weber showed in his work on India and Judaism, and there is a strong market aspect to Church organization. But when it came to religion he dropped the institutional element and used the concept of charisma, invoking interpersonal processes. Since then much clarification and insight has been devoted to bureaucracy and market, but religious forms of organization have effectually been left to one side of the secular theory of society. Perhaps this was wise. When Durkheim laid profane hands on religion he got into trouble for his boldness.
There are real problems in talking about religion in comparative terms. Trying to get a common vocabulary means forcing formal definitions where they have not been needed before: ‘What do you mean by “spirit” or “spiritual”?’ Or ‘What do you mean by “rational”?’ And it is not just a problem of translation. At worst, talking about other people's religions risks offending susceptibilities. At very least, the moral bias has to be unloaded, and the language of exhortation and reprimand needs to be cooled. Appeal to the emotions has to be eliminated. This is precisely what Durkheim tried to do when he asked us to pay attention to ‘social facts’ and to abjure basing explanations on ‘psychology’. Wanting to establish a unified theory of society and knowledge, he needed to tidy up the language, to uncover hidden emotional cargoes and throw them overboard. The aim is still far from achieved, and we are hampered in following him by his own psychologistic waverings.
Durkheim proposed to speak only about social facts, but he based his whole theory of the Sacred on two psychological factors. One was emotional effervescence, the idea that rituals rouse violent, ecstatic feelings, like crowd hysteria, which convince the worshipper of the reality of a power greater than and beyond the self. The other was the emotion of outrage, the idea of sacred contagion and consequent dangers to the community unleashed by breach of cherished norms. Putting them together he produced a theory of social solidarity: first the loosely associated crowd recognizes its unity in ritually aroused emotions, and then it proceeds to harness the whole universe in an intellectual drive to attribute sacred contagion to individual deviation from its norms.
Both fear and emotional effervescence are psychological concepts. The former idea – emotional response to sacred contagion – does not present a problem to an anthropologist who really likes Durkheim and expects to make his theory work. Fear of sacred contagion can be transposed from the language of emotions to the sociological language of claims and counter-claims. Zeus's thunderbolts, Appollo's arrows, the floods and plagues of the God of Exodus, when interpreted as punishments, form the distinctively religious part of the local theory of causation. Like the theory of the person, sacred contagion is a moral theory of connections and causes. By its means the members of a community manipulate one another. Sacred contagion serves the oblique objective of making a group of persons into a community; it is a means of mutual moral coercion and is susceptible of analysis in political and social terms.
It is not so easy to transpose Durkheim's theory of ritual from psychology to social fact. When I first read The Elementary Forms I felt puzzled by his description of rituals and the alleged exciting effect on the congregation. That ritual should be seen as a rabble-rouser was a surprise as my upbringing had given me quite another experience of the big rituals of the Roman rite. Dignified, but tedious, slow and elaborate, this is the Corpus Christi procession that used to wind its way down the sidewalks of Hampstead, or the long Easter Vigil at St Josephs, Highgate. Think of the high degree of co-ordination required to bring in every participant at the right moment. The ordered use of flowers, bells, lights and organ music, and the separation of consecrated from unconsecrated elements; it is all too careful and precise to be interrupted by volleys of spontaneous ‘Alleluiah’ and ecstatic shouting and dancing. Everyone is worried about getting the timing right and fitting in the highly classified parts of the congregation. The choir boys have to be separated from the girls, the Embroidery Guild has to be given a place, but is it before or behind the Knights of St Columba? And where do the Friends of St Vincent of Paul go? The Boy Scouts have to line up with their banners, there must be seats for the old age pensioners. Where is the tea? Where are the matches? Nothing must be left to chance.
When agnostic colleagues sit through a Catholic wedding, they are invariably disappointed by so much circumspection. I do not know what they hope to see, but at a Nuptial Mass they will find ritual, but no rolling in the aisles or spontaneous witnessing in the Spirit, even the singing tends to be dispirited. The Catholic rituals I know are not conducive to the arousing of emotion which Durkheim seemed to think is the function of ritual. Something is wrong, either Durkheim or the religion. Being of a loyal nature I tried in this book to save them both. Australian totemic dances cannot do for a model of ritual in all situations. The answer is not that Durkheim was wrong or that the Catholics are failing in their ritual duties; the idea of the dangerous and powerful Sacred is indeed formed by living together and trying to coerce one another to conform to a moral idea. But the Sacred can be engraved in the hearts and minds of the worshippers in more ways than one: there are several kinds of religion. Some ritualists plan to achieve spontaneity, others aim at co-ordination. Rituals don't wave around in the blue: if we want to explain why some rituals are ecstatic and others not we need to go into comparisons of organizations and their objectives. This is what the grid-group analysis proposed in this book was intended to do.
At the Sorbonne at the end of the nineteenth century a new initiative in comparative religion began to develop a theory of sacrifice that would hold good for Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity. The general scheme envisaged two worlds: one, the world of mundane experience which is under the regular constraints of space and time; the other, a sacred world of transcendant powers manifested by non-corporeal beings. Half of the work of religion was seen as harnessing these divine powers to the benefit of human concerns. On the cornucopia side, blessings and graces or more miraculous benign interventions could be produced by the right words or gestures. On the side of hellfire and thunderbolts, religion warns and protects from hurtful divine interventions. In this perspective Durkheim developed his forensic theory of sacred contagion.
In the 1940s and 1950s, when I was a student, a programme lay invitingly ahead for the social anthropologists who would follow this line of interpretation. It would be a programme for tracing how shifts in organization or in external conditions are accompanied by shifts in the forensic uses of sacred contagion. We would not explain witchcraft by individual emotions such as envy or fear, witch-doctoring by cunning or greed for clients’ fees. We would look at the uses of illness and misfortune in providing causes for blame – we would be interested in the uses of divination for inculpating or exonerating, and in the uses of rituals for deflecting anger and reconciling. Our attention would not be directed solely to the individual case, but to the pattern of accusations and explanations. We would show how the beliefs about the universe were shaped by the kind of society that members were trying to make together.
It is a pity that this aspect of our work was so dominated by esoteric examples, since the forensic approach has in its gift the possibility of a Durkheimian analysis of the whole cosmology, with direct implications for theories of cognition, the philosophy of belief (Douglas, 1970) and of classification (Douglas and Hull, 1993). By thus relating morals with knowledge, the totalizing ethnography envisaged by Marcel Mauss would become possible. It also has wide explanatory power, for example for the loss of religious commitment and accounting for the bias of religious beliefs in modern industrial society.
We have plenty of disasters, floods, famines, plagues, but we no longer consider them caused by sin. Sacred contagion and the lightning-conductor role of expiatory rituals have withered. There is a common self-congratulatory idea that the decline of superstition is due to the growth of science, literacy and technology. On Durkheim's thesis these factors would only work indirectly; if you want to explain how sacred contagion is delegitimated, you should look to the dissolution of closed communities and the weakening of the coercive control their members exert on each other. The more open a community, the less its members are coerced by common beliefs about dangers that defend the community-defined definitions of sin. The idea applies with special force to the theories of disease and natural contagion, as Mark Pegg has shown with regard to the times when leprosy was regarded as a sexually transmitted disease (Pegg, 1990; Douglas, 1993c).
So secularism, on this view, is a consequence of a social factor, openness. The freedom of individuals to move out if they are being harrassed by neighbours is a freedom to disbelieve the divine punishments that afflict those who defy the community standards. The freedom to say goodbye and walk away does not necessarily imply a loss of religious belief, but it does shake the walls of established religions. Open society leads to private religion. Sacred contagion could be expected to change its bias from thunderbolts to cornucopias. The closed-community religions would associate punishment with divinity because they would be hearing about it every day, and the private religions of those who have escaped from community controls would expect divine interventions to be benign. This suggests that we should be able to test some of Durkheim's ideas by comparing the shift of religious bias between thunderbolts and cornucopia according to degrees of closure or openness in the community. But this is more taxing than it sounds.
Religious sociology needs to take several kinds of organization into account. It ought to avoid using the prominent institutions of our own culture as units of analysis. In order not to select arbitrarily, not to be unfair on market, not to import political bias, not to be too kind to religion while trying to explain social forms and religious ideas, the task needs an impartial model of society. The model needs to be able to organize a rich store of information, be flexible, and dynamic, so capable of incorporating change. This was my objective in setting up a two-dimensional diagram of cultural bias. On one dimension is variation in constraints on the individual imposed by group membership. On the other the constraints of structure are assessed – that is, rules, classifications, compartments.
The theory is that each type of organization has advantages for surviving in an appropriate environment, and each has its characteristic disadvantages. Two of them are individualist cultures, two of them are communitarian. In an individualist culture the worshipper tends to confront God and the universe as an individual. When religion is private, grace can be as sporadic or chancy as you like; by definition these people are not intent on persuading each other to combine in long-term association. They do not need to explain their misfortunes as punishments, and they are not going to need to use sacred contagion to bring recalcitrant followers to heel.
To develop comparisons between religions we have to develop the concepts and the words. It is not only a matter of clearing out adhering local commitments and emotional bias. We also have to have a theory about how the doctrines relate to social organization. This book offered a preliminary exploration of the ways in which openness limits the growth of public, standardized doctrine. Sectarian doctrines are typically expected to be more intransigent, more intolerant of deviation, harsher to outsiders, as well as affording consolation and joy to their adepts. If sectarianism interests us, then the first words we have to examine are ‘sect’ and ‘sectarian.’
After some sorry misunderstandings of the earlier editions of Natural Symbols I have recently come to abjure the word ‘sect’. As it has become a term of reproach or even of contempt applied by members of the Church to dissenters it should be ruled out of our discourse. We need a neutral term to refer to the social environment constituted by a strong group boundary and weak internal distinctions.
By definition this is a bounded group, and egalitarian. For talking about the Second Temple Community in Judah in the fifth century, I have come to use ‘egalitarian enclave’ (Douglas, 1993a). However, I still retain the word ‘sectarian’ and all of its unfavourable associations as a description of a tendency or cultural bias which might take over in favouring conditions. Sectarian bias means polarized arguments, persons shown in black and white contrasts, evil and good, and nothing in between; it means adopting a psychologizing and idealizing approach to political and social problems; often a simplistic metaphysics, even an anti-intellectual and anti-theoretical stance, and an uncompromising ruthlessness towards opponents. The question in this perspective is to understand how such an outlook should be harboured in an enclave.
There are some loose ends to be tidied up with changing the terminology. ‘Sect’ was originally used to refer to social units that were internally undifferentiated and dominated by a strong boundary against the rest of the world, and if enclave is to be substituted for it, the same attributes should be apparent. It is not the fact of being physically enclaved in a larger society that brings on the symptoms of sectarianism.
There can be enclaves that are hierarchically organized. This is a source of strength, hierarchy is good for solving co-ordination problems. But how do they manage to develop and hold to a hierarchical organization? If they can afford to organize hierarchically it means that for some reason they have less trouble with controlling their members, less reason for worrying about defection. Let us not call them enclaves, if we are to specialize that word for dissenting egalitarian groups. Let us simply call them hierarchical groups, and expect them to show a typically hierarchical culture. The problems start with a cultural enclavism, an initial decision to withdraw as a group from the wider society of which it was a part. The true enclave is in disagreement with the outside world.
It does not matter where you start, with the group withdrawal, or with whatever caused that, or with weakness in face of defection, or the egalitarian system adopted to resolve the other difficulties, or with the lack of leadership, the organizational problems that such a community has to solve are very great (Douglas, 1987, ch. 3). Neither smallness nor intimacy is enough to explain the peculiarities of enclave culture. I ascribe its distinctive culture to its egalitarian organization, which in turn I see as a result of its weakness in holding its membership and resisting the seductions of the larger society, and this weakness in turn I would explain by its principled opposition to the larger society in which it keeps itself as an enclave. The more that such a community has dissident views, such as refusing military service, demanding separate education, refusing to vote or serve in public office, the less can it count on outside help. It cannot bring in the police to enforce what is not enforceable in the larger society.
The dissenting enclave cannot usually have significant patronage to bestow. All the really powerful positions stand beyond the confines of the enclave, and all the log-rolling and nepotism and big opportunities for amassing wealth are outside too. The enclave's distinctive attitudes to money and markets may often entail pecuniary loss for loyal individuals. The enclave may have to tell its members that they should not defile themselves with material rewards. If it claims to control the sexual life of its members and expects the young to marry in, there is another whole field for conflict and stress. Disciplinary problems loom large on the border between belonging and not belonging, and this is the point to look for the explanations of enclave culture, otherwise called sectarianism.
An enclave starts to polarize its world when it has to worry about the defection of its members. The big organizational problem and the distinctive anxiety of the enclave is about defection. If discipline is threatened against challengers, the latter can threaten to move out. No one can stop them. If they all defect, the group is doomed. There can be no show of power, and authority has to be exerted with great care: hence the insistence on equality. The leadership is very aware that it must avoid looking as if it is free-riding on the efforts of the rank and file, so no privilege of rank, and generally no rank either. All this applies at a fairly late stage after the founding of the group; at the beginning all is hope and love, but after the death of the founder charisma falters, problems of succession raise jealousies and schism threatens.
Enclaves have typical strategies to overcome these difficulties. One is to adopt a rule of rigorous equality. The result of this is to enhance ambiguity and increase the weakness of leadership. Equality plus weak leadership make for poor co-ordination. The typical enclavist difficulties of organization produce the typical sectarian anger against outsiders, and well-known intransigence in debate.
The main disadvantage of the enclave is that it is prone to internal factions which eventually lead to splitting. It is well-devised for protest but poorly devised for exercise of power. Another disadvantage is its tendency to cherish irreconcilable enmities and to see moral issues in rigid black and white. Note also the enclave's weakness in negotiation, its inability to delegate, its administrative muddle, and its difficulty in assuring support for long-term policies. All of this applies to dissenting minorities whether they are religious or secular. The main focus of enclave organization is the integrity of its borders – a polite way of saying that it is very concerned that its members should not defect or run away. The anxiety to prevent leakage turns attention to dissipation of power if ever it is seen to accumulate. Intuitively it may seem that equality is a natural condition, easy to maintain. To be disabused on that score, read Steve Rayner (1988) on ‘The rules that keep us equal’.
Trying to be equal, leadership is deliberately and necessarily weak. The result is a fragile organization. The community which has this culture well represented may reap advantages, for it speaks with the voice of conscience. Its opposition to hierarchy makes it a strong spokesman for the underclass, its reproaches against pomp and waste and its suspicion of intellectual pretension raise the normative dialogue to a higher plane.
We can generalize: whenever a group has to recruit its members competitively it will tend to worry about its future existence, and whenever it is particularly disadvantaged in the competition so that its main concern comes to be concentrated on defection, then enclavism will set in, and sectarian intransigence follow. It just happens by a quirk of intellectual history that the study of sects has been assigned to the sociology of religion, consequently the general understanding of enclaves as organizational forms with particular problems of authority has been fragmented. There are theories of hierarchy and of market, but no secular theory of this third kind of organization. This illustrates the difficulties in the way of sociological generalization about religions. The classifications of society have been made to clarify other kinds of problems in the social sciences, so the study of religion is left with its own language redolent of pulpit and altar.
A religion can be organized according to hierarchical principles, like the Roman Catholic Church, and can spread over the globe, planting little hierarchical segments in hostile cultures. If they should happily be rich enough and powerful enough not to be endangered by defection, they will probably remain hierarchical in doctrine and interpretation, as well as in the division of labour and prestige. The Mormons are a case in point. Thus it is that there can be a hierarchical community which is withdrawn from the larger society and yet has little sectarian bias. It is not a contradiction in terms and it does not produce a problem for the theory of enclaves. It is more puzzling the other way around: the outposts of hierarchical religions can find themselves in enclave situations, and tend under stress to show that same sectarian anxiety about divine punishment, the same anger against outsiders and defectors, and the same intensified contrast of heroes and villains as any egalitarian enclave. It is the openness of the boundary and their unsuccessful efforts to close it that puts them in the same situation as an enclave, albeit preaching some hierarchical doctrines.
The unsuccessful attempt to achieve closure against the outside is just as influential for the bias of religious doctrines in the case of threatened hierarchies as in the case of threatened egalitarian communes. Telling examples are Ireland and France. The French Catholics described by Richard Griffiths (1966) at the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1930s, exemplified the intolerance and heroic exaltation typical of sectarianism. The recent record of the Catholic Church in Ireland to this day is irrevocably associated with sectarian violence.
The Israeli historian, Emmanuel Sivan (1995), has taken this point and applied it to the history of religions in modern times. In a sense, he argues, the growth of science and secular culture have put the old religions – Christian, Hindu, Muslim – into an enclave posture. They have been marginalized in a rich and powerful outside world. They now suffer the disabilities of dissenting minorities even though traditionally they have been established and mainstream. In consequence, he shows, there is a strong sectarian bias in contemporary religious thought, and established religions are heavily attracted to fundamentalist forms of organization.
Enclave is a good solution for organizing protest and dissent. Hierarchy is a good solution for problems of co-ordination. It is run on principles of order, symmetry and balance. Its rules are formalized, it plans for the long term, and justifies what it does by reference to tradition. Its advantages are in its clearly stratified and specialized pattern of roles: it can organize effectively; it is resilient and tenacious in the face of adversity. It tries to conciliate its rival units. Because of stability and specialization a hierarchical Church will be able to hold to an elaborate doctrine that is heavy with the history of its first formulation. And because of its capacity for elaborate doctrine, it values and rewards intellectual achievement.
Its conspicuous disadvantages are over-formalization and excessive trust in routine and regulation, which make it slow to respond. There is also a pathological tendency to try to control knowledge – for new knowledge is the biggest threat to its ordered rankings. Assimilating new knowledge so that it does not destroy the painstakingly preserved order requires a big input of energy. It seems very predictable that in modern industrial society where individuals are drawn away from their primordial roots in family and neighbourhood, trained and selected to serve as mobile units anywhere in the globe, hierarchy is bound to be losing out, and either dissenting groups or individual religions are likely to gain.
Some kinds of hierarchy are less effective or desirable than others. It is understandable that the common idea of hierarchy is nowadays very unattractive, given the movement of cultural bias in the individualist directions I have discussed. Hierarchy is presented as a simple monolithic centralized top-down command system, like a caricature of General Motors in the 1960s. However, other kinds of hierarchy emerge spontaneously in families or small groups, or are enshrined in ancient communities or monarchical systems (Douglas, 1993a). I find proto-hierarchy a good term for uncentralized hierarchical systems. These have multiple peaks of authority, and balanced juxtaposition of ordered units, taking precedence in alternating spheres of control: the King and the Commons, the Church and the State, the Pope and the Emperor, the husband and wife, and so on. The World Council of Churches and the international fellowships which non-conformist and egalitarian churches develop may well have a co-ordinating function at the top level, holding the disparate units together loosely in a proto-hierarchy.
These are the main ideas, presented as I see them now. The book was an attempt to develop Durkheim's programme for a comparative sociology of religion so that it could apply as well to Australian totemism as to modern industrial society. This meant taking seriously the central theme that ideas emerge from the process of organizing, as also do classifications and values. It called for a major intellectual investment in distinguishing kinds of organization and speculating systematically on the kinds of values that would flourish in each kind. I hoped that the sketchy beginning would be taken up and developed, and I have not been disappointed – on the contrary, I have been delighted by aid from very unexpected quarters.
The first task was to strengthen and refine the comparisons of social organization and the different levels at which personal behaviour is influenced by the social environment (for a method, see Gross and Rayner, 1985). The second was to prevent the analysis from becoming static. And the third to make sure that it was always able to be checked empirically. I had no idea of how to do all of this. Originally my own approach was entirely static. It seemed enough to have proposed a map of social environments and to project upon it the different clusters of moral ideas that would do well in each place. Peter Brown's studies of the ‘debate on the Holy’ in the third and fourth centuries suggested how to make it dynamic (Brown, 1978). He described shifts in religious style responding to shifts in a lively competition for power; the activating factor was the disruption and decline of the Roman Empire. Control of the religious life of the community was the prize in an ongoing, three-sided tussle. For example, he saw attacks on sorcery as a ‘muffled debate on the exercise of different forms of power in small groups’ (ibid.: 20). Subsequently Michael Thompson was to take the flat and static map and turn it into a more powerful model, with the struggle for control as the third dimension (Thompson, 1982). Far from muffled, the strident international debate on the environment now provides rich material for grid-group analysis.
Two seminars, one in University College London and one in New York at the Russell Sage Foundation were the basis of the modest volume, Essays in the Sociology of Perception (Douglas, 1982) which boosted the exploratory essay to the status of a theory that could be expanded and modified. Of the fascinating applications of the grid-group measurements, too many to be itemised here, certain seminal contributions became the basis of most subsequent work. I mention Michael Thompson's three-dimensional model; James Hampton's operational definition; David Ostrander's identification of the positive diagonal running between hierarchy and entrepreneurial individualism; Steve Rayner's comparison of perceptions of time and space, and David Bloor's comparison of the research agendas of nineteenth-century mathematical departments, which was complemented by Martin Rudwick's comparison of cognitive styles in geology.
This was followed up by an exercise in methodology – Steve Rayner's collaboration with the mathematician, Jonathan Gross, produced a how-to-do-it handbook, with a sophisticated EXACT model for assigning the members of a community to points on the grid-group diagram (Gross and Rayner, 1985).
In 1977 I joined Aaron Wildavsky when he became President of the Russell Sage Foundation, to ‘head up’, as he put it, the programme on Culture. It seemed to be a wonderful opportunity to organize some empirical research to test the ideas of Natural Symbols. I thought to meet the Foundation's strong eleemosynary objectives by sponsoring work in the sociology of food, and at the same time do a good turn to the theory of culture. It would be very helpful to comparisons of culture to be able to say unequivocally whether (other things being equal) one set of behaviours was more or less structured than another. The occasion of eating in a hierarchy would always be made to carry a load of symbolic structure which would not be necessary or possible in any other kind of culture. This made it interesting and possibly important to know the non-alimentary uses to which food is being put. Jonathan Gross in the mathematics department of Columbia University devised an ingenious measure of relative intricacy of structure. Field studies by three teams of American anthropologists who studied the food systems of Sioux Indians, Italians in Philadelphia, and North Carolina Black Americans, were published (Douglas, 1984). Sadly, after only a few months, and before our research got up any momentum, Aaron Wildavsky's Presidency came to an untimely end, so that it was impossible to develop the early ideas. Though the individual essays have been used a little, the attempt to establish a dimension of structure has not had any currency.
Aaron Wildavsky became the principal inspiration and promoter of cultural theory. He returned to the Graduate School of Public Policy at Berkeley when he left the Russell Sage Foundation. He grasped with enthusiasm the forensic approach to attitudes to risk, which then as now was a topic fraught with political tension, and he welcomed the possibilities of using the grid-group scheme to analyse politicians’ thinking. At that time the psychologists who analysed public opinion polls simply assumed one basic kind of human person with personality quirks which accounted for changes in attitudes to risk. Adding the cultural element meant looking for organizational pressures on opinion. It meant not treating attitudes to risk as free-floating psychic items liable to change capriciously, but supposing that attitudes to the long term, or attitudes to loss and gain, would be affected by the social environment. We worked out together a distribution of risk beliefs according to social and cultural predilections which explained American attitudes to technological risk better than the personality types of the reigning paradigm.
To some extent Aaron Wildavsky liked grid-group analysis because it seemed to justify his prejudices: against hierarchy as a top-down, bureaucratic, oppressive form of government, and against sectarianism as politically irresponsible; this left individualism as the cultural bias with most in its favour. As for the isolates, by definition they were not interesting from the policy point of view.
I myself like the theory of cultural bias because of its promise of objectivity, and Wildavsky liked it because it proved there was only one, right, truly liberal way to organize society, that is, from the corner of individualist culture. With such different outlooks it was extraordinary that we were able to collaborate, or rather it would seem extraordinary to anyone who had never worked with Aaron Wildavsky but only knew him as passionate in conviction and merciless in controversy. It is a tribute to his scholarly generosity, which is also famous, that after enjoying heroic bouts of argument we were able to produce Risk and Culture together (1983). He used to say: ‘Grid/Group is the best game in town,’ and then add wryly: ‘Pity nobody's playing it!’ Mean-while he and Michael Thompson got together and pioneered the cultural approach to environmental controversy, summarized in another collaborative work on method and theory (Thompson and Wildavsky, 1991). Between them they recruited other scholars in political science in different countries, notably Denis Coyle and Richard Ellis (1994) in California, Per Selle and Gunnar Grendstad in the Norwegian Centre for Organization and Management, and Manfred Schmutzer at the Institute of Technology and Society in Vienna. Tragically, Aaron Wildavsky died in 1993.
Cultural theory can also throw light on thought style as a collective product. Steve Rayner has carried this interest forward, developing a cultural theory of social constraints on forgetting and remembering, cultural bias in styles of thinking and argumentation (Rayner, 1988, 1991a and b, and 1994). Two pieces of research in Late Antiquity start close to the original project but go much further than I could have expected: Sarah Coakley's historical study of the christological controversies – the development of the doctrine of the Trinity seen in a feminist perspective (1992); also Richard Lim's cultural analysis of public disputations on theology in late antiquity, and why they became so violent that they had to be banned (1995). With different applications for different fields, it is not surprising that the grid-group diagram never looks exactly the same. It is not necessarily that we have changed our minds – a thought that seems to have worried James Spickard (1989) – or that we are quarrelling. Simply, trying to work in two dimensions is extremely difficult, and we are continually moving on, simplifying, shifting the axes, or rotating the diagram. I hardly recognize them, but there is no point in my trying to correct the diagrams that are in this book to make them match something that is being done in the 1990s. There have been great developments. The only thing that matters is the collaborative effort to think about life and human values with a tool that systematically questions the thinker's own starting point. We scout out alternative visions of reality, real alternatives.
These studies will surely help to bring the sociology of religion into the mainstream of social thought. In the end I have to admit that my preference for religious studies with a solid methodological foundation is based not so much on theoretical concerns as on a boundary problem. When the study of religions is conducted in the language of the pulpit and dominated by the language of moral regeneration anthropology is excluded, and that can't be good.
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